“In much Protestant scholarship of the last hundred or more years, Ephesians has regularly been deemed post-Pauline, and Colossians has frequently joined it in that 'deutero-Pauline' category. Like my teacher George Caird, and more other leading scholars than one might imagine from some of the mainstream literature, I have long regarded that judgment with suspicion, and the more I have read the other letters the more Ephesians and Colossians seem to me very thoroughly and completely Pauline. The problem is, of course, that within the liberal Protestantism that dominated New Testament scholarship for so many years Ephesians and Colossians were seen as dangerous to the point of unacceptability, not least because of their 'high' view of the church. There are, to be sure, questions of literary style. But with the Pauline corpus as small as it is—tiny by comparison, say, with the surviving works of Plato or Philo—it is very difficult to be sure that we can set up appropriate stylistic criteria to judge authenticity.”—Justification, page 43
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Very well put. Our inheritance from the Enlightenment blinds us to many obvious things, this being one of them...
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2 comments:
I would agree that stylistic assumptions are perilous -- I've always thought that the differences between earlier and later Henry James was instructive in that respect. On the other hand, I cannot escape the powerful impression that Ephesians is not written in the kind of clear and intelligible Greek (albeit sometimes difficult and sometimes calling for reading between the lines) that Paul writes in the unquestionably authentic letters. Finally, I think the notion of what is "obvious" is every bit as perilous as the criterion of Pauline style; what is "obvious" to one may be very questionable to another.
Carl,
Good observations. I tend to think that both it and Colossians are Pauline, but "obvious" is indeed a perilous word.
James
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