Subject: tc-list-digest V4 #120

From: "David C. Hindley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 14:50:21 -0400

Message text written by Dr. Ulrich Schmid:

>>a) There is evidence from antiquity that letter writers published
collections of 
(some of) their letters (again Cicero and Cyprian, among others).
b) Paul was able to perform such a task, because, in all likelyhood, he
retained 
copies of the letters he sent (see above).
c) What are the biblia and membranai mentioned in 2 Tim 4:13?  We don't
have 
information about the individual items (possible candidates are OT books,
the 
letters Paul recieved from "his" communities and collaborators, copies of
his 
own letters). The least one can say, I think, is that there must have been
books 
and parchments among the personal belongings of Paul which have been
carried 
around and considered to be very important. 

I may restate my initial question:
What do we know of the historical details of Paul's life that makes it 
unthinkable or unlikely that Paul himself edited a selection of his 
correspondence?

Again, you may want to check 
David Trobisch, Die Entstehung der Paulusbriefsammlung. Studien zu den
Anfaengen 
christlicher Publizistik, Freiburg (Schweiz)-Goettingen 1989 (NTOA 10).
David Trobisch, Paul's Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins, Minneapolis
1994.<<

Luckily an online version of the (slightly modified) introduction to
_Paul's Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins_ is available online at:

http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll?action=showitem&id=15
#_Toc439066036

I quote from it the following excerpts;

>>I [Trobisch] grew up with a picture of Paul traveling through Asia and
Europe, founding congregations, counseling and teaching the men and women
who had given their life to Jesus. If he could not visit them, he sent
letters. When Paul died, his letters were kept as treasures. Each church
that had received one of his letters saved it, had it read during worship
services, and exchanged copies of the letter with other congregations close
by. Later the congregations tried to complete their collection. 

But this view does not match the uniformity of manuscript evidence. 

I will have to explain this more closely. Today, before a book is
published, the author presents a manuscript to the publisher. The publisher
very often will suggest changes and will have the manuscript edited by
professional editors. After author and publisher agreed on the final
version, one single manuscript only is forwarded to the printer. This
manuscript becomes the ancestor of the whole edition or, in other words,
this manuscript is the archetype of the text tradition. 

The view I grew up with does not suggest that there was any archetype of
the letters of Paul. [Instead, t]here were several collections and
different editors combined these collections at different places until all
known letters were included.<<

[snip]

>>If the view I grew up with was right, that Christian congregations
started out with some letters and gradually tried to complete their
collection of Paul's letters independently from each other, then each
editor of the collection would face the problem of arranging the letters.
And how likely is it that each one came up with exactly the same
arrangement as is given in the New Testament? [In other words, Trobisch
does not think this is likely]<<

[snip]

>>There is no manuscript evidence to prove that the letters of Paul ever
existed in an edition containing only some of the thirteen letters.<<

[snip]

>>Let me sum up the two points I wanted to make so far. First, the complete
manuscript evidence can be interpreted to testify to an edition of thirteen
letters of Paul with the order Romans 1 Corinthians 2 Corinthians Galatians
Ephesians Philippians Colossians 1 Thessalonians 2 Thessalonians 1 Timothy
2 Timothy Titus Philemon. Second, it is very unlikely that two editors
would arrange the letters of Paul in this way independently of each other.

These two assumptions lead me to conclude that the canonical edition of the
fourteen letters of Paul as it is presented in the New Testament today goes
back to one single copy of thirteen letters of Paul, and that only the
letter to the Hebrews was added at a later stage of the text-tradition. <<

Trobisch's analysis appears, to me, to be saying that the 13 Pauline
epistles were *not* circulating independently prior to their publication as
a collection! While this does not negate your points (b) & (c) above, I
think point (a) is open to question. That Roman and Greek writers of means
could afford to publish collections of their letters does not easily
translate into Paul, a man of modest means, doing so. 

You have assumed that this archtype collection proposed by Trobisch was
published by Paul or his immediate circle. There are other possibilities.
What if they were published much later? And if later, to what extant might
they have been redacted? Then there would *be* no autograph to go back to,
only an edited archtype! As for where the original letters came from, if
not drawn from letters in general circulation, then I would suggest that
the editor was able to get ahold of one of those trunks like the one left
at Troas. He was then free to mold Paul into the image that he held him to
be, regardless of what the original texts said. What a publicity, or
recruitment, coup that would have been!

Regards,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 16:02:03 -0700

My apologies to the list for the double post, with the bum subject
header, on David Traubisch's effect on the Pauline autograph/archtype
issue.

I had a nasty HDD crash 5 weeks ago, and am just starting to recover.
Cannot seem to reactivate my POP3 mailbox, forcing me to revert to
using my ISP's built-in (but not very intuitive) mail features. It kept
telling me it didn't send any message. <g>

Regards,
 
Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 11:45:50 +0200

David C. Hindley wrote:
> [quoting Schmid]:

[omitting long quote from Trobisch]

[Hindley]
> translate into Paul, a man of modest means, doing so. 

Trobisch is *not* saying "that the 13 Pauline epistles were *not* circulating 
independently prior to their publication as a collection." Trobisch is not 
making assumptions about circulation of individual letters neither positive nor 
negative. He is saying that the extant textual transmission of the Pauline 
letters started with the publication of the 13-letter-collection. BTW-- It was 
Trobisch who argued that Paul himself started to publish (some of) his letters 
as an "authors recensension"; read his 1989 dissertation.

> published by Paul or his immediate circle. 

No. I don't agree with Trobisch on the 13-letter-collection as archetype of the 
extant textual transmission. In my view, another 10-letter-collection (= 
pre-marcionite collection) was extant, possibly earlier than the 
13-letter-collecction. The textual transmission, especially of Romans and 
Ephesians, is best interpreted as a result of contamination between the two 
editions. You will find my analysis, discussing Trobisch and Gamble, in my book 
*Marcion und sein Apostolos*, deGruyter: 1995 (ANTF 25), pp. 284-303.

> There are other possibilities.

In the 19th century cholars had been much bolder. F.C. Baur and his school 
argued that only Gal 1/2 Cor Rom are from Paul. The rest of his letters are 
documents of an "early-catholic" compromise accounting for the new 2nd century 
church situation. There was an even more radical approach (Bruno Bauer, W.C. van 
Manen, G.A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, among others) arguing that all of Paul's 
letters were the product of antinomistic quarrels around 140 CE. Some 
still argue today that Paul had to be domesticated because of the marcionite 
threat to Christianity; therefore the Pastorals had been invented.
To sum up: There is a great variety of ideas concerning the inception of the 
Pauline letters. The most radical ones have been expressed more than a century 
ago. 

------------------------------------------
Dr. Ulrich Schmid
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 18:08:34 -0700

Dr. Ulrich Schmid said:

>> ... read [Trobisch's] 1989 dissertation. [...] You will find my
analysis, discussing Trobisch and Gamble, in my book  *Marcion und sein
Apostolos*, deGruyter: 1995 (ANTF 25), pp. 284-303.<<

I wish I could. Alas, I am not a reader of German, much less a
professional academic. But in my my own profession I must always be
asking questions and following logical progressions, and I felt that
the question of a non-Pauline  origin for the archtype was not
adequately addressed.

>>Trobisch is *not* saying "that the 13 Pauline epistles were *not*
circulating  independently prior to their publication as a collection."
Trobisch is not  making assumptions about circulation of individual
letters neither positive nor  negative. He is saying that the extant
textual transmission of the Pauline  letters started with the
publication of the 13-letter-collection. BTW-- It was  Trobisch who
argued that Paul himself started to publish (some of) his letters  as
an "authors recensension"<<

Trobisch's wording in regard to the assumptions he grew up with, and in
the way he concluded that the extant Pauline corpus originated with a
13 letter archtype, strongly suggested to me that he was mooting the
idea that the letters circulated independently just as much as the idea
that the 13 letter corpus was compiled from smaller collections of
independently circulating letters. 

>>No. I don't agree with Trobisch on the 13-letter-collection as
archetype of the  extant textual transmission. In my view, another
10-letter-collection (=  pre-marcionite collection) was extant,
possibly earlier than the  
13-letter-collecction. The textual transmission, especially of Romans
and Ephesians, is best interpreted as a result of contamination between
the two  
editions. <<

I would have to ask, then, what ever happened to these earlier
independently circulating letters? In other words, why did they not
affect the textual transmission? 

>>To sum up: There is a great variety of ideas concerning the inception
of the  Pauline letters. The most radical ones have been expressed more
than a century  ago. <<

Yes, I am quite aware of the 19th century "radical" interpretations, at
least in summary, and that these are today quite out of vogue. However,
they all appear to have taken the approach that the Christology was the
heart of Paul's message and the doctrine of justification of Gentiles
was secondary or interpolated. Considering that no one has been able to
reconstruct plausible "original" letters under this model, this
approach has been abandoned for good reason.

For what it is worth, I have been studying these epistles for close to
20 years as an amature in an attempt to reconcile the seemingly
incompatable ideas that often sit side by side one another in the
Pauline letters. 

My current model proposes a core of 13 epistles concerned solely with
the justification of Gentiles, into which Christological material
(among some other themes) had been interpolated by means of individual
words, short phrases, comments and full homilies. The core material
knew nothing of Jesus or Christology. 

To account for a relative lack of variants at the places I identify as
interpolations (about 1/3 of the text) I had resorted to proposing that
an editor made use of more or less genuine unpublished materials,
redacting them to make Paul a Christian of his period. These were then
published in order to capitalize on the good name of Paul among certain
Gentile God-fearers for the purposees of recruiting them to Gentile
Christianity. 

This was formulated before I had ever heard of David Trobisch. Perhaps
you can see why I was interested in the idea that the 13 epistles were
published as a corpus with no earlier competing archtypes. This could
be compatible with my proposal, and I was curious as to why the idea of
a late publication was not being considered in the posts I had
encountered here on TC-list. 

Sorry if I did not seem "with it". 

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA