We have already seen the high probability that Moses didn't write the Law and Daniel didn't write Daniel, but does the New Testament fair any better?
There are reasons for thinking that the Gospels were not written by the people they are attributed to that I don't want to get into here. Instead I want to look at Paul's writing as that is something I have done more research into.
There are fourteen books that are attributed to Paul, with Hebrews which is anonymously written often being attributed to another writer. I've heard both views on Hebrews from the platform (during a sermon) by Christadelphians. Of these only seven are undisputed as being written by Paul, these are: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians and Philemon. The remainder are all disputed to a greater or lesser extent by scholars. Of the disputed letters the pastoral epistles (First and Second Timothy and Titus) are regarded as the most obviously not written by Paul and this has been the consensus view of critical scholars in the USA and Western Europe for years. The earliest list of New Testament scriptures we have was written by Marcion, who was a great follower of Paul and includes all the other letters attributed to Paul but not these three.
More modern scholarship has noticed that the vocabulary and phraseology used in these letters is different to Paul's other letters. To put some numbers on it, there are 848 different Greek words used in these letters. Of those words 306 do not occur anywhere else in the letters attributed to Paul. Around 200 of these words are used by Christian writers in the second century as Christianity continued to develop. The author also uses the common words differently. Take 'faith' for example which for Paul meant having a trusting acceptance of salvation through Jesus. But by the time we get to the second century the writer uses the word differently to mean the set of beliefs that make up the Christian faith (see Titus 1:13).
Scholars also suggest that the theology and situation also better reflects life in the second century when it became clear that Jesus wasn't going to return soon and a structure and hierarchy became important and was required in the church (e.g. 1 Timothy 3), which seems at variance with what is presumed in the letters to the Corinthians and recorded in Acts 2 where there was no hierarchy and everyone lived together and had everything in common (a model that is not used by believers today). The reason that Paul didn't leave a model for structure and hierarchy in the Church is because he thought that Jesus was about to return so there was no need for this formality. The later author who wrote after Paul's death chose to write in the name of Paul so that his work would carry the authority of Paul, which it clearly did as it's included in our Bible today.
next >
No comments:
Post a Comment