Derek Brown has an insightful post on The House that Pseudonymity Built. He notes that it is almost as if in the academic world there are three strata within the Pauline corpus:
- "Authentic" Pauline works: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon ("the seven").
- "Not really Pauline but they're pretty good anyways": Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians.
- "Equivalent to illegitimate children" epistles: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus (aka "the Pastorals").
Yet I wonder if Wright is onto something about the authorship of the "Deutero-Paulines" as noted by Mark Owens. I know my former teacher George Wieland was dismayed when his supervisor Howard Marshall stated that he was pretty convinced that the Pastorals are pseudonomous.
But what of Derek's point that these letters have been relegated to the margins of studies? I fear, unless the route taken by Wright has any merit, the field will probably stay as it is... And if Mark Goodacre is right, then scholarship will seek to specialize in the Pastorals as a subset of Pauline studies, and the chasm will widen... Unless of course we heed Mark's advice and become more couragous and publish in other areas too...So shall Derek restore the balance to the force and research Christology in the P.E. arising out of a 2nd Temple Judaistic context? Or shall he research something completely different yet still have the guts to publish on the importance of the P.E.? Only time will tell...
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