Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (57 page)

There is more to be said, but this is enough for our purposes. There is almost nothing in these particular words and phrases—except possibly the term “myths”—that makes them unsuitable for many of the other books elsewhere in the New Testament, or just for Paul. It is not that they are objectionable or puzzlingly unusual constructions. They are simply an author’s preferred vocabulary. It is possible, of course, that one author wrote one of the books, and another author decided to copy many of its distinctive words and phrases to produce a book of his own. But given the facts that all three books have numerous similarities together while each of them has similarities with each of the others not shared by the third, the simplest solution is that one author produced all three books.
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This is especially the case given the evidence, yet to be adduced, that each of the letters as well as the corpus as a whole was probably not written by Paul.

It seems odd to find—as one sometimes does—scholars who claim that each of the Pastorals was produced by a different author without even considering, for a moment, the linguistic arguments that show otherwise.
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Those who do advance this view sometimes resort to linguistic arguments that appear to strain at gnats to swallow camels, as in an interesting and learned article of J. Herzer, which nonetheless maintains that the ecclesiologies of the 1 and 2 Timothy are at odds,
in no small measure because the phrase
of 1 Tim. 3:15 is inconsistent with the
of 2 Tim. 2:20.
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What of the dozens of distinctive and virtually impossible to explain verbal overlaps? It is even odder to find, on the far other side, a commentator like L. T. Johnson arguing against treating the three letters as a group produced by a single author, in the introduction to a commentary that treats 1 and 2 Timothy as two books by a single author (in his case, Paul, also, for him, author of Titus).
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Sometimes scholars, such as Gordon Fee, ask the rhetorical question of why a pseudepigrapher would have produced three such books instead of just one—overlooking the fact that Fee himself thinks that this is precisely what Paul did.
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Apart from that, the rhetoric has no force. Why do we have fourteen letters between Paul and Seneca? Surely two or three would do. Why are their six pseudo-Ignatian letters instead of one? Why does any forger forge more than one work, even if he has similar things to say? With the Pastoral epistles one could imagine all sorts of reasons for an author wanting to write three letters. 2 Timothy, as I have been emphasizing, differs more from the other two than they do from each other, and so was obviously written for different reasons. As to the other two—just staying in the realm of pure speculation—one of them could have been a draft for the second; the second could have been an expansion of the first; they could have been written to different places, audiences, or times. They could have been merely two letters out of twenty that the person wrote. Maybe five or six others were reasonably similar; who knows? The answer, of course, is that no one knows. But one cannot object that a forger would not write three letters. Why would he not write three letters? Or thirty-nine? Even if the author wrote three and only three letters, one can imagine good reasons even for that; as Richard Pervo has recently pointed out, “Three is … a satisfactory and symbolic number, implying a true collection.”
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In short, it appears that the same author produced the three Pastoral letters. Moreover, there are very good reasons for thinking this author was not Paul. Many of the strongest reasons have to do with the contents of the letters individually: what they actually say that stands at odds with views otherwise well documented for Paul himself. But the force of the argument for taking them as a collective should not be pushed aside. If one of these letters is forged, they are all forged, because they were all likely written by the same hand. In evaluating the question of authorship, Johnson is far less than generous, or at least being excessively rhetorical, when he claims that “the main argument against authenticity today is the sheer weight of scholarly consensus.”
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The reality is that the vast majority of the New Testament scholars who discuss the issue have read and mastered the
scholarship and found that it is convincing, and have seen little reason then to reinvent the wheel.

It is true that bad arguments are often made to attack the Pauline authorship of the letters. It is commonly and roundly asserted that it is hard to locate the letters in Paul’s ministry as laid out either in his own letters or Acts. But as Johnson points out, our hard information on Paul’s ministry is extremely sparse: eight of the twelve years spanning 50 and 62
CE
are summed up in the book of Acts in four lines.
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But the arguments for considering the group as a whole pseudonymous are powerful, and we have already seen the opening gambit. Not only is a good deal of the vocabulary—terms, phrases, sentences—shared among the three letters, this shared vocabulary in particular is not Pauline.

Issues concerning the vocabulary and style of the Pastorals have been batted around for a very long time. The seemingly convincing case that P. N. Harrison made in 1921,
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with its well-known lists and numbers of hapax legomena, was early on shown to be less than definitive by shorter studies, such as the pointed response by W. Michaelis.
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But study after study continues to demonstrate the enormous linguistic problems.
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The reality is that these letters are far less like Paul than anything in Paul.

This is recognized even by those who want to challenge the consensus opinion. The most recent attempt has been made by Armin Baum, who tries to explain one of the distinctive features of the letters: they violate the otherwise solid rule that shorter letters of Paul tend to use relatively fewer distinctive than common words. The pastorals have a vocabulary that is, by comparison with the other letters in the corpus, exceedingly rich; here there are approximately 20 percent more distinctive than common words.
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This is a statistic that is obviously hard to explain on the assumption of Pauline authorship, especially when one looks at the hard data. As Baum shows, for example, 2 Timothy uses 451 different words, 161 (22 percent) of which are found only in 2 Timothy in the New Testament. In an average Pauline letter of this length we would expect only 42 distinctive words (12 percent). So how does one answer this incommensurability in favor of Pauline authorship? Baum does so with a theory: since it has been argued that written compositions tend to evidence richer word choice than oral communications, the
Pastoral epistles may have been planned as written works rather than dictated off the top of Paul’s head.

It is hard to know where to begin with any such claim, but possibly it should be with the question of proof. One is hard pressed to know what evidence Baum might find persuasive for his view, since he presents it as a suggestion and so martials no argument. But what are we to think—that Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, was dashed off in a hasty mode of dictation, but 2 Timothy was carefully plotted and outlined as a literary text? Given the nature of the two letters, this seems, on the generous side, a shade unlikely. And the comparatively richer vocabulary itself cannot serve as the evidence that it happened this way, since that is the datum the theory is trying to explain.

Baum not only presents no evidence, he considers no obvious counterevidence, such as the observation of Quinn that the syntax of these letters sometimes breaks down, with “inordinately rough abrupt transitions (thus Titus 2:6–8; 1 Tim. 3:1a–b), inexplicable shifts in the inflection of verbs (1 Tim. 2:15),… sentence fragments that are without a verb or object to weld their endless phrases together (thus Titus 1:1–4; 1 Tim. 1:3–7).”
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These do not give the appearance, at least, of being carefully plotted literary compositions.

There is more to the argument from vocabulary than a mere listing of unusual terms, even with an inordinately high level of frequency. More probative is the fact stressed so frequently, and for good reason, that some of the key terms actually shared with Paul take on other meanings—and this with words that matter a good deal to both Paul and the author of the Pastorals. And so, as commonly and rightly pointed out,
has lost its Pauline character involving justification by an act of God, and has become a virtue for the believer to pursue (thus 1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:22). So too “faith” is no longer a relational term, referring to a trusting relationship with God through Christ, or trust “in” the death of Christ for salvation. It is now the content of the religion (thus 1 Tim. 4:6; 5:8). In this linguistic world, the recurring phrase
no longer sounds even vaguely odd.

As Harrison noted already in 1921, the vocabulary preferred by the author resonates more closely with the Christian language of the second century than with Paul. Yet more important, the historical situation of the church itself, embodied in the descriptions afforded by this vocabulary, appears to have moved far along from the days of Paul’s charismatic communities. This is a factor that is completely underplayed and slighted by Johnson, who wants to see a solid continuity between the church of the Pastorals and the church of Paul.
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What is far more salient to most readers is the radical discontinuity. We can get a good sense of “Pauline” churches from two corpora of letters, the Corinthian correspondence and the Pastorals. It is hard to see how these derive from contexts that are at all equivalent either temporally or ideologically. When Paul is dealing
with the manifest problems in the church of Corinth—disunity, immorality, disorganization, false teachings, and so on—why does he not write to the leader or leaders he has appointed in order to convince them to bring their people into line? Surely it is because there were no leaders, in that sense, who could do so. And the correspondence is completely unambiguous as to why. There were no “offices” in the Corinthian church that were conveyed by the laying on of hands (or by selection) to those who had set qualifications and the ability to lead. Each member of the community had a spiritual gift that was to be used for the upbuilding of the community; each person needed to use these gifts with
for the entire community, being concerned not for self-aggrandizement but for the good of the whole. If they followed the direction of the Spirit there would be harmony in the body of Christ as every part worked together for the greater good.