Introduction to the Study of the Pauline Canon

Abstract

Pauline studies are like no others in the entire area of biblical studies. The man, Paul, continues to stand at the centre of much controversy, much of it caused directly by his letters. In this volume, the subject of discussion is the canon of Paul’s letters. The issue of canon has been an important and live one in recent New Testament scholarship,¹ and raises many inter-related questions especially in terms of the letters traditionally ascribed to Paul. Some of these questions are the following: Did Paul write all of the letters ascribed to him in the New Testament? If he did, can we account for how these letters were preserved and compiled into the corpus that we now have? Did he write any other letters, of which we still have direct or indirect evidence, that are not in the canon but that bear examination? If we think that he did not write all of the letters, which ones did he write? How do we know that he did or did not write these letters? What criteria can we use to discuss this issue? For those that he did not write, how do we account for their having been written and included in what is now our canonical collection as found in the New Testament? How do we account for some of the problematic juxtapositions of ideas in the letters that we do have? If we think that Paul may have written some parts of individual letters, but not all of them, how do we differentiate the parts that he wrote from the others? If Paul did not write all of the letters ascribed to him, what are the canonical, historical and even theological, implications of such a conclusion? These are the kinds of questions that are explored in the essays in this volume. As a result, this volume includes a number of papers that raise a variety of questions regarding the canon of the Pauline writings. Some of the essays are more narrowly focused in their intent, sometimes concentrating upon a single dimension related to the Pauline canon, and sometimes upon even a single letter. Others of the essays are more broadly conceived and deal with how one assesses or accounts for the process that resulted in the letters as a collection, rather than analyzing individual letters. There are also mediating positions that attempt to overcome the disjunction between authenticity and inauthenticity by exploring the complex notion of interpolation.