WHEN I BECAME A BORN-AGAIN Christian in 1971, I was eager to read and learn all I could about the Scriptures. I had no idea at the time that there was such a thing as biblical scholarship, or that there were books written by real experts who had mastered the relevant ancient languages—Greek and Hebrew, for example—and plumbed all the ancient sources for years on end in order to provide historically accurate accounts. I was just as happy with a good novel about, say, Jesus or Paul as with something serious. And novels, of course, make for easy reading, just the sort of thing I liked.

During the preceding year one of the best-selling biblical novels of all time had appeared, Taylor Caldwell’s Great Lion of God, a fictional account of the life of the apostle Paul. For eight months it had been on the New York Times bestseller list, and as far as I was concerned, if that many people read it, it must be accurate and informative. So I devoured it. It was only later in life that I realized just how much fiction there was in this “historical” novel. I remember, years after, fervently hoping that I hadn’t gotten too much of my “common knowledge” about Paul from this fantastical account.

The one episode that stuck with me over the years involved Caldwell’s attempt to explain why Paul was so ripe for conversion to become a follower of Jesus after being such a violent persecutor of the church. The way she mapped out the scenario, roughly, was this. As a very young teenager Paul was extremely zealous for his Jewish faith and strove mightily to keep the Jewish law. But at one point he succumbed to an irresistible temptation. It involved a tryst out at the local lake with a dark-haired slave girl. This sexual encounter created an enormous burden of guilt in the young Paul, which he tried to assuage by becoming even more hyperreligious. As a young man, he heard of the followers of Jesus, who were preaching that salvation can come to people who do not keep the law. Salvation comes simply through faith in Christ. Paul became incensed and got official permission to oppose and persecute them. This was a further way of working out his own personal guilt; by engaging in religious zeal he assuaged his conscience. But he found that the harder and harder he pressed for keeping the Jewish law in all its rigorous details, the more overwhelmed he was with guilt for having broken it.

Then he had a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. He realized for the first time both that he could not really keep the law and that he did not need to. Jesus brought a release from the deeply hidden guilt within him, and out of profound gratitude he threw himself with equal zeal into being a missionary for the church rather than its persecutor.

Caldwell’s long book was a compelling read, especially for an eager teenager wanting to know more about the truth of his newfound faith. As it turns out, though, the entire plot is a fiction. There is no historical record of Paul’s sexual fling at the local pond and no indication that he felt tremendous guilt over being unable to keep the law, even though a lot of Christians continue to misinterpret Paul that way. We have a reasonable understanding of what Paul thought, since he has left us some letters (all in the New Testament). When he talks about his Jewish life before Jesus, even though he does indicate that he was extremely zealous for the law, he makes it quite clear that it was not because of guilt over being unable to keep it. On the contrary, Paul indicates that as a faithful Jew he was “blameless” in keeping the law (Phil. 3:6). When he became a follower of Jesus, it was not to resolve internal conflict and guilt. It was because he came to realize that Christ’s death was the only thing important for salvation, and everything else, even the law, was as worthless as “garbage” (as he puts it in Phil. 3:8)¹

Taylor Caldwell, of course, had access to Paul’s own writings and could have known what he actually said about his life before Jesus. But probably the reality of his life didn’t make as good a story as the idea of the tryst with the slave girl. Having the true account from the horse’s mouth (or in this case the Great Lion’s) has never stopped people from telling fictional accounts about Paul.

Ancient Fictions About Paul

OF ALL THE CHRISTIANS who have ever lived, probably no one has had more stories told about him than Paul. We still have a number of ancient legendary accounts, just as we have for Peter. In the case of Paul we have a record of someone actually being caught red-handed fabricating stories about him and being punished for it. Ancient people saw fabrications about historical figures (i.e., made-up stories) much as they saw forgeries (false authorial claims): they were pseuda, “falsehoods” or “lies,” and they normally were not tolerated.

Many of the ancient fabricated accounts can be found in a book that has survived the ravages of time only in bits and pieces, called the Acts of Paul. The narrative describes the missionary activities of Paul, his preaching, and his amazing miracles. Probably the most famous part of the story involves Paul’s conversion of a wealthy young woman named Thecla, who abandons her fiancé to become Paul’s devoted follower.

Paul is said to have arrived in the city of Iconium and to have been welcomed into the house of a Christian named Onesiphorus. There he preaches a sermon. But it is a sermon quite unlike anything Paul himself teaches in his own letters in the New Testament, where his message always concerns the need to believe in Jesus’s death and resurrection for salvation. Here, in the Acts of Paul, the apostle’s message is one of sexual abstinence. Only the pure in heart and body, preserved through remaining sexually chaste, can inherit the kingdom. This applies not only to single people, but also to those who are married. Sex is forbidden.

Thecla, who lives next door, happens to be sitting in her second-floor window and overhears the sermon. She is engaged to a wealthy and prominent man, but decides on the basis of what she has heard to abandon her wedding plans and follow Paul. Her mother and her aggrieved fiancé try to dissuade her, but to no avail. Rejected and angry, they turn her over to the authorities to be burned at the stake for violating social custom. She miraculously escapes and becomes Paul’s follower. The rest of the story is about her adventures with Paul and her persecutions.

In another city she resists the sexual advances of an aristocrat and once more is condemned to death. This time she is to be thrown to the wild beasts. She is upset, though, that she might die before she has been baptized into her new faith. Seeing a vat of water filled with man-eating seals (whatever those might be), she throws herself in and declares herself baptized. God performs another miracle, and Thecla escapes intact. Finally she reunites with the apostle Paul, informs him of her desire to spread the word of the gospel, and is authorized by him to do so.

I’ve given just a brief sketch here of this fairly long and interesting story. The full account was very popular among some Christian groups in the early centuries. And it caused quite a stir among church leaders who were offended by the significant role it gave to Thecla as someone who could baptize (herself!) and preach the gospel, even though she was a woman. By the second century, most churches reserved such ministerial duties for men. But these stories, through no less significant a figure than Paul, seemed to authorize women to engage in them. Moreover, the “gospel” of Paul in this text is all about sexual abstinence and the avoidance of marriage. In other churches it was taught that the family was important, that the male leaders of the churches should be married, that their wives should have babies and be submissive to their husbands in all things. The alternative perspective of the Thecla story led to some serious divisions in the church.²

We know this because the first time an ancient author mentions the story, it is in order to oppose it. The writer was the famous Christian theologian, defender of the faith, and misogynist Tertullian, who around 200 CE wrote a treatise on baptism. In this treatise he attacks women who used the story of Thecla as a justification for practicing baptism since, for Tertullian, only men should be allowed to baptize. Tertullian argues that this story of Thecla was fabricated and had no historical value. In fact, he says the author of the story was an elder (“presbyter”) in a church of Asia Minor. He was caught fabricating the account, was put on trial in the church, and was relieved of his duties. Thus, for Tertullian, the story cannot be used to authorize women’s baptism practices.³

Scholars frequently cite this brief but fascinating passage from Tertullian in order to show that forgers were not welcomed in the church. I wish that were the point of the story, since I think it is true that forgers were not welcome. But unfortunately, the story is not about a forger. It is about a fabricator. This Asia Minor presbyter did not write a book claiming to be Paul; he wrote a book with fabricated stories about Paul. At the same time, it is true to say that he was treated as forgers were also generally treated. He was severely reprimanded for not speaking the truth.

With good reason a number of scholars have argued that the presbyter did not actually invent these stories about Thecla, but simply retold them, editing them for his own purpose. In other words, the stories were floating around in the oral tradition for a long time before the end of the second century, when he produced his account. This may well be the case, as we will see later in this chapter when we return to the stories. But in any event, somebody made up the stories, since they are not historical. The author or editor who wrote them down was found out. And the consequences were not good.

Noncanonical Writings Forged in the Name of Paul

IF CHRISTIANS MADE UP stories about Paul, did they also make up writings allegedly by Paul? This is the question we asked about Peter in Chapter 2, and the answer here will be the same. There are numerous forgeries in the name of Paul from the early church, all of them, so far as we can tell, written to “authorize” certain views in the name of this great author. Some of these forgeries survive; we know of other forgeries that once existed, but have since been lost.

FORGERIES PERPETRATED BY MARCION

You might think that someone of Paul’s stature would have been a unifying influence on the early church. As it turns out, nothing could be farther from the truth. At about the time the presbyter of Asia Minor was propounding stories about Paul that led to splits over the role of women in the church, an even bigger menace to the church’s unity was coming from a completely different direction. It involved the teachings of one of Paul’s greatest early admirers, the second-century teacher and theologian Marcion.⁴

It is unfortunate that we no longer have any of Marcion’s own writings. They were deemed heretical (“false teachings”) and destroyed. What we do have are the writings of his opponents, including especially the already-mentioned Tertullian, who wrote a five-volume refutation of Marcion’s teachings. We still have this work, and it is a gold mine of information about one of the most divisive persons in the history of the early church.

Marcion came from the city of Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea. His father was reportedly a bishop of the local church, and so Marcion was raised, in the early second century, in a Christian household. His family was from the upper class, and he himself became an entrepreneur as a young man, apparently in the shipbuilding business. After he amassed a good deal of wealth, he left Asia Minor for the capital city of the empire, Rome, where he joined the church and participated actively in its ministry. Scholars have traditionally dated Marcion’s time in Rome as 139–144 CE.

It was in Rome that Marcion developed his distinctive theological ideas. Marcion was especially attracted to Paul’s idea that a person is made right with God not by doing the requirements of the Jewish law (the “works of the law,” as Paul puts it), but only by having faith in Christ’s death and resurrection. Paul, in such books as Galatians and Romans in the New Testament, emphasizes that no one can be right with God through the works of the law. He preached his “gospel” (literally, the “good news”) to Gentiles, telling them that Christ’s death could bring a reconciliation with God for all who have faith.

Marcion saw this contrast between the law of the Jews and the gospel of Christ in extreme terms and pushed the contrast to what he saw as its logical consequences. Where there is law, there is no gospel. The law and the gospel are fundamentally distinct. They are contrary things. The Old Testament has nothing to do with the gospel of Paul. The necessary conclusion, for Marcion, was that the God who gave the Jewish law must not be the God who saved people from their sins, which they incurred by breaking the law. In other words, the Old Testament God was not the same as the God of Jesus and his apostle Paul. There were literally two Gods.

Marcion argued that the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God who created this world, chose Israel to be his people, and then gave them his law. No one was able to keep this law, however. So the Old Testament God was perfectly justified in condemning everyone to damnation. He was a just, wrathful God—not evil, just ruthlessly judicial. The God of Jesus, on the other hand, was a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness. This good God, superior to the God of the Jews, sent Jesus into the world in order to die for the sins of others, to save people from the wrathful God of the Old Testament. Salvation comes, then, by believing in Jesus’s death.

Marcion set out to prove his doctrine of the two Gods by writing a book called the Antitheses (i.e., the “contrary statements”). In it he showed that there were severe inconsistencies between the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus and Paul. The God of the Old Testament, for example, orders the Israelites to take over the promised land, first by destroying the city of Jericho (Josh. 6). He instructs them to go into the city and slaughter every man, woman, and child in it. Is this the same God, asks Marcion, who says, “Love your enemies,” “Turn the other cheek,” and “Pray for those who persecute you”? It doesn’t sound like the same God. Because it’s not.

The God of the Old Testament sent his prophets, one of whom was Elisha. One day, we are told in the Old Testament, Elisha was verbally harassed by a group of boys making fun of his bald head. Elisha called the wrath of God down upon the boys, and two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them to death (2 Kings 2). Is this the same God who said, “Let the little children come unto me”? No, there are two different Gods.

Since the God of Jesus is not the God of the Old Testament and is therefore not the creator of the world, Jesus could not belong to this created order. He could not be born into this world as a flesh-and-blood being; otherwise he would belong to the God of the Jews, just as every other created being does. Jesus must have come from heaven, from the true God, directly. For that reason he was not an actual, physical human being. He only seemed to be. In other words, Marcion was a docetist (see Chapter 2). For this view he could again appeal to the writings of Paul, who stated that Jesus came into this world “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3). For Marcion, it was all an appearance.

Marcion is the first Christian of record to have insisted on a distinct canon of Scripture, that is, a collection of books he considered sacred authorities. Marcion’s canon was remarkably short by most standards. Since the Jewish God was not the true God, his book was not part of the Christian Scriptures. There was no Christian Old Testament. The canon, instead, was made up of two sections. One part consisted of Paul’s letters. Marcion apparently knew ten of these, all the ones in the New Testament except 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the so-called pastoral letters. Moreover, in his letters Paul constantly refers to his “gospel.” So Marcion included, as the other part of his canon, a Gospel account of the life of Jesus. This was apparently a version of the Gospel of Luke.

The problem with this eleven-book canon is that even these books quote the Old Testament as an authority and seem to affirm the creation as coming from the true God. How could that be, if Marcion’s views of Paul and Jesus were right? Marcion had an easy answer to that. He believed that after Jesus left this earth, his followers, the disciples, changed his teachings and went back to their old Jewish ways, misinterpreting his gospel message and turning it around to affirm the goodness of the creator God and his creation. They never fully understood Jesus’s teaching that the creator was not the true God. That is why Paul had to be called to be an apostle. The apostles before him had altered Jesus’s teachings, and so Paul was commissioned to set things straight. According to Marcion, this wide misinterpretation of Jesus’s message had affected lots of other Christians, including the scribes who copied the writings of Paul and Luke. These eleven books had in fact been miscopied over the years. Scribes who did not understand the truth—that there are two Gods, that Jesus was not really born and is not really human, and so on—altered the texts and inserted false views into them. Marcion then edited his eleven books, eliminating from them portions that seemed too Jewish.

In addition to these eleven books, Marcion and his followers had other books forged in Paul’s name. We know this from a fragmentary text that comes to us from the second century, a text that discusses which books belong in the true cannon of Scripture, as opposed to the canons of Marcion and other heretics. This text is called the Muratorian Canon, named after the Italian scholar, Muratori, who discovered it.⁵ Among other things the Muratorian Canon indicates that the Marcionites, the followers of Marcion, had forged two books in the name of Paul, a letter to the Christians in the city of Alexandria and a letter to those in the town of Laodicea. These letters to the Alexandrians and Laodiceans, regrettably, no longer survive. But we can be relatively certain that if they ever turn up, they will represent even more forcefully than the books of Marcion’s canon his distinctive views about the two Gods, the non-human Jesus, and the salvation he brought.

3 CORINTHIANS

It was quite common for “orthodox” Christians (i.e., Christians who accepted the theological views that eventually became widely accepted throughout Christianity) to charge “heretics” (those who taught “false teachings”) with forging documents in the names of the apostles in order to support their views. We will see much more of this phenomenon in Chapter 6. The Gospel of Peter, for example, was charged with being heretical, as teaching a docetic view of Jesus. But orthodox Christians forged documents of their own. We have far more of this kind of forgery, since orthodox writings were more likely to be preserved for posterity, even if they were not actually written by their alleged authors.

Everyone familiar with the New Testament knows that it contains two letters by Paul to the church in Corinth, called 1 and 2 Corinthians. What most people do not know is that outside of the New Testament is a book called 3 Corinthians. It is a fascinating book, penned in the name of Paul to oppose heretics like Marcion. But Paul did not write it. It is an orthodox forgery of the second century.⁶

Like the stories of Thecla, 3 Corinthians is now found in the Acts of Paul. According to the account, two heretics came to Corinth propounding their false views, Simon the Magician, whom we have met before, and Cleobius. The Corinthian Christians were disturbed by what they were hearing and wrote to Paul asking him to correct the heretical teachings and to come in person to straighten out those who had succumbed to them.

This letter to Paul, forged in the name of the Corinthians, is the first part of 3 Corinthians. It sets out the claims of the two false teachers, namely, that it is wrong to appeal to the Old Testament prophets, that God is “not almighty” (i.e., that the creator God is not God over all), that there will be no future resurrection of the flesh, that the world was not created by God, that Christ did not come to earth bearing real flesh, that he was not born of Mary, and that the world was not created by God, but by angels.

Much of this sounds like the teaching of Marcion. As we have seen, Marcion devalued human “flesh,” because he rejected the idea that the creator of this world is the true God. And the creator, of course, is the one who made fleshly beings. As a consequence, the followers of Marcion did not believe that the afterlife would be lived “in the flesh” there would be no physical resurrection at the end of time. So too Christ could not have had real flesh and was not actually born. Since the Old Testament is not part of the Christian Bible, for Marcion, one cannot appeal to the prophets, and the creator God is not the true God.

At least one aspect of the alleged teachings of Simon and Cleobius, however, does not sound like Marcion, their teaching that the world was created “by angels.” Marcion maintained that it was created by the God of the Old Testament. Either some of Marcion’s followers thought that the Jewish God had created the world through powerful angelic intermediaries, or the fictitious opponents of the Corinthians are not followers of Marcion per se, but are “heretics” with views very similar to Marcion’s.

The rest of 3 Corinthians is Paul’s letter in response. This letter is much longer than the one from the Corinthians, and in it “Paul” argues strongly against the heretical views being propounded by the false teachers. Paul stresses that the message he preaches is the one that he received from the other apostles, “who were together with the Lord Jesus Christ at all times.” In other words, his message is not unique to him. This stands in contrast to Marcion, who saw Paul as the apostle par excellence, who opposed the false teachings of the other apostles who corrupted Jesus’s message. Paul goes on to stress that Jesus really was born of Mary and came in the flesh in order to redeem all flesh and to raise people from the dead in the flesh. The true God is the creator, and the prophets were his spokespersons.

This emphasis on the “flesh” is very interesting, but also a bit ironic. One recent study of 3 Corinthians has shown that the forger, who was intent on opposing the false teachings of the heretics, does so by teaching ideas about the flesh that are contrary to what the real, historical Paul taught.⁷ Paul himself certainly believed that God had created this world and that at the end of time he would redeem it. Paul, like most Jews and Christians in his day, thought that at the end of this age there would be a bodily resurrection. That is to say, humans would face judgment, either reward or punishment, in their own bodies, which had been raised from the dead (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 15). But Paul did not call the body the “flesh.” On the contrary the “flesh” meant something completely different for Paul. It meant that part of human nature that is controlled by sin and is alienated from God (see, e.g., Rom. 8:1–9). For Paul, the “flesh” needed to be overcome, since it was controlled by sin. The human body would be raised from the dead, but the flesh had to die.

This somewhat technical understanding of the term “flesh” came to be lost in later orthodox Christianity, when theologians began thinking that flesh and body were the same thing. And that has happened here in 3 Corinthians. Unlike Paul, this author emphasizes the importance of flesh as a creation of God that will be raised. In other words, this is an instance in which a forger claiming to be Paul represents a point of view that is contrary to Paul’s, even though he is trying to correct, in Paul’s name, teachings he thinks are false.

THE LETTERS OF PAUL AND SENECA

A completely different agenda is found in a much later forgery of Pauline letters that was destined to become quite influential on later Christian thinking about Paul. By the end of the second century, many Christians—not just Marcion—considered Paul to be the most important figure in the religion after Jesus. Paul was understood as the great apostle, the great spokesperson, the great theologian of the church. His writings were widely read, and his thought was deeply appreciated. But over the years Christians wondered why, if Paul was such a brilliant and astute thinker, none of the other great thinkers of his day mentions him. Why does he appear to have been a great unknown in the Roman Empire, outside of the Christian church itself?

Sometime in the fourth century an unknown author sought to address the issue and did so by forging a series of fourteen letters between Paul and the Roman philosopher Seneca.⁸ Seneca was widely recognized as the greatest philosopher of his day, one of the real intellectual giants of the early Roman Empire. He was in the upper crust of elite and powerful society, as he was the tutor and later the adviser of the emperor Nero. A number of Seneca’s philosophical writings were widely read in antiquity, and a good number of them survive today. But nowhere in these writings does he mention the existence of Christianity or refer to Jesus or any of the great leaders of the new faith.

These fourteen letters repair the damage. Eight of the fourteen are allegedly Seneca’s letters to Paul; the other six are Paul’s responses. Modern readers of these letters are often a bit disappointed that their contents are so meager. One would hope for some good juicy gossip between the greatest thinker of the first century and the greatest apostle of the church. But with one exception the letters are not meant to provide fabricated stories about life in the imperial palace, for example. They are meant to show that Paul was well placed and well respected by intellectuals of his time.

“Seneca” in his first letter praises Paul for his “wonderful exhortations to the moral life” and indicates that these are divine teachings not spoken so much by Paul as through him by God. Paul, in his response, simply indicates that, yes, Seneca has spoken the truth! In another letter Seneca praises Paul’s “sublime speech” and his “most venerable thoughts” and indicates that the emperor Nero himself has read the letters and has been moved by Paul’s sentiments. All of this, of course, is historically bogus. Seneca had almost certainly never heard of Paul. But it makes for a good story three hundred years later.

In only one letter is there any historical reference of interest. In Letter 11 (sometimes numbered 14, since it appears to be the last one chronologically) Seneca expresses his sincere regret that Paul has been condemned to death even though he is innocent. This is a reference to the tradition that Paul was among the Christians martyred by Nero, who blamed them for starting the fire that burned the city of Rome, which he himself may have had started. Seneca states that the fire burned for six days, destroying 132 palaces and 4,000 apartment buildings. And he indicates his distress that Christians and Jews were being executed because of it by Nero, an unjust ruler “who takes pleasure in murder and uses lies as a disguise.” But the emperor’s days were numbered, and he would pay the penalty by enduring eternal torment: “This accursed one will be burned in the fire for all.”

Here we have, then, not just a set of forgeries written in the names of Paul and Seneca centuries after they were dead, but also a fabricated account of how such an eminent philosopher both appreciated Paul and held him and his fellow Christians innocent of the charges of arson brought against them in 64 CE. Christians of later centuries took these writings with extreme seriousness. It later became a commonplace that Seneca knew the apostle Paul and his Christian message, and that the famous philosopher, the greatest mind of his day, was entirely open to the gospel of Christ.

“Pauline” Writings in the New Testament

AS WITH PETER, SO with Paul. Outside of the New Testament there are numerous fabricated stories told about him and a number of writings only allegedly by him. All of the writings attributed to Paul from outside the New Testament were forged. Are there any Pauline forgeries within the New Testament?

Here again there is a broad scholarly consensus. There are thirteen letters that claim to have been written by Paul in the New Testament, nearly half of the New Testament books. But six of these were probably not written by Paul. Scholars have called these six the “deutero-Pauline” letters, meaning that they have a “secondary” standing in the corpus of Paul’s writings.

Virtually all scholars agree that seven of the Pauline letters are authentic: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. These seven cohere well together and appear stylistically, theologically, and in most every other way to be by the same person. They all claim to be written by Paul. There is scarce reason to doubt that they actually were written by Paul.

The other six differ in significant ways from this core group of seven. Three of them—1 and 2 Timothy and Titus—are so much alike that most scholars are convinced that they were written by the same person. The other three are usually assigned to three different authors. There is greatest scholarly agreement about the first group of three, and so I begin by discussing why scholars have long considered them to be forgeries.

THE PASTORAL LETTERS: 1 AND 2 TIMOTHY AND TITUS

The letters of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus have been grouped together and called the “Pastoral epistles” since the eighteenth century. The name derives from the subject matter; the author, who claims to be Paul, is allegedly writing to church leaders, his companions Timothy and Titus, to instruct them on their pastoral or ministerial duties in their respective churches. The three letters have many striking similarities to one another, as I show in a moment; but they are also three distinct letters with, probably, three distinct purposes, just as the authentic letters of Paul each has a distinct purpose. Before showing why most scholars consider them to be written by someone other than Paul, I should give a brief summary of each letter.

Summary of the Letters

First Timothy claims to be a letter from Paul to his junior colleague Timothy, whom he has left behind to be the leader of the church in the city of Ephesus. In the letter “Paul” gives Timothy instructions pertaining to how to run and organize the church. He is to oppose groups of false teachers who propound wild theories involving “myths and genealogies” and who promote a kind of rigorous ascetic activity as a spiritual exercise, in which, for example, marriage is forbidden and certain strict dietary restrictions must be observed. He is to make sure that only the right kind of person is appointed to the church offices of bishop and deacon. In particular, the offices are to be occupied only by men who are married, are not recent converts, and live upright lives. Most of the letter provides instruction on how Christians are to conduct themselves and interact with one another, for example, how to pray, how to behave toward the elderly and widows, and how to relate to material wealth.

Among the sundry problems addressed by the author of 1 Timothy is the role of women in the church. In a strident passage the author indicates that women are to be submissive and not to exercise any authority over a man, for example, through teaching. They, instead, are “to keep silent.” This, for the author, is how things simply ought to be, as seen from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, when the first man, Adam, was deceived by his wife, Eve, and ate the forbidden fruit. It was all the woman’s fault. But she, the woman, can still be saved, assures the author, by “bearing children” (2:11–15). In other words, women are to be silent, submissive, and pregnant.

Even though 2 Timothy is addressed to the same person, it is written to a different situation. In this case Paul is allegedly writing from prison in Rome (we’re never told where 1 Timothy was written); he has been put on trial and is expecting a second trial soon in which he will be condemned to death. He writes Timothy to encourage him in his ongoing pastoral duties and his rooting out of the false teachers who have infiltrated the church. “Paul” expresses a good deal of love and concern for Timothy in this letter; it is far and away the most personalized of the Pastorals. And he hopes that Timothy will be able to join him in Rome soon, bringing some of his personal possessions.

The book of Titus sounds very much like the book of 1 Timothy, almost as if it is a Reader’s Digest version of the longer letter. But it is addressed by Paul to Titus, a different companion, who is allegedly the pastor of the church on the island of Crete. Paul writes to have his representative correct those who are delivering false teachings, which again involve “genealogies” and “mythologies.” He also gives instructions to various groups within the church: older men, older women, younger women, younger men, and slaves.

The First Scholarly Suspicions About the Letters

These three letters are particularly significant for our discussion, because they were the first books of Paul that, in the history of modern scholarship, were extensively argued to be forgeries. The big moment came in 1807 with the publication of a letter by the German scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was one of the most important Christian theologians of the nineteenth century. He was famous for defending the Christian faith against its “cultured despisers” and for developing distinct theological views that influenced theologians well into the twentieth century. There are still scholars today who specialize in studying the works and teaching of Schleiermacher. Among his many writings is an open letter sent to a pastor in 1807 in which he tried to demonstrate that 1 Timothy was not written by Paul.

Schleiermacher argued that 1 Timothy used words and developed ideas that were at odds with those in the other letters of Paul, including 2 Timothy and Titus. Moreover the false teachings attacked in the letter do not sound like anything we know about from Paul’s day. Instead, they sound like heresies of the second century generally called “Gnostic.”

Like Marcion, Gnostic Christians maintained that this world is not the creation of the one true God. But unlike Marcion, Gnostics did not believe there were just two Gods. They maintained that there were many divine beings in the divine realm that had all come into existence at some point in eternity past, and that this world was created when one of the divine beings fell from the divine realm and came to be entrapped in this miserable world of matter.⁹ The Gnostic religions taught that some of us have a spark of the divine trapped in our bodies. Salvation will come to the spark only when it learns the truth of where it came from and who it really is. In other words, the inner element of the divine within us needs to acquire the true and secret “knowledge” that can set it free. In Greek, the word for “knowledge” is gnosis, and so this kind of religion is called Gnosticism. According to Gnostic Christians, Christ brings salvation by providing the secret knowledge, not, for example, by dying on the cross. And since the goal of salvation was to escape the trappings of the human body, many Gnostics were rigidly ascetic, urging their followers to treat the body severely, for example, in what was eaten and in avoiding the pleasures of sex.

Schleiermacher argued that the “myths and genealogies” opposed in 1 Timothy sound like the mythologies propounded by these later, second-century Gnostics. In connection with the other problems of the book, such as the non-Pauline vocabulary, this shows that it was a later production, forged in the name of Paul. Soon after Schleiermacher wrote his open letter-essay, other scholars came forward arguing not only that he was right about 1 Timothy, but also that the other two pastoral letters were written by the same person. All three were forged.

Current Scholarship: Are the Letters Forged?

An incredible amount of scholarship has been devoted to the pastoral letters just in the past thirty or forty years, two centuries removed from Schleiermacher. Much of it is tedious to normal human beings, but fascinating to those of us who are abnormal scholars. I can’t summarize it all here. Instead, I simply give a few reasons for thinking that all three letters were written by the same person, and that this person was not Paul.¹⁰

I should admit at the outset that some recent scholars have argued strenuously that 2 Timothy is so different from the other books that it should be considered separately, as by a different author from the others, possibly Paul himself.¹¹ For about a year or so before I started writing this book, I myself began to be increasingly inclined to take this view. But then I did some further serious research on the matter and am now thoroughly persuaded that whoever wrote 1 Timothy must have written 2 Timothy. The reason is that they share way too many verbal connections and similarities for these to be accidental. Just consider how they begin:

They are virtually the same. And even more important, there is no other letter of Paul that begins this way. Either these are by the same author, or one author is copying the writing of another. But there are reasons for thinking it is not the work of a copyist. For one thing, there are tons of verbal agreements of a similar sort. Both letters have words and phrases in common not found in any of the other letters attributed to Paul: the “promise of life” “with a pure conscience” “from a pure heart” “guard the deposit (of faith)” Paul is an “apostle, herald, and teacher.” And on and on and on. What is striking is not only that these phrases and many others like them are found in these two letters, but that they are found only in these two letters.

That’s why one of the letters isn’t being written by a copyist using the other as his model. To do so would have required the copyist not only to know which words and phrases were important in the first letter, but also which of these words and phrases were, simultaneously, ones that Paul himself never used. I suppose it is theoretically possible that a very astute student of Paul in the first century read through all of Paul’s letters, made a list of words that occurred in them, then read 1 Timothy, made a list of important words there, compared the two lists, and decided to write another letter to Timothy using lots of words and phrases that occurred in the second list, but not the first. But it really stretches the imagination. It is much easier to believe that whoever wrote the one letter had his favorite terms and used them in the other letter as well. It’s just that those terms were not terms used by Paul.¹²

That is one of the reasons scholars from the nineteenth century on have been convinced that Paul did not write the letters. The vocabulary and the writing style are very different from those of the other Pauline letters. In 1921 the British scholar A. N. Harrison wrote an important study of the pastoral letters in which he gave numerous statistics about the word usage in these writings. One of his most cited set of numbers is that there are 848 different words used in the pastoral letters. Of that number 306—over one-third of them!—do not occur in any of the other Pauline letters of the New Testament. That’s an inordinately high number; especially given the fact that about two-thirds of these 306 words are used by Christian authors living in the second century. That suggests that this author is using a vocabulary that was becoming more common after the days of Paul, and that he too therefore lived after Paul.¹³

A number of scholars have called Harrison’s use of statistics into question, since, as we all know, you can make statistics say just about anything you want them to say. But the arguments over word usage have gotten increasingly refined over the ninety years since he wrote, and in almost every study done, it is clear that the word usage of the Pastorals is different from that in Paul’s other letters.¹⁴ At the same time, probably not too much stock should be placed in mere numbers. Everyone, after all, uses different words on different occasions, and most of us have a much richer stock of vocabulary than shows up in any given letter or set of letters we write.

The problem is that a large number of factors all seem to point in the same direction, showing that this author is not Paul. For one thing, sometimes this author uses the same words as Paul, but means something different by them. The term “faith” was of supreme importance to Paul. In books such as Romans and Galatians faith refers to the trust a person has in Christ to bring about salvation through his death. In other words, the term describes a relationship with another; faith is trust “in” Christ. The author of the Pastorals also uses the term “faith.” But here it is not about a relationship with Christ; faith now means the body of teaching that makes up the Christian religion. That is “the faith” (see Titus 1:13). Same word, different meaning. So too with other key terms, such as “righteousness.”

Even more significant, some ideas and concepts in the pastoral letters stand at odds with what you find in the letters that Paul certainly wrote. For example, we have seen that Paul was highly concerned with arguing that performing the “works of the law” could not contribute to one’s right standing before God. It was not the Jewish law that could bring salvation, but the death and resurrection of Jesus. When Paul talks about “works,” that is what he means: doing the things that the Jewish law requires, such as getting circumcised, keeping kosher, and observing the Sabbath. In the Pastorals, however, the Jewish law is no longer even an issue, and the author speaks of works as “good works,” that is, doing good deeds for other people. The term occurs this way six times in 1 Timothy alone. This author is concerned to show that by being a morally good person you cannot earn your salvation. That may be true, but it is a completely different idea from Paul’s; Paul was concerned about whether you kept the Jewish law as a means to salvation (you should not), not if you did good deeds for it.

Or take a completely different idea, marriage. In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul is insistent that people who are single should try to remain single, just as he is. His reason is that the end of all things is near, and people should devote themselves to spreading the word, not to establishing their social lives. But how does that square with the view in the Pastorals? Here the author insists that the leaders of the church be married. In Paul’s letters it is better not to be married; in the Pastorals it is required that people (at least church leaders) be married.

Or think about the basic issue of how a person is “saved.” For Paul himself, only through the death and resurrection of Jesus can a person be saved. And for the Pastorals? For women, at least, we’re told in 1 Timothy 2 that they will “be saved” by bearing children. It is hard to know what that means, exactly, but it certainly doesn’t mean what Paul meant!

Probably the biggest problem with accepting the Pastorals as having come from Paul involves the historical situation that they seem to presuppose. Paul, like Jesus before him, thought he was living at the very end of time. When Jesus was raised from the dead, that was the sign that the end had already started and that the future resurrection of the dead was about to take place. According to Jewish thinking the resurrection was to arrive when this age had come to an end. That’s why Paul called Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection” in 1 Corinthians 15:20. This is an agricultural metaphor. The farmhands celebrate the first day of harvest by throwing a party that night; this commemorates the “first fruits” of the harvest. And when do they go out to get the rest of the harvest? The next day—not twenty or two thousand years later. Jesus is the first fruits, because with him the resurrection has started, and very soon everyone—all the dead—will be raised for judgment. That is why Paul thinks he himself will be alive when Jesus returns from heaven (see 1 Thess. 4:14–18).

In the meantime, though, the church has to grow and survive in the world. Paul thought that in this short interim period between the resurrection of Jesus and the end of time, the Spirit of God had been given to the church and to each individual making up the church. When a person was baptized, he or she received the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), and the Spirit gave the person a spiritual “gift.” Some of the baptized were given the gift of teaching, others of prophecy, others of healing, others of speaking in angelic tongues, others of interpreting those tongues. All of these gifts were meant to help the Christian community function together as a unit (1 Cor. 12–14). None of the gifts was paltry or insignificant. They all mattered. Everyone in the church was equally endowed with a gift, so that in the church all were equals. Slaves were on the same level as masters, women were equal with men. That’s why Paul could say, “In Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). There was equality.

When problems arose in one of Paul’s churches—for example, the church of Corinth, for which we have the best documentation—he wrote to deal with them. It is interesting to read his correspondence with the Corinthians. The church was in a mess. There were divisions and episodes of infighting, some members were taking others to civil court, the worship services were chaos, and there were harsh disagreements over major ethical issues, such as whether it was right to eat meat that had been sacrificed to pagan idols. Some people denied that there was to be a future resurrection, and there was gross immorality—some men were visiting prostitutes and bragging about it in church, and one fellow was sleeping with his stepmother.

To address these severe problems, Paul appeals to the church as a whole and to the individuals in it. He urges them to use their spiritual gifts for the mutual good. He appeals to them to act as a unit. He exhorts them to begin behaving in an ethical fashion. He chastises them for not accepting the proper teaching, for example, about the future resurrection.

The one thing Paul does not do is write to the leaders of the church in Corinth and tell them to get their parishioners in order. Why is that? Because there were no leaders of the church in Corinth. There were no bishops or deacons. There were no pastors. There was a group of individuals, each of whom had a gift of the Spirit, in this brief time before the end came.

Contrast that with what you have in the Pastorals. Here you do not have individuals endowed by the Spirit working together to form the community. Here you have the pastors Timothy and Titus. You have the church leaders: bishops and deacons. You have hierarchy, structure, organization. That is to say, you have a different historical situation than you had in the days of Paul.

If you expect Jesus to come back soon—say, sometime this month—there is no real need for a hierarchical system of organization and leadership. You simply need to get along for the short term. But if Jesus does not return, and you need to settle in for the long haul, things will be different. You have to get organized. You have to have leadership. You have to have someone run the show. You have to have teachers who can root out the false teaching in your midst. You have to specify how people should relate to one another socially: masters to slaves, husbands to wives, parents to children. In a hierarchical system there is no equality; there is leadership. That’s what you find in the pastoral letters—churches settling in for the long haul. But that’s not what you find in the historical Paul. For the historical Paul, there was not going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon.

As I said at the outset of this discussion, some scholars have been willing to concede that 1 Timothy and Titus, which is closely tied to 1 Timothy, are pseudepigraphal, but that 2 Timothy may stem from Paul. I’ve tried to show that this view can’t work, because whoever wrote 1 Timothy also wrote 2 Timothy. If the one is forged, so too is the other. That doesn’t mean the two letters are addressing the same concerns or were written for the same purpose; it just means the same author wrote them. But one point sometimes raised is that there is so much personal information in 2 Timothy, it is hard to see how it could be forged. Why, for example, would a forger tell his alleged reader (who was not actually his reader!) to be sure to bring his cloak to him when he comes and also the books he left behind (2 Tim. 4:13)?

This objection has been convincingly answered by one of the great scholars of ancient forgery, Norbert Brox, who gives compelling evidence that this kind of “verisimilitude” (as I called it in Chapter 1) is typical for forgeries. Making the letter sound “homey” removes the suspicion that it’s forged. The personal notices in 2 Timothy (there are fewer in Titus and fewer still in 1 Timothy) serve, then, to convince readers that this really is written by Paul, even though it is not.¹⁵ But why does an author forge letters like this?

Why Were the Pastoral Letters Forged?

The most obvious answer is that the author is someone facing new problems in a generation after Paul, problems that Paul himself never addressed, and he wants to deal with them in the name of an authority who will be listened to. And who in Paul’s churches has greater authority than Paul himself? So the author dealt with the problem of false teachings, for example, of those propounding “myths and genealogies” in 1 Timothy and of other false teachers who claimed that the resurrection “had already happened” in 2 Timothy. He also dealt with problems involving church leadership and with problems over with the roles of women in the church. He did all this by pretending to be Paul.

Some scholars have thought that something even more precise may have occasioned these forgeries. In a very interesting and influential study, the American scholar Dennis MacDonald argues that the pastoral letters were written to oppose the views that were in circulation in the stories connected with Thecla.¹⁶ It is true that the Acts of Paul, where the Thecla stories are now found, were probably written later than the Pastorals by as much as seventy to eighty years. But the stories recorded in the Acts of Paul had been circulating for a very long time before the presbyter in Asia Minor fabricated his account. And in remarkable ways, the views found in the Thecla stories contrast with the views advocated in the Pastorals. Could one of them have been written to authorize a contrary view under the authority of Paul?

In the Acts of Paul, marriage is disparaged. In the Pastorals marriage is encouraged; church leaders in fact are required to be married. In the Acts of Paul sexual activity is condemned; only by remaining chaste can you enter the kingdom of heaven. In the Pastorals sexual activity is urged; women will be saved only by having babies. In the Acts of Paul women—specifically Thecla—are allowed to teach and exercise authority. In the Pastorals women are to be silent and submissive; they are not allowed to teach or exercise authority. Since the pastoral letters are directly opposing the views found in the stories incorporated into the Acts of Paul, MacDonald argues that the letters were forged by someone who had heard the stories about Thecla and wanted to set the record straight from Paul’s “true” point of view.

This is a very appealing argument, and it may be right. But for many scholars the biggest problem with it has to do with the dates of the materials. The Acts of Paul was probably written by the presbyter of Asia Minor some decades after the Pastorals were produced. The stories the presbyter used may have been much older, but without corroborating evidence, it is hard to say. So a different historical reconstruction may be more plausible.

It goes like this. Paul’s churches were split in lots of ways, as we have seen. One of the splits involved issues of sex, sexuality, and gender. Some Pauline Christians thought that women should be treated as equals and given equal status and authority with men, since Paul did say that “in Christ there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). Other Pauline Christians thought that women were equal with men only “in Christ,” by which they meant “in theory,” not in social reality. These Christians were keen to tone down Paul’s own emphasis on women, and one of them decided to write a set of letters, the Pastorals, that authorized his view in Paul’s name. He had other issues he wanted to address as well: the nature of the leadership in the church, the need to suppress false teaching, the relations of slaves and masters, parents and children, and so on. He packaged all of these sundry issues in a set of letters and wrote them in the name of Paul, forging them to provide them with the authoritative voice they needed.

But not everyone was convinced and not everyone accepted these letters as coming from Paul. Remember that Marcion, for example, did not have them (it is hard to know if he was aware of them). Moreover, the other side of the split over the role of women was not destroyed by the appearance of the pastoral letters. It lived on, seeing Paul as an opponent of marriage and of sex, but as a proponent of women. This other side told stories about Paul that supported their views, and these stories eventually came to center on one of Paul’s key converts, Thecla. At one time in the second century both sets of documents were in wide circulation, the fabricated stories about Paul and Thecla and the forged letters of Paul that eventually came to be included in the New Testament.

2 THESSALONIANS

When I was a conservative evangelical Christian in my late teens and early twenties, there were few things I was more certain of, religiously, than the fact that Jesus was soon to return from heaven to take me and my fellow believers out of the world, at the “rapture” before the final tribulation came. We read all sorts of books that supported our view. Few people today realize that the bestselling book in English in the 1970s, apart from the Bible, was The Late, Great Planet Earth, written by the fundamentalist Christian Hal Lindsey. Based on a careful (or careless, depending on your perspective) study of the book of Revelation and other biblical books of prophecy, Lindsey wrote with assurance about what was about to transpire in the Middle East as the superpowers of the Soviet Union, China, the European Union, and finally the United States converged in a massive confrontation leading to an all-out nuclear holocaust, right before Jesus returned. All of this, we were told, had to happen before the end of the 1980s, as Scripture itself taught.

It obviously never happened. And now there is no Soviet Union. But that hasn’t stopped people from writing about how the end will come very soon now, in our own day, at any time. On the recent book-selling front, dwarfing the sales of the Harry Potter books has been the multivolume Left Behind series, about those who will not be taken in the imminent rapture. These books were coauthored by Jerry Jenkins and Timothy LaHaye, the latter of whom previously enjoyed a career writing books with his wife, Beverly, about sex for Christians.

What most of the millions of people who believe that Jesus is coming back soon, in our lifetime, don’t realize is that there have always been Christians who thought this about their own lifetimes. This was a prominent view among conservative Christians in the early twentieth century, in the late nineteenth century, in the eighteenth century, in the twelfth century, in the second century, in the first century—in fact, in just about every century. The one thing that all those who have ever thought this have had in common is that every one of them has been demonstrably and irrefutably wrong.

Paul himself thought the end was coming in his lifetime. Nowhere is this more clear than in one of the letters we are sure he wrote, 1 Thessalonians. Paul wrote the Christians in Thessalonica, because some of them had become disturbed over the death of a number of their fellow believers. When he converted these people, Paul had taught them that the end of the age was imminent, that they were soon to enter the kingdom when Jesus returned. But members of the congregation had died before it happened. Had they lost out on their heavenly reward? Paul writes to assure the survivors that, no, even those who have died will be brought into the kingdom. In fact, when Jesus returns in glory on the clouds of heaven, “the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). Read the verse carefully: Paul expects to be one of the ones who will still be alive when it happens.

He goes on to say that it will be a sudden, unexpected event. That day will come “like a thief in the night,” and when people think that all is well, “sudden destruction will come upon them” (5:2–3). The Thessalonians should be alert and prepared, because, as with the labor pains of a pregnant woman, it is possible to know that it will come very soon, but you can’t predict the exact moment.

It is precisely this emphasis on the suddenness of the reappearance of Jesus, which will catch people by surprise, that makes the second letter that Paul allegedly wrote to the Thessalonians so interesting. This too is a book written about the second coming of Jesus, but now a completely different problem is being addressed. The readers have been “led astray” by a letter that has apparently been forged in Paul’s name (2:2) saying that “the day of the Lord is at hand.” The author of 2 Thessalonians, claiming to be Paul, argues that the end is not, in fact, coming right away. Certain things have to happen first. There will be some kind of political or religious uprising and rebellion, and an Antichrist-like figure will appear who will take his seat in the Temple of Jerusalem and declare himself to be God. Only then will the “Lord Jesus” come to “destroy him with the breath of his mouth” (2:3–8).

In other words, the Thessalonians can rest assured they are not yet at the final moment of history when Jesus reappears. They will know when it is almost here by the events that transpire in fulfillment of Scripture. But can this be by the same author who wrote the other letter, 1 Thessalonians? Compare the scenario of Jesus’s appearance in 2 Thessalonians, according to which it will be a while yet and preceded by recognizable events, with that of 1 Thessalonians, when the end will come like a “thief in the night,” who appears when people least expect it. There seems to be a fundamental disparity between the teachings of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, which is why so many scholars think that 2 Thessalonians is not by Paul.¹⁷

It is particularly interesting that the author of 2 Thessalonians indicates that he taught his converts all these things already, when he was with them (2:5). If that’s the case, then how can one explain 1 Thessalonians? The problem there is that people think the end is supposed to come any day now, based on what Paul told them. But according to 2 Thessalonians Paul never taught any such thing. He taught that a whole sequence of events had to transpire before the end came. Moreover, if that is what he taught them, as 2 Thessalonians insists, then it is passing strange that he never reminds them of this teaching in 1 Thessalonians, where they obviously think that they were taught something else.

Paul probably did not write 2 Thessalonians. That makes one feature of the letter particularly intriguing. At the end of the letter the author insists that he is Paul and gives a kind of proof: “I Paul write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write” (3:17). This means that “Paul” had been dictating his letter to a scribe who had written it all down, until the end, when Paul signed off with his own hand. Readers of the letter could see the change of handwriting and recognize Paul’s, authenticating this letter as really his, as opposed to the forged one mentioned in 2:2. What is peculiar is that the author claims that this is his invariant practice. But it is not how most of the undisputed letters of Paul end, including 1 Thessalonians. The words are hard to account for as Paul’s, but they make sense if a forger is trying to convince his readers that he really was Paul. But perhaps the queen doth protest too much.

Some scholars have taken the question of forgery a bit farther and suggested that when the author, claiming to be Paul, tries to soothe his readers not to be led astray by a forged letter (“as if by us,”), which maintains, in Paul’s name, that the end is right around the corner, the forger is actually referring to 1 Thessalonians! That is, someone living later wanted to disabuse readers of the message Paul himself had taught about the imminent end, since it did not, after all, come, and Paul and everyone else had died in the meantime. So an author provided some reassurance by forging a letter claiming that the authentic letter was a forgery. Whether or not that is right, what seems relatively certain is that someone after the time of Paul decided that he had to intervene in a situation where people were eagerly anticipating the end, so eagerly, he suggests, that they were neglecting the duties of daily life (3:6–12); he did so by penning a letter in Paul’s name, knowing full well that he was someone else living later. Second Thessalonians, then, appears to be another instance of a Pauline forgery.

EPHESIANS

When I was teaching at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, I regularly offered a course on the life and teachings of Paul. One of the textbooks for the course was a book on Paul by the conservative British scholar F. F. Bruce.¹⁸ I used the book because I disagreed with just about everything in it, and I thought it would be a good idea for my students to see a different side of the story from the one I told in class. One of the things F. F. Bruce thought about the writings of Paul was that Ephesians was the most Pauline of all the Pauline letters. Not only did he think Paul wrote it; he thought it encapsulated better than any other letter the heart and soul of Paul’s theology.

That’s what I once thought too, years earlier, when I was just starting out in my studies. Then I took a course on the New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary with Professor J. Christiaan Beker. Beker was a formidable scholar of Paul. In the late 1970s he wrote a massive and influential study of Paul’s theology, one of the truly great studies ever to be published on the matter.¹⁹ Beker was thoroughly convinced that Paul had not written Ephesians, that in fact Ephesians represents a serious alteration of Paul’s thought.²⁰

At the time, when I took the course, I wasn’t so sure. But the more I studied the matter, carefully comparing what Ephesians says with what Paul himself says in his undisputed letters, I became increasingly convinced. By the time I was teaching at Rutgers, I was sure Paul had not written the letter. Today the majority of biblical scholars agree. Ephesians may sound like Paul, but when you start digging a bit deeper, large differences and discrepancies appear.

Ephesians is written to Gentile Christians (3:1) to remind them that even though they were once alienated from both God and his people, the Jews, they have now been reconciled; they have been made right with God and the boundary that divided Jew from Gentile—the Jewish law—has been torn down by the death of Christ. Jews and Gentiles can now live in harmony with one another, in Christ, and in harmony with God. After laying out this theological set of ideas in the first three chapters (especially chapter 2), the author turns to ethical issues and discusses ways that followers of Jesus must live in order to manifest the unity they have in Christ.

The reasons for thinking Paul did not write this letter are numerous and compelling. For one thing, the writing style is not Paul’s. Paul usually writes in short, pointed sentences; the sentences in Ephesians are long and complex. In Greek, the opening statement of thanksgiving (1:3–14)—all twelve verses—is one sentence. There’s nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek; it just isn’t the way Paul wrote. It’s like Mark Twain and William Faulkner; they both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other. Some scholars have pointed out that in the hundred or so sentences in Ephesians, 9 of them are over 50 words in length. Compare this with Paul’s own letters. Philippians, for example, has 102 sentences, only 1 of which is over 50 words; Galatians has 181 sentences, again with only 1 over 50 words. The book also has an inordinate number of words that don’t otherwise occur in Paul’s writings, 116 altogether, well higher than average (50 percent more than Philippians, for example, which is about the same length).²¹

But the main reason for thinking that Paul didn’t write Ephesians is that what the author says in places does not jibe with what Paul himself says in his own letters. Ephesians 2:1–10, for example, certainly looks like Paul’s writing, but just on the surface. Here, as in Paul’s authentic letters, we learn that believers were separated from God because of sin, but have been made right with God exclusively through his grace, not as the result of “works.” But here, oddly, Paul includes himself as someone who, before coming to Christ, was carried away by the “passions of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and senses.” This doesn’t sound like the Paul of the undisputed letters, who says that he had been “blameless” with respect to the “righteousness of the law” (Phil. 3:4). In addition, even though he is talking about the relationship of Jew and Gentile in this letter, the author does not speak about salvation apart from the “works of the law,” as Paul does. He speaks, instead, of salvation apart from doing “good deeds.” That simply was not the issue Paul addressed.

Moreover, this author indicates that believers have already been “saved” by the grace of God. As it turns out, the verb “saved” in Paul’s authentic letters is always used to refer to the future. Salvation is not something people already have; it’s what they will have when Jesus returns on the clouds of heaven and delivers his followers from the wrath of God.

Relatedly, and most significantly, Paul was emphatic in his own writings that Christians who had been baptized had “died” to the powers of the world that were aligned with the enemies of God. They had “died with Christ.” But they had not yet been “raised” with Christ. That would happen at the end of time, when Jesus returned and all people, living and dead, would be raised up to face judgment. That’s why in Romans 6:1–4 Paul is emphatic: those who are baptized “have died” with Christ, and they “will be raised” with him, at Jesus’s second coming.

Paul was extremely insistent on this point, that the resurrection of believers was a future, physical event, not something that had already happened. One of the reasons he wrote 1 Corinthians was precisely because some of the Christians in that community took an opposing point of view and maintained that they were already enjoying a resurrected existence with Christ now, that they already were enjoying the benefits of salvation. Paul devotes 1 Corinthians 15 to showing that, no, the resurrection is not something that has happened yet. It is a future physical event yet to occur. Christians have not yet been raised with Christ.

But contrast this statement with what Ephesians says: “Even when we were dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ…and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places” (2:5–6). Here believers have experienced a spiritual resurrection and are enjoying a heavenly existence in the here and now. This is precisely the view that Paul argued against in his letters to the Corinthians!

In point after point, when you look carefully at Ephesians, it stands at odds with Paul’s own work. This book was apparently written by a later Christian in one of Paul’s churches who wanted to deal with a big issue of his own day: the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the church. He did so by claiming to be Paul, knowing full well that he wasn’t Paul. He accomplished his goal, that is, by producing a forgery.

COLOSSIANS

Much the same can be said about the book of Colossians. On the surface it looks like Paul’s work, but not when you dig deeply into it. Colossians has a lot of words and phrases that are found in Ephesians as well, so much so that a number of scholars think that whoever forged Ephesians used Colossians as one of his sources for how Paul wrote. Unfortunately, he used a book that Paul almost certainly did not write.²²

Colossians has a different agenda and purpose from Ephesians. This author is especially concerned with a group of false teachers who are conveying some kind of “philosophy.” Unfortunately the author does not detail what this philosophy entailed and leaves only hints. Evidently the false teachers urged their listeners to worship angels and to follow Jewish laws about what to eat and what special days to keep as religious festivals. One reason the author does not explain in detail what these false teachers taught may be that the people reading the letter knew full well whom he had in mind and what they were saying.

The author opposes them by emphasizing that Christ alone, not angelic beings, is a divinity worthy of worship and that his death put an end to the need to keep the law. In fact, for him, believers in Christ were already above all human rules and regulations, because they were already raised with Christ in the heavenly places, experiencing some kind of mystical unity with Christ in the here and now. This does not mean, however, that Christians could live just any way they please. They were still responsible for living moral lives. So the final two chapters outline some of the ethical requirements of the new life in Christ.

The reasons for thinking the book was not actually written by Paul are much the same as for Ephesians. Among other things, the writing style and the contents of the book differ significantly from those in the undisputed letters of Paul. Far and away the most compelling study of the writing style of Colossians was done by the German scholar Walter Bujard nearly forty years ago now.²³ Bujard analyzed all sorts of stylistic features of the letter: the kind and frequency of conjunctions, infinitives, participles, relative clauses, strings of genitives, and scores of other things. He was particularly interested in comparing Colossians to Paul’s letters that were similar in length: Galatians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. The differences between this letter and Paul’s writings are striking and compelling. Just to give you a taste:

The lists go on for many pages, looking at all sorts of information, with innumerable considerations all pointing in the same direction: this is someone with a different writing style from Paul’s.

And here again, the content of what the author says stands at odds with Paul’s own thought, but is in line with Ephesians. Here too, for example, the author indicates that Christians have already been “raised with Christ” when they were baptized, despite Paul’s insistence that the believers’ resurrection was future, not past (see Col. 2:12–13).

What we have here, then, is another instance in which a later follower of Paul was concerned to address a situation in his own day and did so by assuming the mantle and taking the name of Paul, forging a letter in his name.

Conclusion

WE HAVE SEEN THAT there were a number of Pauline forgeries floating around in the early church, letters claiming to be written by Paul, but in fact written by someone else. Some of these letters are acknowledged as forgeries by everyone on the planet, such as the Letters of Paul and Seneca, for example. Others are a matter of serious scholarly discussion. But the majority of scholars acknowledge that, whereas there are seven letters in the New Testament that Paul certainly wrote, six others are probably (or for some scholars, certainly) not by Paul, for some of the reasons I have laid out here. There are plenty more reasons, but the arguments can get a bit dull after a while.

Some scholars, though, have been reluctant to call these deutero-Pauline letters forgeries. Some have argued that they differ from Paul’s own letters, because they were given by Paul to a secretary to write, who used a different writing style from Paul’s. Others have suggested that since Paul in some of his letters mentions coauthors, possibly these other authors were responsible for writing the letters, accounting for their differences. And yet others have claimed that it was common in philosophical schools for disciples of a teacher to write treatises and sign them in the name of their teacher, as an act of humility, since all the ideas originated with the teacher himself.

These are all interesting proposals. But I think they are all wrong. I try to show why in the next chapter.