Virtually everyone who goes to seminary will be required to take an introductory course on New Testament. And in that course, they’ll be introduced to a whole host of controversies surrounding the NT text and its interpretation. Did the apostles actually write all the letters attributed to them? How did the four gospels come about—and what order were they written in? Why do the gospels disagree sometimes on chronology? Can we trust the NT manuscript tradition, or has the text been corrupted over time?
These are important questions; and seminarians aren’t the only ones asking them. I’ve heard them come up in Sunday school classes and personal bible studies, as well. And, of course, not everyone asking these questions has the luxury of going to seminary to work through them. So in this series of posts, I wanted to offer a very quick primer on these NT interpretive issues. This will not be a robust, academic treatment; so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll want to look elsewhere. This is a cursory treatment, and I reference only a few sources in each post. It’s moreso intended for those in the church who are curious about these issues and wrestling through them for the first time. To that end, I hope it’s useful and encouraging. We’ll start with a big one: disputed authorship.
Part 1: Disputed Authorship
There is increasing speculation and debate in the world of New Testament scholarship about the authorship of various books and epistles in the New Testament. While a handful of books (the Gospels and Hebrews, for instance) do not explicitly claim any authorship, many other books do claim authorship—and that authorship is at times questioned by biblical scholars. Examples of books/epistles that fall within this latter category are Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 2 Peter, and the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus). Writings that are believed to wrongly attribute authorship are often referred to as “pseudepigraphic” or “pseudonymous.”
For many Christian NT scholars, the possibility that there is pseudonymous authorship in the NT does not threaten their faith or worldview. As Mark Allan Powell notes, these scholars don’t see pseudonymity as “forgery” (Powell, 240). They don’t believe a pseudonymous text is any less inspired or any less authoritative. They don’t believe a pseudonymous text is necessarily deceptive. Instead, they argue that authorship can be falsely attributed for several valid reasons.
For example, some scholars have argued that certain letters were started by one author (identified in the text), but finished posthumously by another author upon the death of the original author. Other scholars have argued that certain letters were written by the apprentice of an identified author—and that the apprentice wished to continue in the tradition of the identified author following his/her death. Still others have argued that certain letters were written in honor of an apostle, by someone influenced by (though not directly connected to) that apostle. There is some level of historical precedent for this kind of pseudonymity.
That said, other Christian scholars are more hesitant to accept pseudonymous authorship. Ben Witherington, for example, expresses concern over its acceptance. He’s not so sure that pseudonymity in letter-writing was as acceptable a literary convention in the Greco-Roman world as other scholars have made it out to be (Witherington, 241–48). In fact, Witherington makes a compelling case that in the ancient world, “there could even be criminal repercussions for [pseudonymity]” (ibid., 248). He also finds it difficult to disentangle the practice of pseudonymity from intentional deception. For instance, all of the personal references in 2 Timothy or Titus would be unnecessary and misleading if the authorship was not authentically Pauline. If the author of those letters was merely an apprentice or spiritual successor to Paul and not Paul himself, why would he/she bother roleplaying with Paul’s cloak in 2 Timothy 4:13? Such embellishments would be nothing less than deceptive attempts at substantiating the false authorship (ibid., 244).
It would be helpful at this point to pause and offer a brief explanation of why pseudonymous authorship is proposed in the first place. Powell helps to answer this question. Theology, language, style, and ecclesiology all play into the decision to attribute pseudonymous status to a text. Some argue, for instance, that Peter’s letters are written with a style and vocabulary that is suspiciously advanced for a Galilean fisherman (Powell, 243). In terms of theology, some people do not believe Paul’s letters are entirely consistent. For example, while Galatians and Romans make ‘justification by faith’ a central theological focus, the book of Colossians doesn’t use the language of ‘justification’ at all. In fact, Colossians in general has a more spiritualized focus and ‘realized eschatology’ than Paul’s other letters (e.g., while Paul talks about the resurrection as something future in Rom 6:5, he talks about it as something past in Col 2:12).
As we’ve seen, there’s some room for debate as to how we resolve these issues; but I empathize with Witherington’s concerns. There is hefty evidence that the Greco-Roman world had a concept of intellectual property and actively guarded against forgery. And as Witherington notes, the historical precedents for ‘acceptable’ pseudonymity most often cited by scholars (e.g., 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra) belong to entirely different genres of literature than ad hoc letters (Witherington, 245). Furthermore, I can find no evidence in the early church of Christians accepting pseudonymous texts as authoritative; and I can find a lot of evidence that they were against the practice of pseudonymity. Some scholars suggest that opposition to pseudonymity began only in the second century, as the practice had become severely abused by that point. But we have no first-century evidence of Christian communities explicitly accepting the practice of pseudonymous letter-writing, either. Nevertheless, if Witherington is correct and Christians should steer away from accepting pseudonymity, what are we to do about all of the seeming inconsistencies in NT letters?
E. Randolph Richards offers several explanations for why there might be diversity in the nature of a single author’s corpus. Writers in the first century wrote in a much different way than we usually write today—and this difference in approach can accommodate for much of the diversity. First and foremost, many authors had scribes who wrote on their behalf. And in the event that scribes were used, the words that the scribes used were not always exactly dictated by the authors. Scribes were often given creative license in the way they expressed the ideas of an author. In many cases, they would have detailed notes from the author and would work to formulate those notes into cohesive writings (Richards 358–59).
Second, other written works were often quoted and/or referenced in the ancient world without proper citation. It’s possible that uncharacteristic passages in certain letters are importing unknown quotations and/or drawing from unknown references. Third, collaboration in the writing process was exceedingly common in the ancient world—so it’s possible that different letters incorporated different collaborators, which resulted in differences in the tenor of each letter (ibid., 356–57). Fourth, in the case of New Testament texts specifically, the cost of writing materials was high—and that could have affected the way letters were written. Letters often needed to be redacted in order to fit onto certain scrolls (ibid., 360-362). A fifth and final point, raised by Powell, is that one’s tone and theology could easily change depending on his/her particular task and/or audience (Powell, 243).
For all these reasons and more, Witherington submits that he’s concerned with whether or not the “material comes from the mind of a particular person”—not with whether the material “fully reflects his grammar and syntax and vocabulary” (Witherington, 240).
While I certainly don’t have the time or space in this post to make a detailed case for the authentic authorship of each of the NT letters, I hope you can begin to see that there are good and thoughtful reasons to question confident assertions of pseudonymity (except perhaps in the case of 2 Peter…but I’ll save that can of worms for another time 😉). That said, however, we have also seen that those who dispute authorship are not necessarily doing so in bad faith. There are well-meaning Christians with a high view of Scripture who affirm pseudonymous authorship in the New Testament. Regardless of what one accepts about the pseudonymity of a particular NT letter, though, the church has recognized and witnessed to the divine character and profound transformative power of the New Testament canon for nearly two millennia. Perhaps the best way to become convinced of the divine provenance of these texts is to yield ourselves to them and experience their life-giving power.
Resources:
Powell, Mark Allan. Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018.
Richards, E. Randolph. “Reading, Writing, and Manuscripts.” Essay. Pages 345–66 in The World of the New Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts. Edited by Joel B. Green and Lee Martin McDonald. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013.
Witherington, Ben. Invitation to the New Testament: First Things. Oxford etc.: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Jared Dale Greer 
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