Testing Pauline Pseudonymity: 3 Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles Compared

“Testing Pauline Pseudonymity: 3 Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles Compared” (pdf) Proceedings: Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Biblical Societies (2000), 63-68.

Jim Leonard writes an encomium for Gordon Fee, for whom we were both TA’s, entitled, “Gordon Fee and Textual Criticism“. In an earlier post on the same page, Jim writes that Fee’s view that the Pastoral Epistles are authentic has had a serious influence on later commentators. He writes,

The impact of Fee’s analysis was so great that my survey of the best six commentaries on PE earlier in this decade showed that four of the six accepted Pauline authorship. In my estimation, the best commentary on PE is by Robert Mounce in the Word Biblical Commentary, which is profoundly indebted to Fee in reconstructing the situation behind the PE.

I here provide my own contribution to the subject, in which I argue that in contrast to an uncontested inauthentic Pauline letter, the second-century 3 Corinthians, the PE most likely belong to the first century. This contrast most clearly comes out of an analysis of the orthodoxy and heresy of the respective documents.

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