Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (42 page)

How are we to imagine such impressive and extensive verbal parallels? Is it likely that Paul remembered to the very word what he said at times in his earlier letter, creating verbatim agreements (found in none of his other writings from the same time) extending sometimes to sequences of nine, ten, or more words? Even if he wrote the second letter just, say, six weeks later, would he remember such phrases, which involve not only important ideas but also off-the-cuff comments and expressions? It is simple to see how a copyist may have taken over words and phrases here and there to make the letter sound so much like the first one. But why would Paul have done so, assuming, say, that he kept a copy on hand? Why would he delve into the heart of the first letter to pull out a word, a phrase, a sentence that he had earlier used to be sure to use it again? Is this how Paul ever writes?

We do have a way of knowing. There are other letters that deal with topics similar to one another: Galatians and Romans, for example. But such extensive “borrowings” are not found in them.
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And we have yet other letters written—as allegedly were the Thessalonian epistles—to the same community within a relatively short period of time (1 and 2 Corinthians). Once again, there is nothing like this phenomenon to be found.

The agreements do not occur simply on the level of words, phrases, and sentences. The structure and layout of the two letters are strikingly parallel. Both, unlike any other Pauline letter, have two thanksgivings (instead of one), one at the outset and one in the body of the letter (1 Thess. 1:2–10; 2:13; 2 Thess. 1:3–12; 2:13).
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They both contain an eschatological section, an admonition to be strong and to abide in the apostolic teaching, and a warning against idleness. Indeed, as Bailey has stressed, there is not a single major theme in 2 Thessalonians that is not also found in 1 Thessalonians.
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This is not how Paul wrote any of his other letters, by replicating the structure (to this degree) and taking over the vocabulary and even sentences of an earlier letter he wrote. But it is no stretch to imagine that this is how a forger would operate, to provide a Pauline feel to the letter. The evidence is clinched when seen in relation to the style and theology of the second letter, which differ from those of the first.

It is altogether simple for a forger to take over the words and phrases of an author’s other writing. It is a different matter to be able to imitate the author’s style when engaging in free composition. Jewett sensibly objected to the stylistic arguments mounted by Trilling, because—as often happens in discussions of style in the Deutero-Paulines—Trilling offered no bases of comparison with the established
Pauline writings.
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It is one thing to say that an author uses excessively long, complex sentences; it is another thing to show that this is somehow different from how Paul himself was known to write.

Two points should be kept in view at the outset of any discussion of Pauline style. The first is that the question is never whether Paul was capable of writing in one style or another. He was an educated author, and like all educated authors he could vary his style, to some degree at least, as he saw fit. But everyone does in fact typically write in a certain style, often without putting a great deal of thought into questions such as how to effect subordination, whether to prefer subordination to coordination, how to choose which conjunctions to prefer over others, how to construct participial clauses, how to employ the infinitive, and so on. Most authors, unless they are overwhelmingly conscious of being involved in a rhetorical exercise (for example, trained rhetoricians working on an oratorical production), simply write the way they write. No one can plausibly claim that Paul could not have written in the style of, say, Luke or the author of Hebrews, if he had really wanted to. At the same time, no one can plausibly claim that Paul did write that way.

The second point will require more extended discussion, and so I leave it to a short Interlude to come at the conclusion of the next chapter. It is often claimed by scholars of the New Testament that differences of writing style among, say, the Pauline or Petrine letters can be accounted for by the use of secretaries. This secretary hypothesis has become a panacea for all things authorially dubious, as even a quick survey of the commentaries makes abundantly clear. It nonetheless rests on an extremely thin, virtually nonexistent, evidentiary basis. All this I will try to show anon; I mention it here simply to forestall the anticipated objection that stylistic differences within the Pauline corpus derive from secretarial input.
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The most directed study of the style of 2 Thessalonians was undertaken by Darryl Schmidt, who showed on the basis of several unrelated but significant grounds that the letter differs, stylistically, from the undisputed Pauline letters.
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Schmidt’s essay does not engage in bland generalities about long sentences and strange style, but provides a detailed demonstration that 2 Thessalonians (and Colossians and Ephesians) are not written in Paul’s typical style. Among his criteria, three are especially striking. First, he considers sentences as measured by the numbers of embedded clauses and levels of embedding. 2 Thess. 1:3–12 is often pointed to as a long and complex sentence. It is true, as Schmidt points out, that there are other sentences in the undisputed letters that are nearly as long (2 Cor. 6:3–10, 11:24–31). But these letters do not match the complexity of the sentences in 2 Thessalonians. Specifically, Schmidt takes the longest sentence in the opening thanksgiving section of each of the Pauline letters and measures
how many embedded clauses there are and how many layers of embeddedness. The results are quite telling: in Romans there are five embedded clauses at four layers of embeddedness; 1 Corinthians: six clauses at four layers; 2 Corinthians: five clauses at three levels; Philippians: six clauses at one level; 1 Thessalonians: ten clauses at five levels. Contrast these figures with the Deutero-Paulines: Colossians: twelve clauses at eight levels; Ephesians: eighteen clauses at thirteen levels; and most striking, 2 Thessalonians: a whopping twenty-two clauses at fifteen levels of embeddedness. The point, again, is not that this is an impossibly more complex style (it is not nearly as complex as that found in numerous other authors); the point is that it is an uncharacteristically Pauline style.

Schmidt then considers a different stylistic feature, the patterns of genitive constructions in nonphrase strings, of which there are three kinds: (1) article + noun + article + noun (genitive); (2) a genitive pronoun added to a string; (c) anarthrous nouns in the same kind of string. When calculated for every 1,000 words in the text, one finds the following frequencies of these kinds of strings (Appendix 2): Romans 12.8 strings per thousand words; 1 Corinthians 8.8 strings; 2 Corinthians 13.1 strings; Galatians 15.2 strings; Philippians 7.4 strings; 1 Thessalonians 10.8 strings; Philemon 11.9 strings. Again, the contrast with the Deutero-Paulines, and especially 2 Thessalonians is stark: Colossians 29.7 strings; Ephesians 31.7 strings; and 2 Thessalonians 26.7 strings.

Third, Schmidt considers the frequency with which a writing uses coordinating and subordinating constructions. Leaving out the ubiquitous καí, he finds the relative frequency of coordination versus subordination (per hundred words) to work out as follows: Romans 68:34; 1 Corinthians 77:47; 2 Corinthians 59:42; Galatians 65:44; 1 Thessalonians 49:38; Philippians 53:36; Philemon 50:38. Once again there is a contrast with the Deutero-Paulines, where subordination is far more relatively common: Colossians 18:25; Ephesians 27:26; 2 Thessalonians 41:37.

The ultimate payoff of these three measurements is that the general sense that scholars have had for many decades that 2 Thessalonians (and the other two Deutero-Paulines) contains a more complex style than the undisputed letters—including the author’s model, 1 Thessalonians—is in fact borne out. It is indeed a more complex style. In isolation this kind of stylistic demonstration can carry little weight. Authors can and do vary their style, and statistical models are constantly challenged on grounds related both to the statistics and the models. But when taken in tandem with the earlier consideration, that the author of 2 Thessalonians has followed the structure and borrowed the words, phrases, and even sentences of 1 Thessalonians, the fact that the nonborrowed materials appear in a non-Pauline style appears far more formidable. Remaining doubts can be removed by the most complex of the three main arguments against Pauline authorship, the theology of the letter.

As recognized already by J. E. Chr. Schmidt more than two centuries ago, the theological problem of 2 Thessalonians involves the divergent eschatological outlook
of 2:1–12. There are two issues involved: Is the author addressing a problem of a realized or an imminent eschatology? And does his resolution of the problem contradict the views of 1 Thess. 4:13–5:11?

The first issue hinges to a great extent on the exegesis of 2 Thess. 2:2, and especially the key term
. The readers are urged, with respect to the “parousia” of Christ and “our gathering together with him,” not to be “quickly shaken or disturbed”—whether “by spirit, by a word, or by a letter as if from us” to the effect that
. In this context, does the perfect of
mean that the day of the Lord “has already come and is now present,” an eschatology analogous to what Paul disparages in 1 Corinthians, or that “it is virtually here and is soon to be realized,” comparable, say, to the proclamation of Jesus in Mark 1:15, “the Kingdom of God is at hand”
?
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The use of the term
in other Christian literature of the period is of only limited help. Twice in the writings of Paul and three times in the letter of Barnabas the word is clearly used to refer to “things present” as opposed to things “yet to come” (
Rom. 8:38; 1 Cor. 3:22; Barn. 1.7, 5.3, 17.2). On two other occasions it is used in this sense without the explicit contrast, in Barn. 4.1 and Heb. 9:9. At other times the usage—whether present reality or imminent occurrence—is ambiguous, as in Gal. 1:4 (“to deliver us from the present/from the impending evil age”). Somewhat less ambivalent is 1 Cor. 7:26, which like 2 Thess. 2:2 uses the perfect tense, but probably to imply a future event; it is because of the “impending distress” (probably) that one should not change one’s marital status. In 2 Tim. 3:1 the term is used to denote something yet to come, but there it is an unambiguous future tense.