Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (48 page)

Colossians then may be considered a counterforgery in the weaker sense, in that it attacks a distinct—if hard to localize and identify—set of opponents representing an aberrant view. Here a later forger puts a non-Pauline (or anti-Pauline) eschatological view on Paul’s pen in order to oppose “false teachers” who do not appreciate the full extent of the salvation Christ has brought. The letter did not need, of course, actually to have been sent to Colossae, whether or not the town still existed at the time.
⁵⁴
As Standhartinger indicates, the specific address to Colossians in fact seems at odds with the universal tendency of the letter (1:6, 1:23, 1:28, 2:1, 4:16). As a result, she may be right that the letter was (pseudonymously) directed there for symbolic value. Colossae was a remote, little known place; this embrace of the fullness of the divinity in bodily form reaches into the very remote corners of the empire.
⁵⁵

I will deal with the letter to the Ephesians in somewhat less detail because it is less ostensibly polemical, in any traditional sense: it is not obviously directed against a group of enemies. But the letter does take non-Pauline eschatology even farther than Colossians, and at least one recent interpreter has seen it as an attempt to correct an important aspect of its predecessor. To that extent it can be seen, at least subtly, as polemical.

That the writing style of Ephesians stands out within the traditional Pauline corpus was seen already by Erasmus: “Certainly the style is so different from several of Paul’s letters, that it might seem to be by another, were it not for the fact that the spirit and nature of the Pauline mind altogether vindicate it” (Certe stilus tantum dissonat a ceteris Pauli epistolis, ut alterius videri possit, nisi pectus atque indoles Paulinae mentis hanc prorsus illi vindicarent).
⁵⁶
Evanson in 1792, and then Usteri in 1824, both maintained that its impersonal character and close proximity to Colossians made it suspect. But W. M. L. de Wette was the first to formulate the full
argument against its genuineness in his
Einleitung
of 1826, an argument repeated in his commentary of 1843. In de Wette’s view, the letter contains much that is “foreign to the apostle … or not worthy of him in its mode of writing and thought.”
⁵⁷

A key contribution to the modern study was C. L. Mitton’s 1951 analysis,
⁵⁸
which laid out, in considerable detail, a wealth of arguments based on linguistics, style, literary dependence, historical circumstances, and doctrine. His demonstration against authenticity was not at all compromised by his adoption of the well-known but now discredited Goodspeed-Knox theory that the letter was originally designed as a “cover letter” for the
Corpus Paulinum
. Among the letters discussed so far, Ephesians is the most widely acknowledged to be pseudepigraphic among critical scholars, including such recent commentators as Sellin.
⁵⁹

As so often happens, the arguments against authenticity are at times far from compelling. It is widely pointed out, for example, that there is a lack of a concrete Sitz im Leben for the letter; no clear characterization of the recipients, who appear to be known only by hearsay; and no obvious situation to which the letter is addressed. But this scarcely speaks against Pauline authorship: there is no reason to think that Paul was constrained to write only one kind of occasional letter throughout his career. Was Paul for some reason not allowed to write a circular letter if he so chose? So too, it is often pointed out that the author himself is portrayed in rather colorless terms. But here as well, one might suspect that if Paul were to write another kind of letter from the seven about which we have detailed information, he may well have stood in relationship to it in a different way.

There are, nonetheless, compelling reasons for thinking that Paul did not in fact write the letter. The first and most obvious involves its relationship to Colossians, on which it appears to be patterned. If Colossians was forged—as it almost certainly was—there can be no thought of Paul himself imitating it in another piece of correspondence. Scholars evaluate the proximity of the two letters in various ways. Mitton’s famous claim is that a third of the words in Colossians reappear in Ephesians. Lincoln gives more precise, though completely confirmatory, statistics: of 1,570 words in Colossians, 34 percent appear in Ephesians; of 2,411 words in Ephesians, 26.5 percent are in Colossians.
⁶⁰
Hüneburg is somewhat more circumspect, recognizing that a good deal depends on how one counts the words found in parallel passages; by his tally somewhere between 26.5 percent and 50 percent of the words of Ephesians can be found in Colossians.
⁶¹

These kinds of bare statistics are scarcely probative; what matters are the individual instances. The passage that leaves no doubt is Eph. 6:21–22, which repeats an entire twenty-nine words from Col. 4:7–8 (leaving out just two words). Obviously this kind of parallel is impossible without one author copying another. Lincoln points out that there are three other passages that have seven words in common; these alone show that there must be a literary relationship between the letters (Eph. 1:1–2 and Col. 1:1–2; Eph. 3:2 and Col. 1:25; Eph. 3:9 and Col. 1:26); in two other passages five consecutive words are found (Eph. 1:7 and Col. 1:14; Eph. 4:16 and Col. 2:19).
⁶²

As might be expected, various solutions to the obvious literary ties of the two writings have been proposed throughout the history of the discussion. Mayerhoff in 1838 maintained that Ephesians is authentic and that Colossians was a secondary reworking of it by a later writer. De Wette in 1843 took the opposite side: Colossians is authentic and Ephesians was an imitation. Holtzmann in 1872 declared that both books, in their surviving form, are inauthentic: Colossians was based on an authentic Pauline letter, which had been used as the basis for a later author to create Ephesians, which in turn was used to create what is now Colossians. The majority of scholars today—despite the protests of E. Best—side with the priority of Colossians.
⁶³
The most recent case has been made by Leppä: a number of the parallel passages in Ephesians appear to be elaborations of Colossians (Eph. 2:1–10 of Col. 2:12–13; Eph. 5:21–33 of Col. 3:18–19) and some passages of Ephesians appear to be conflations of disparate statements of Colossians (Eph. 1:7, cf. Col. 1:14, 20; Eph. 1:15–16, cf. Col. 1:4 and 1:9; Eph. 2:1–5, cf. Col. 2:13; 3:16; etc.).
⁶⁴

If this view is right, Ephesians was obviously forged, since Colossians, on which it was based, was forged. Confirmation comes in a range of arguments involving style, vocabulary, structure, and content. The stylistic considerations that led Schmidt to claim that 2 Thessalonians was non-Pauline speak with equal elegance for Ephesians—as well as for Colossians, in a case that is fully confirmed and ratified by Bujard’s earlier but more extensive analysis. Unfortunately, nothing of Bujardian proportions exists for Ephesians, although it is frequently observed that the style is not Pauline, with its love of long and awkward sentences (1:3–14; 1:15–23; 2:1–7 with anacolouthon; 3:8–12; 3:14–19; 4:11–16; etc.), its strings of participles (1:13; 2:12; 2:14–16), strings of infinitives (3:16–18; 4:22–24); and repetitions of prepositions (1:3ff.; 4:12–13). Again, the question is not whether Paul was capable of writing in this way, but simply of whether he did. With respect to the long and complex sentences, one frequently cited statistic is that of Morton and McLeman, who pointed out that nine out of a hundred
sentences in the book comprise more than fifty words.
⁶⁵
This stands in sharp contrast with passages of approximately equal length in Paul, for example, Romans 1–4, which has just three out of 581 sentences over fifty words; 1 Corinthians 1–4, which has one of 621 sentences; 2 Corinthians 1–3, with two of 334 sentences; Galatians, with one of 181 sentences; Philippians, with one of 102 sentences; 1 Thessalonians, with one of 81 sentences. Paul could obviously write long sentences. But it was not his characteristic style. One can only marvel at a supporter of authenticity like M. Barth, who suggests that “Paul himself is the man who could best afford to write in a non-Paulinistic way.”
⁶⁶
Whether here a secretary (or coauthor) hypothesis can best explain these stylistic data will be an issue addressed in an excursus in the next chapter.

Pointing in the same direction of style is the structure of the letter, which looks, at first glance, roughly Pauline, but is distinctive within the canonical corpus in containing both a blessing (1:3–14) and a thanksgiving (1:15–23). The word usage points in the same direction, in view of its occasional distinctiveness, although this is obviously not compelling in se. Still, as frequently noted, this author prefers the phrase “in the heavens” to Paul’s “in heaven” (1:3, 20; 2:6; 3:10; 6:12), refers to the “Devil” instead of Paul’s “Satan” (4:27, 6:11),
⁶⁷
and uses the non-Pauline phrase “good works” (2:10). The final point—possibly the others as well—indicates a larger problem than mere linguistic preference. This author has a perspective that in many places may sound like Paul but in fact stands at odds with him, a matter to which we will turn momentarily.

Before doing so, it is important to stress more generally the strongest argument against the Pauline authorship of the letter, its non-Pauline contents. As different as Colossians is from Paul himself, Ephesians is more so, often in the same ways. There continues to be some element of eschatological reserve here, although not as much as Colossians. Thus, for example, the Spirit is the “down payment of our inheritance until we acquire it” (1:14) and it is in “the coming ages” (2:7) that believers will receive “the immeasurable riches of his grace”; moreover, the wrath of God is still “coming” (5:6). Nonetheless, the real significance of the resurrection of the dead is that it is a spiritual event that has happened (in the past) to believers, who are already enjoying the benefits of a raised existence. Even more than Colossians, this realized eschatology stands in sharp tension with Paul’s carefully developed views in Romans 6, Philippians 3, and 1 Corinthians 15. Just as Christ himself has been “raised … from the dead and made to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above every authority, power, and dominion” (1:20–21), so too the believers have also already been “made alive” (1:4), indeed, “made alive
together with Christ …. and raised … up with him and made … to sit with him in the heavenly places” (2:5–6). The exalted character of Christ who now rules over all the evil forces of this world is shared by the believers who have been raised with him and so likewise rule in the heavenly places. Believers are not even said, as in Paul, to have “died” to sin and the powers of the world; for this author, they
once
were dead, before coming to life in Christ; but now they are no longer subject to the powers and forces of the world.
⁶⁸

This is not the only material difference between Paul and the letter to the Ephesians. Like its model, Colossians, Ephesians too speaks of redemption in the un-Pauline way of
(1:7; cf. Col. 1:14); it too conceptualizes Christ as the head of the body, not the body (1:22–23 and especially 4:15–16, which sounds very much like Colossians—see Col. 1:18 and 2:19); it too, presents a Haustafel that appears to stand at odds with Paul’s radical social ethic and endorsement of celibacy, and much more like the bourgeois ethic that the Christian church had begun to adopt once it recognized that it needed to “settle down” into life in the Roman world—a reconfirmation of the lack of eschatological urgency so characteristic of the authentic Paul.

Other statements of the letter are even more difficult to imagine as coming from the pen of Paul, including the claim—key to the teaching of the letter—that Christ had somehow “abolished the law of the commandments” by his death (2:15). Paul himself, with one of his characteristic emphatic declarations
insists that he does not believe the Law has been abolished; on the contrary, for him it is established in Christ (Rom. 3:31; cf., e.g., Gal. 6:2).