To Christians: How do we know the Pauline Epistles are genuine?

The Pauline Epistles in the New Testament are thought to be some of the earliest evidence of Christian thought, the oldest documents we have about the worship of Jesus Christ. However, how do we know that this is the case? There are some interesting insights to be had in Patricia Rosenmeyer's Ancient Epistolary Fictions. This book isn't actually about Paul's letters, but rather about the practice of letter-writing in the ancient Greek literary tradition. Now, the questions raised here don't mean that the Pauline letters aren't genuine. But they do force us to reevaluate how we determine that they are.

Letters were a popular composition both within novels and as collections of fictional or didactic correspondence. They were a popular form of entertainment and instruction, both under the real name of their authors and under pseudonyms. So the first thing that drops out of this is that "Well, they were letters, not novels or anything like that" doesn't actually help us determine that they are genuine.

There's also an interesting discussion of how writers were trained to compose letters. Chapter 8 discusses the genre at the time of the Roman imperial period of pseudonymous letters and letter collections written in the name of fictional, mythical or well-known historical persons such as Plato, Themistocles, or Euripides.

. . . the letters will give the impression of having been really written by that person by imitating the dialect and reflecting historical setting, but this same attention to detail will create opportunities for inadvertent anachronisms . . . The most obvious shared trait of all the pseudonymous collections is their supposed historicity.

Does not Philippians speak of a truly enlightened person as adopting a "view from above", a concept elsewhere not noted till the time of Marcus Aurelius well into the second century; and do not commentators struggle to demonstrate that Paul's gnostic phraseology is really "proto" gnostic since everyone knows gnosticism is a second century development?

By the Roman imperial period, the imaginative composition of letters to and from famous men had become a standard component of the rhetoric syllabus, . . .

So whoever wrote the NT letters, in their own name or another's, would quite likely have had training in writing pseudonymous letters. Authors took to maintain consistency of characterization, historical plausibility, the use of well known names, places and precise dates, all to make the final product “ring true”. They were trained to add minor personal details, such as requests for a cloak or mentions of the author's health, to increase the appearance of authenticity.

For example, look at the collection of Chion of Heraclea. The letters begin in media res, with a situation already occurring that the "real" audience of the letters would clearly know all about, but which the actual audience (the author's contemporaries, and us) find very intriguing, requiring us to fill in the details. How many times have we heard "Well, Paul didn't need to talk about Jesus' life, because everybody he was writing to already knew about it"? The last letter in this collection, one in which the narrative author writes that he is plotting an assassination, ends abruptly – leaving the reader hanging with suspense. This is nothing less than rhetorical intent.

Then there’s the collection itself and how it’s put together. Rosenmeyer argues that Chion’s letter collection is:

deliberately arranged in chronological disorder. The arrangement may reflect an attempt at historical verisimilitude: the disorder is meant to suggest the absence of editorial intervention, and thereader is encouraged to accept the collection as a random assortment from the hand of the author himself. We are asked to believe not that the author wrote out of chronological sequence, but that the letters, retrieved from their respective addresses, were bound together as they came in, without regard for date or subject matter. In other words, this is like a jumble of ‘real’ letters in Pharlaris’ attic, not a sophisticated literary anthology.

One is reminded of the vast amount of scholarly work that has been done to try to figure out the original order of the Pauline letters, because the collection is not apparently in chronological order.

Rosenmeyer concludes that the only way we can tell whether a letter is genuine or a pseudonymous literary construction is from external evidence. Internal literary clues are no help, because the authors of pseudonymous letters at the time were trained to make their work have the appearance of historicity. So, how do we know which, if any, of the Pauline Epistles were actually written by Paul of Tarsus?

Note: Referenced throughout.