More intelligent enemies of the Christian Faith really cling on to the theory that St. Paul didn’t write half of the books described to him. Muslims really like this theory, not because they actually care what St. Paul wrote as most Muslims don’t much like St. Paul, but to discredit the New Testament. Why should we trust a document containing multiple forgeries? It’s a valid point. If I believed that the NT was full of forgeries, I wouldn’t trust it for theological purposes; historical purposes maybe but certainly not theological. I simply believe that the NT doesn’t contain forgeries.
Pauline authorship isn’t the only authorship of the NT that is disputed. The epistles of St. Peter, St. John and others are challenged, however the main argument for those is that the rural Galilean authors ascribed to the epistles would not have been proficient in Greek and didn’t have the ability to write the the epistles. This cannot be said about St. Paul since he was highly educated. Also, those who believe that St. Paul didn’t write half of what is ascribed to him, admit that he wrote at least seven epistles. These epistles are Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. Anyone who could write these epistles would certainly have an ability to write 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.
I should point out that the book of Hebrews is traditionally ascribed to St. Paul, though unlike the other thirteen epistles that he wrote, it doesn’t have his name on it. Because of that, I want to eliminate it from this discussion. I’m not afraid to discuss it, but it’s simply not important to this conversation as it has an entirely different set of arguments due to its unique circumstances.
For Catholics, accepting the Pauline authorship of the 13 epistles shouldn’t be a problem. After all, it’s clearly stated in all of the councils where the canon was gathered including Rome, Hippo, Carthage, Florence, and Trent. However, many people today think that they’re smarter than over a millennia and a half of wisdom.
The main arguments surrounding the falsely attributed authorship of these books is that differing literary styles are used, vocabulary differences in the letters, supposed theological differences, supposed differences in church structure and other minor reasons. The theological differences are probably the worst argument as most of people who promote this theory aren’t experts in theology.
The books that are most used among those who are apologetically minded are two books written by Bart Ehrman. One is a popular book called Forged and the other is a more scholarly work called Forgery and Counter-forgery. I find the arguments against Pauline authorship for the six epistles to be very bad, however that doesn’t stop them from being used so I’m going to be going over some of the main ones in the next few posts.
This is extremely important in apologetics. These conclusions are uncritically accepted by many people who read about them and are used against the Christian faith. If you can say that the NT has forgeries then it’s unreliable. If the Bible is unreliable then our religion fails. It’s as simple as that. Do you now see why this is important?
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