On Pauline PseudePigraPhy:
an intrOductiOn
stanley e. Porter and gregory P. Fewster
McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, ON, Canada
F. c. Baur’s Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi has served as the perennial point
of departure for discussions of Pauline pseudepigraphy. taking his direc-
tion from eusebius’s musings on the new testament canon, Baur opted
to divide the Pauline letters into three categories: authentic, disputed, and
spurious letters.1 the paradigm for fitting these letters into each category
was, according to Baur, a dispute between Pauline and Petrine forms of
christianity, which corresponded to Paul’s tensions with Judaistic forms
of christianity.2 this particular schema resulted in the delineation of a
very small Pauline canon (galatians, 1 and 2 corinthians, and romans), a
rather sizable collection of disputed letters (ephesians, colossians, Philip-
pians, Philemon, 1 and 2 thessalonians), with the spurious letters consist-
ing of the Pastoral epistles. it is notable that, in more recent work, while
the precise means and results of assigning letters to particular categories
have shifted, the basic categorical structure has remained very much
the same.
in 1988, richard Bauckham proposed that, in light of the divided opin-
ions of new testament scholars over the authenticity of several new
testament epistles, new criteria were necessary to move discussion for-
ward. his solution was to narrow the focus of investigation, suggesting
that the epistolary genre itself provided constraints on how pseudepig-
raphy can function.4 While this article was primarily concerned with
1 see F. c. Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi: Sein Leben und Werken, seine Briefe und
seine Lehre (stuttgart: Becher & Müller, 1845): et Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life
and Works, His Epistles and Teachings (repr., Peabody, Ma: hendrickson, 2003), 255–59.
cf. eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.25.1–7, although this class system is applied to non-Pauline texts
as well.
2 Baur, Paul, esp. 129–36, but also 261–63, 304, 332.
3 see, e.g., the discussion in Mark harding, “disputed and undisputed letters of Paul,”
in stanley e. Porter (ed.), The Pauline Canon (Past 1; leiden: Brill, 2004), 137–44, 150–63.
harding employs Baur’s categories, though shifts which letters he considers within those
categories. the spurious category only includes non-canonical Pauline letters. the con-
temporary trends are identified in luke timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testa-
ment: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 388–93.
4 richard Bauckham, “Pseudo-apostolic letters,” JBL 107.3 (1988): 469.