seneca and paul 327
noun in Paul’s letters in the new Testament present this syntactical form,
the same that is transposed into Latin in Paul’s letters in the correspond-
ence with seneca. a forger must be supposed to have adopted a really
extraordinary mimetic subtlety.
Let me just adduce two more examples of syntactical graecisms in
the correspondence at stake. in Letter Vi, this too by Paul, the expres-
sion quibus si patientiam demus is generally considered to be strange and
late.27 however, this is a precise syntactical graecism: ὑπομονὴν (also:
ἀνοχὴν and μακροθυμίαν) δίδωμι is very well attested, often precisely with
the dative case, exactly from the first imperial age onwards.28 The Latin
here is, again, a transposition of a typical greek construct. in Letter ii, also
ascribed to the apostle, Paul shows delight for seneca’s appreciation of his
own literary letters: Litteras tuas hilaris heri accepi [.. .] quod litteris meis
vos bene acceptos alicubi scribes, felicem me arbitror tanti viri iudicio. Non
enim hoc diceres, censor, sophista, magister tanti principis, etiam omnium,
nisi qua vere dicis. Paul here uses the verb accipere, which is an active verb
in Latin, first as an active (litteras tuas accepi) and then as though it were a
so-called deponent verb (litteris meis vos bene acceptos). in order to mean,
“that you have well received my letters,” instead of writing litteras meas
vos bene accepisse, he uses a middle-passive form: litteris meis vos bene
acceptos. This is the same syntactical construct as seneca uses in Letter Vii
(bene me acceptum lectione litterarum tuarum), but in seneca’s phrase the
meaning is passive: “i was well received (by nero) with the reading of
your letters.” Paul, instead, uses the passive form of accipere in an active
meaning, as though accipere were a so-called deponent. now this is very
probably again a syntactical graecism: Paul is attaching the grammati-
cal form of greek δέχομαι (a middle-passive verb with active meaning,
“to receive” or “to accept”) to the Latin verb accipere, which is a regular
active verb. Therefore, this seems to be a further syntactical graecism in
Paul’s letters.
These amazing coincidences, which are found only in the letters ascribed
to Paul, due to their extreme subtlety, were very difficult to reconstruct for
a forger, who moreover did not have at his disposal digital databanks such
as the TLg nowadays. Lexical graecisms and, even more, syntactical grae-
cisms do not seem to prove that the correspondence was originally writ-
ten in greek and then translated into faulty Latin, because they are only
27 see for instance Fürst, Der apokryphe Briefwechsel, 46 n.70, “Patientiam dare ist eine
singuläre Junktur.”
28 all instances are collected in ramelli, “The apocryphal correspondence.”