hermeneutical issues in canonical pseudepigrapha 95
concept of canon, that is, how the texts were received by the early church.
the acceptance of a letter into the canon—authentic or otherwise—
is a legitimizing practice and the ordering of books within that canon
necessarily engenders a particular interpretive movement.18 canon pro-
vides interpretive constraint, as aichele argues. canon is at one time
inclusive and exclusive: inclusive of the texts within and exclusive of the
texts without. an effective functioning of canon provides its own “intra-
canonical commentary.”19 With respect to canonical pseudepigrapha, the
placement of a letter, such as 1 timothy, in the canon functions to legiti-
mize its authority (even as it is a pseudonymous document) and validates
its contribution to canonical meaning and truth.20 in theory, the voice
of the pseudepigrapher equivocally joins with Paul’s in the provision of
the content of religious truth. Beyond simply legitimizing a text’s author-
ity, the canonical perspective enables a strategy for reading: letters that
appear earlier in the corpus have a degree of interpretive priority over
letters appearing later, rather than those letters that are chronologically
prior.21 thus, the canonical approach delimits what constitutes religious
truth with respect to canonical pseudepigrapha and provides a means of
appropriating that truth. this shift in hermeneutical perspective should,
at least in theory, effectively counteract the limits of historical criticisms
that canonical critics are so quick to identify.
Historical and Canonical Readings of the Body Motif
What, then, are the tendencies of these hermeneutical strategies and how
do they result in the actual interpretation of texts? interpreting the body/
18 as Wall points out, the canonical process itself (with a view to the final product) is of
foremost concern among canonical critics (robert W. Wall, “the function of the Pastoral
letters within the Pauline canon of the new testament: a canonical approach,” in stan-
ley e. Porter [ed.], The Pauline Canon [Past 1; leiden: Brill, 2004], 27, 35).
19 aichele, Control, 21.
20 see an articulation of this precise point in robert W. Wall, “Pauline authorship and
the Pastoral epistles: a response to s. e. Porter,” BBR 5 (1995): 126–28; and Wall, “func-
tion of the Pastoral letters,” 34–44. aichele points out some epistemological problems
with such a proposition, though this does not take away from the function of canon (see
aichele, Control, 21). Wall, on the other hand, understands canonical criticism not as a
novel interpretive strategy but as an orientation to scripture in functional terms vis-à-vis
authority (robert W. Wall, “the significance of a canonical Perspective of the church’s
scripture,” in mcdonald and sanders [eds.], Canon Debate, 528–29).
21 for example, childs suggests that “the canonical shaping of the corpus in assigning
a critical role to romans does serve to guide the range of possible interpretations” (childs,
Reading Paul, 68, 74).