seneca and paul 331
explicitly referred to in the correspondence arguably belong to the earliest
collection of Paul’s letters. what emerges from this recent research and
demands to be accounted for is that the references to the new Testament
that are found in our correspondence—apart from the later Letter Xi and
Letter XiV—are all references to letters of Paul, and only authentic letters
by Paul, not letters that critics nowadays consider to be deutero-Pauline or
even pseudo-Pauline (such as the so-called Pastoral epistles). Furthermore,
all are references to letters that seem to belong to the most ancient collec-
tion of Paul’s letters. however, a christian forger from the fourth century—
as is usually taken to be the author of this Pauline pseudepigraphon—
or even from the third, would have been unable to distinguish between
authentic Pauline epistles and deutero- or pseudo-Pauline letters, and
moreover to isolate the oldest ones. Yet, a careful analysis of the refer-
ences to the new Testament in the correspondence at stake shows that
this correspondence reflects knowledge of the first letters of Paul, and not
the last, nor the deutero- or pseudo-Pauline, nor even, as it seems, the rest
of the new Testament. only Letter XiV of our correspondence, which was
added later, includes echoes from 1 Pet 1:23–25 and from deutero-Pauline
letters, which the forger was unable to distinguish from Paul’s authentic
letters (col 3:9–10; eph 4:22, 24). Likewise Letter Xi (Xii barlow), which
is surely false and much later than the rest of the correspondence, and is
the only letter therein that suggests seneca’s conversion to christianity,
echoes 1 Pet 2:12, mark 5:11, and perhaps 2 Thess 2:6, 9, 11. in sum, the two
letters added afterwards refer not only to Paul’s authentic letters, but also
to later new Testament writings, such as 1 Peter and “deutero-Pauline”
epistles, and even later literary sources that are equally absent from the
original correspondence, such as Tacitus, Tertullian, and fourth-century
Proba, the christian lady who composed a Vergilian cento.
in the original redaction of our pseudepigraphon, the most frequent and
significant echoes of Pauline ideas and expressions—as they are found in
Paul’s authentic letters in the new Testament—are concentrated in the
letters ascribed to Paul himself.40 Those attributed to seneca, on the con-
trary, interestingly betray some misunderstandings of Paul’s concepts, as i
have briefly exemplified. it is notable that some new Testament letters by
Paul—again, letters that contemporary critics recognize as authentic—
are not only echoed, but also explicitly mentioned in the pseudepigra-
phon at stake. and again these letters coincide with the first collection
40 see ramelli, “a Pseudepigraphon inside a Pseudepigraphon?”