seneca and paul 333
in the 50s of the first century—as hans dieter betz still thinks, long after
the appearance of his hermeneia commentary on galatians—and before
the chronological setting of the seneca-Paul correspondence (58–62 ce).46
There is no reconstruction of the earliest corpus Paulinum that does not
include them; especially 1 corinthians had a wide and early diffusion.47 it
is striking that Letter Vii cites exactly those letters which constituted the
first core of the corpus Paulinum, and that all new Testament echoes in
this Pauline pseudepigraphon refer to authentic letters of Paul, and the
earliest ones. in the years 58–62 ce, the setting of his correspondence with
seneca, Paul had already written these letters, which were beginning to
circulate in a small collection. a fourth-century christian forger would
have very easily cited Paul’s epistle to the romans, which Paul wrote well
before going to rome. but in our correspondence, very interestingly, there
is no trace of it. what is most remarkable, such a forger would have been
unable to separate out Paul’s authentic letters, and the earliest.
what seneca is made say in Letter i, Libello tuo lecto, id est de plurimis
aliquas litteras quas ad aliquam civitatem seu caput provinciae direxisti,
mira exhortatione vitam moralem continentes, usque refecti sumus, confirms
what i have suggested: the seneca-Paul correspondence presupposes that
in the years of its setting, some letters by Paul were already circulating, in
a small collection. seneca indeed describes as libello tuo some letters by
Paul—those belonging to the collection and forming a booklet—among
the many which he had written: aliquas litteras de plurimis.
Conclusion
The striking results yielded by this recent intertextual and linguistic
research, which i have summarized above, need to be accounted for and
call for a scholarly reassessment of this intriguing Pauline pseudepigra-
phon. The nature and distribution of new Testament allusions in the
pseudepigraphon confirms what i had hypothesized sixteen years ago,
46 our Pauline pseudepigraphon is only partially dated: only some of the letters have a
consular date at the end. The whole claims to be dated—or, in the case of letters without
dating, is set—to the years 58–62 ce, apart from Letter Xi (Xii barlow), which purports
a date of 64 ce. The last five of the fourteen letters are dated to 58–59 ce by ordinary
consuls (Letter Xii) or suffecti (Letters X, Xiii, and XiV). Letters i through iX are not dated,
but internal allusions set them to 59–62 ce. in italy, the last document dated by consules
suffecti stems from 289 ce, which suggests that these letters were composed before the
end of the third century.
47 Full documentation can be found in ramelli, “The apocryphal correspondence.”