334 ilaria l. e. ramelli
namely, that Letters Xi and XiV are later additions to the original corpus
of the correspondence, a corpus which, theoretically, can be dated from
the years of its setting in the late 50s and early 60s of the first century to
the end of the third, when the use of suffecti in dates is last documented
in italy. The original corpus, excluding the two later letters, includes both
explicit references and implicit allusions to new Testament books and
passages, but all of these allusions are limited to Pauline letters that crit-
ics recognize as written by Paul himself. what is more, among these, the
letters referred to in our pseudepigraphon arguably belong to the earliest
collection of Paul’s epistles. There seems to be no allusions to the gospels,
the disputed Paulines, the Pastoral epistles, the catholic epistles, or rev-
elation. a possible reference to acts is doubtful: it concerns Paul’s roman
citizenship, which could have been known from other sources too. on
the contrary, allusions to the new Testament in Letters Xi and XiV are
very different, and are accompanied—as i have mentioned—by echoes
from later Latin historians and christian authors. This confirms what i
had already suggested many years ago on the basis of historical, philo-
logical, and linguistic arguments; namely, that they do not stem from the
original corpus, but have different authors and were added later, probably
at some point between the time of Jerome, who did not know Letter Xi
at the end of the fourth century,48 and the eleventh century, when Let-
ter XiV seems to have begun to spread the legend of seneca’s conversion
to christianity.
but the original correspondence is much earlier, from the second half
of the first to the end of the third century. is it possible to indicate a more
precise date within this chronological span? only very tentatively. one
can consider that the canonical Pauline corpus, including the so-called
Pastoral epistles, was quoted as authentic from around 180 ce onwards,
at least in greek. since the original redaction of our pseudepigraphon, as
48 Jerome, Vir. Ill. 12, remarks that, in the years in which the seneca-Paul correspon-
dence was composed, seneca was the most powerful man of his time and nero’s instruc-
tor and counsellor: continentissimae vitae fuit, quem non ponerem in catalogo sanctorum,
nisi me epistulae illae provocarent quae leguntur a plurimis, Pauli ad Senecam et Senecae
ad Paulum, in quibus, cum esset Neronis magister et illius temporis potentissimus, optare
se dicit eius esse loci apud suos, cuius sit Paulus apud Christianos. Jerome clearly refers to
the original correspondence, but not to Letter Xi, which purports to have been written in
64 ce. For seneca was nero’s “prime minister” from 54 to early 62, but in 64 seneca was
neither nero’s “teacher/counsellor” (magister) nor was he any longer “the most powerful”
(potentissimus), but was disgraced and forced to commit suicide in 65, under suspicion
of having participated in the Pisonian plot. Letter Xi had not yet been added to the cor-
respondence in 392 ce, when Jerome wrote his De viris illustribus.