1.B 05. Collecting Paul's Letters

Collecting Paul’s Letters In view of all this how^^^^^^l^tters^gpE^Cted, and how did they become the universal possession of the Church? There were, of course, ample precedents for the collection and publication of the letters of great men. The letters of Plato, of Cicero had been collected and published. How did Paul’s letters attain to the dignity of collection and publication, and how did they in the end gain their place of authority as Holy Scripture? At the moment we shall try to answer only the first half of that question, and the answer to the second half will come later. We have certain pointers to aid us in our investigation.

It is significant that in writings before A.D. 90 there is no mention of the letters of Paul and no reference to them. In writings after A.D. 90 there are abundant references to the letters of Paul and abundant proof of full acquaintance with them. In the Synoptic Gospels, even in Luke, there is no trace of Pauline language or ideas. But in the Fourth Gospel, in James, in 2 Peter, and in the Letters of John there is clear acquaintance with Pauline thought and language. Obviously something must have happened to bring this about.

Further, it is significant that from A.D. 90 onwards there came into the Church what E. J. Goodspeed calls "a shower of Christian letters". Consider the beginning of the Revelation. The Revelation begins with the letters to the Seven Churches. Why should a book begin with a collection of letters? Why should Pergamum read the letter to Ephesus, and Thyatira read the letter to Laodicea, and Philadelphia read the letter to Smyrna? The very way in which the Revelation begins shows that there must have been a precedent for issuing a collection of letters. It may well have been close to that time that Hebrews and James and Jude were written, as well as the letters of John, and most of these are not so much real letters as treatises cast in epistolary form. There must have been a good precedent for letter writing, It is certainly just shortly after this that Clement wrote his letter to Corinth. And it was not very long after this that Polycarp collected and issued the seven letters of Ignatius. Not long after A.D. 90 there was a veritable epidemic of letter writing and something must have given it its impetus. The deduction must be that it was just then that the letters of Paul were first collected and issued, and that this collection provided the precedent and the stimulus for this outbreak of letter writing. But how did this happen? It was for long believed that the growth of the collection of Paul’s letters was a long, slow process, a kind of natural growth. The idea was that a Church possessed a letter of Paul of its own; it knew that a neighbouring Church also had a letter; it asked for a copy of its neighbour’s letter; and so bit by bit the collection was built up, varying from place to place according to the number of letters each individual Church had been able to obtain, and coming to its completion somewhere towards the end of the century. But in recent times E. J. Goodspeed and John Knox in America and C. L. Mitton in Britain have produced a quite different, and we think a better, theory. We have to explain why between A.D. 60 and A.D. 90 there is no trace of the letters of Paul. These scholars think that the letters of Paul were forgotten, that they were seldom or never used, that they were laid away in some chest amongst the archives of their Churches, covered in dust and buried in neglect, that there was in fact a generation who knew not Paul.

What was it that changed all that? We have seen that the change must have come not very long before A.D. 90. What happened to affect the situation somewhere between A.D. 80 and A.D. 90? The answer is that it was sometime near the middle of that decade that Acts was written and published at least in its first form. The result was that the half- forgotten figure of Paul suddenly burst upon the Church as the most epic, the most heroic, the most colossal and dominating figure in the early history of the Church. Immediately everything about this extraordinary man became precious. Every relic of him must be rescued from oblivion; everything he wrote must be recovered and studied and reverenced. The publication of Acts suddenly reminded men of the half-forgotten greatness of the incomparable apostle to the Gentiles, and it was that which provided the stimulus to the collection and the publication of the letters of Paul.