The Letters He Did Not Write

Words to Know

Pseudonymous — written under someone else’s name. It was common in the ancient world, and it did not always mean what the word forgery means to you.

Household codes — the passages telling wives, children and slaves to submit.

Estate — what is left of a person after they die, that other people manage.

Something happens as you read further into the collection.

The voice changes. The fever goes out of the sentences.

The man who expected the world to end in months is replaced by a careful administrator explaining how a household should be arranged, and what qualifications a church officer should have (1 Timothy 3:1–7). Those are the concerns of an organization that expects to be here in fifty years.

And the content changes. Wives are told to submit to husbands, children to obey parents, and slaves to obey their masters in everything (Colossians 3:22). A woman is to learn in silence and is allowed no authority over a man (1 Timothy 2:11–12).

Go deeperHow far the submission instruction reached

Look at what the letter actually spells out for a church officer: married once, children under control, not a recent convert, and well thought of by outsiders (1 Timothy 3:1–7).

The submission instruction goes further too. Slaves are told to obey with fear and trembling, the way they would obey Christ himself (Ephesians 6:5). And a letter from the same period, carrying a different apostle's name, extends that same instruction to cruel masters as well as kind ones (1 Peter 2:18).

These passages cluster.

They are concentrated in a specific set of letters: Colossians, Ephesians, the two to Timothy, and Titus. And most people who study these texts professionally, including many who hold them sacred, conclude most of those were not written by Paul.

Here is how they can tell, and none of it requires you to trust anybody.

• The words. The letters to Timothy and Titus use well over a hundred words that appear nowhere else in Paul.
• The meanings. For the real Paul, faith is something you do. You trust. In these letters, the faith is something you have, a body of teaching to guard (1 Timothy 6:20).
• The sentences. The real Paul’s Greek runs away from him. These letters are tidy. A calm man wrote them.
• The clock. The end has quietly receded, and church administration has taken its place.

On the two to Timothy and the one to Titus, that judgment is close to settled. On Ephesians it is strong. On Colossians scholars split about evenly, and I will not pretend otherwise. ¹

Go deeperHow the words and style actually shifted

Look closer at each test. Outside these letters, a striking number of these unusual words appear nowhere in your entire New Testament, while words the real Paul leans on constantly are simply missing.

The shift in meaning cuts deeper too. For the real Paul, faith is something you do: you trust, you hold on, you throw your whole weight onto it. In these letters it has become a body of correct teaching to be kept safe and handed on undamaged, as in the instruction to guard the deposit entrusted to you (1 Timothy 6:20). That is not a small drift. That is the difference between trusting somebody and filing something.

The style shift is just as telling. The real Paul interrupts himself, starts over, piles clause on clause, and sometimes forgets where a sentence was going. Whoever wrote these letters never does any of that.

He was dead by then.

Before you get angry, understand how this worked. In that world, writing in a dead teacher’s name, what scholars call pseudonymous writing, was ordinary. Students of Plato wrote as Plato. If you had sat at a man’s feet for twenty years, you might genuinely believe you knew what he would say about a new problem, and writing in his name could be a form of respect.

That is the kindest version, and I want you to have it before you have mine.

Go deeperWriting in a dead teacher's name

Whole philosophical schools practiced this, not just Plato's. Followers of Pythagoras wrote as Pythagoras. Jewish writers from those same centuries produced entire books under the names of Enoch, Moses and Solomon, men who had been dead for a thousand years and more.

To some who did this, it felt less like theft and more like letting the teacher go on speaking through the student.

But the people at the time were not all comfortable with it. One letter with Paul’s name on it warns readers not to be shaken by a letter seeming to be from us (2 Thessalonians 2:2). A bishop of Antioch named Serapion pulled a gospel out of a congregation’s hands when he decided Peter had not written it. ²

So they cared. They just could not always tell. A copy of a letter arrives in your town, and Paul has been dead thirty years. It sounds like him. It has his name on it. And it says the things your leaders already teach.

You read it out on Sunday.

Go deeperWhy nobody could check a letter

A few lines later that same letter points to the handwriting at the end as proof that this one is really from Paul himself (2 Thessalonians 3:17), which tells you people were already worried enough to ask for proof.

But proof was not really available. What arrived in your town was a copy, not the original, and the original, if one still existed, was sitting in another country. Nobody in the room had ever seen Paul's actual signature to compare it against, and by then everyone who had once known his handwriting was dead too.

Now ask the only question that really matters about a forgery. Who got something out of it?

The letters to Timothy and Titus buy an organization. They carry the officer requirements for overseers and deacons (1 Timothy 3:1–13; Titus 1:5–9). Paul’s own congregations had no job requirements, because there was no job. People stood up and spoke as it came to them (1 Corinthians 14:26–33). A generation later there is a job, and the man who holds it has a letter from Paul saying he should.

I had said the opposite. Do not let people call you Rabbi, and call no man on earth your father. The greatest among you will be your servant (Matthew 23:8–12).

Go deeperOfficers, titles, and what I said about them

What occupied Paul in his own churches was not job requirements but getting people to take turns, since anyone with something to say simply stood up and said it (1 Corinthians 14:26–33).

And remember the reasoning I actually gave for that instruction on titles: you have one teacher, and you are all brothers, and you have one Father. Do not be called instructors either (Matthew 23:8–12).

Now count the titles in a church directory.

The instruction silencing women buys the pulpit.

I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man (1 Timothy 2:11–12). A matching line in 1 Corinthians sits oddly where it is (1 Corinthians 14:34–35). In some old copies it turns up at a different point in the chapter, and a few scholars argue it was pushed in later. Most do not go that far, and I will not either. ³

But Paul’s real letters are full of women with authority. He calls Phoebe a deacon of her congregation and a patron of many, including himself (Romans 16:1–2). He calls Junia outstanding among the apostles (Romans 16:7). So women were leading. That is in the letters nobody disputes.

Then a letter arrives with Paul’s name on it saying they may not. That letter did not describe a situation. It ended one. And the people it handed the room to were men.

Go deeperThe women Paul worked beside

He sends Phoebe to Rome carrying his own letter to that congregation (Romans 16:1–2). Prisca is named ahead of her own husband more often than not, which in that world was not nothing. And Paul takes it entirely for granted that women pray and prophesy out loud in the assembly, arguing only about what is on their heads while they do it (1 Corinthians 11:5).

The household codes buy safety and respectability.

Think about what a Roman heard when he heard about us. A group was meeting privately in houses, taking in slaves and women as full members, and calling a crucified criminal Lord. To him that was a household coming apart, and to a Roman, households coming apart was precisely how an empire came apart.

The household codes answer him in his own language. Look at us. Our wives submit. Our children obey. Our slaves work. We are no danger to you.

It worked. It is very likely one of the reasons there were any Christians left to argue about any of this.

It was also the sale of every single person at the bottom of that list, in exchange for the safety of the people at the top. And it is still being read at them.

Go deeperThe household codes, verse by verse

Ephesians gives the same three instructions as Colossians, almost word for word: wives submit to husbands (Ephesians 5:22–24; Colossians 3:18), children obey parents (Ephesians 6:1; Colossians 3:20), and slaves obey masters in everything (Colossians 3:22; Ephesians 6:5).

The reassurance did not stop at a flat denial of danger either. It insisted the whole community was respectable: we are not what you were told, we are respectable people.

Now look at what all three have in common.

Every one of them takes authority away from somebody who had it and hands it to the man at the front of the room. And every one arrives with a dead apostle’s signature on it, so that nobody in the room can argue.

The real authors were writing in Paul’s name because his name had become worth something. That is the surest sign a movement has ended and an estate has opened.

I went looking for the man who stole my movement. I found a man whose own name had been lifted off him and used to sell furniture. He was robbed too.

Nobody was the villain. The thing had to last.

It had to last past the year Paul expected, then past every human being who had ever seen my face. Watch how that happens, because it is very ordinary.

You start with twenty people eating together in somebody’s house, with no officers. The group grows, and there are widows and orphans and prisoners to feed, so people put money in a common purse. Somebody has to hold the purse. Then people die and leave the group a house to meet in and ground to bury in, and now a name has to be on the deed. Then two travelling teachers arrive with opposite messages, and the man holding the purse and the deed is the only one in the room with standing to settle it.

So one man per city ends up in the chair. About eighty years after my death, a bishop named Ignatius is writing letters insisting that nothing whatever should be done in a congregation without the bishop. ⁴

Nobody voted for that. It grew out of money, and burial, and arguments that had to be stopped.

Go deeperWhat each step of the growth cost

After twenty centuries of thinking about who to blame, I no longer believe it was any single person.

Look at what each step actually cost. The first man who held the common purse became an officer because of money, not because of God. The group needed its own burial ground because you could not bury your dead among the pagans, so it bought land, and now somebody had to be able to stand in front of a magistrate and defend that ownership. And when the two travelling teachers showed up in the same month with opposite messages, both of them were waving letters from Paul.

But look where it leaves you. The man who now decides what I said is a man who is good with property, careful with outsiders, and personally responsible for keeping the doors open next year.

That is not the kind of man who reads go, sell what you have and give it to the poor (Mark 10:21) out loud and means it.

Nobody chose this. Everybody chose to survive, which is the same thing done slowly enough that nobody in the room has to notice it happening.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:22, one after the other.

You will find: “no longer slave nor free” — and then, in a later letter with the same name on it, slaves told to obey in everything.

The Short Version

• Partway through the letters with Paul’s name on them, the words, the sentences and the expected future all change.
• Most scholars think several of those letters were written after he died, by other people.
• The harshest instructions about slaves and women are concentrated in exactly those letters.
• Each one paid somebody: an officer class, a male-only pulpit, and respectability in Roman eyes.
• Nobody planned the takeover. It grew out of a purse, a burial ground and an argument that had to be settled.

Think About It

1. Why would someone write a letter under a dead teacher’s name? What does it tell you about his reputation?
2. Which is more disturbing: a villain, or nobody in particular?