A crucial discovery information is given in: *Gal 5:21 ("as I said before"). This small sentence provides us with a back-reference.
If I am not mistaken, it can only refer to *1 Cor 15:50. This clarifies one of my uncertainties whether or not the redactor had written or oral material in front of him, when putting together the collection of 10 Pauline letters, credited to Marcion.
A back-reference only makes sense, if the letter with the back-reference, is part of the collection. As it goes into the wrong direction within the 10-letter-collection of Marcion, this reference must be older, unless Epiphanius where we find this, has given us the canonical text and not the precanonical one.
On the basis that he gives us the precanonical text, the redactor must have used an older collection of 7 Pauline letters plus a collection of the 3 Deuteropaulines that have already been identified as a collection - see their position in the collection and also their lexical and semantic and content proximity). A back-reference that is incorrect in *Gal 5,21, hence, shows us this and several other things:
Let’s assume that the epistles were found individually in different places as part of a heritage rescue mission. This in itself seems unrealistic due to the vast expanse of the Empire, but this is not the main problem. It turns out that the Christian community started by Paul is dominated by redacted copies, amalgams and fakes. As if the main goal of all these copyists was to endlessly correct the Apostle from various theological perspectives. Our brave seeker finds nothing authentic almost everywhere. Complete absurdity.
ReplyDeleteLet’s take another scenario. Our searcher found some set of Paul’s original letters. Then he has to make all the editing changes and gluing various texts together and creating new ones. Otherwise, they will not be included in one collection. Therefore, all these changes in all the original letters written from different theological perspectives are the work of one center. Equally pointless.
Pauline Corpus is a content product. As well as fake letters added to the supposedly real ones. It is obvious.
Unfortunately, "real letters" are also a product of ghostwriter. The Corpus shows that one author wrote significantly more than the others. He was assigned a few letters, a specific theology, a distinct style, specific views and was declared the historical Paul. An invented hero.