—David P. Wright, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient near East, Brandies University.

Preface

When I met Laurine Kingston, I knew that she represented the type of woman I had studied in my graduate research at Northwestern University and that her profession answered a deep personal quest for an alternative to hospital birth. I could not easily overstate the intensity of dissatisfaction I had experienced with my first obstetrician. In fact, I can document my subsequent search for a better way through the arc of my experiences in giving birth to five babies. I can now see that in each case, I moved closer to finding what I assumed had disappeared with the railroad, which is to say midwives. I was in my mid-thirties and about to deliver my last child when I met Ronna Hand, an associate of Laurine’s, and then Laurine herself.

I was so enthusiastic about my discovery and so pleased with how my last birth went, I applied to work for the Domiciliary Midwives of Utah and was hired to teach classes for them in the psychology of family relations and communications. My Ph.D. was in psychology, and a primary interest had been in the psychosomatic aspects of childbirth. When I met Laurine, she was already legendary as a driving force in the midwifery movement in Utah, and she was impressive. As I watched her teach and assist women in giving birth, I noticed how competent and cool she was under pressure—and I saw her as a role model for young women in a subculture that did not value them. I thought she was the quintessential Utah midwife, and she is! Whereas I had assumed my own life path had been unpredictable and colorful in its various twists and turns, her story outdid mine as a meaningful, adventure-filled odyssey.

Let me explain a little about myself and how I came to have this fascination with midwifery and with one of its key advocates. I was born in the 1940s in the little town of Salina, Utah. My parents, Fae Peterson and Stanley Burgess, were born at home. In their day, people did not know anything different. By the 1940s when I was born, things had changed and most everyone was born in a hospital, even in my case where it meant having to travel far from home. For those who are not from Utah, Salina was on U.S. Route 50, which was famously constructed through the middle of the state without touching any significant population areas. In 1990, Interstate 70 was built, which misses Salina by a few miles. Salina is about 150 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

We were one of those sleepy outback communities the government disregarded in the 1950s and 1960s when it detonated atomic bombs in the West Desert, letting the fallout drift northeast and land in our gardens. Some of my neighbors contracted leukemia and breast cancer. I noticed recently that one-third of my high school graduating class had died—far too many people for my age group. The Atomic Energy Commission wrote a report that said they chose this area to test atomic bombs because people in the area were “low-functioning members of society.” My father was a multi-millionaire cattle rancher with bachelor’s degrees in animal husbandry and economics. All my aunts and uncles are college graduates. Governor Scott Matheson came from the county, as did the inventor of television, Philo T. Farnsworth. Utah writer Terry Tempest Williams has written about the experience of passing nearby when she was a child and observing one of the pyrotechnic displays in the desert, after which the fallout rained down on the family car. As a result, her family became what she called the clan of one-breasted women. We were all Downwinders.

Aside from radioactivity, Salina had benefits. I wore cowgirl boots until I was sixteen. By five, I was able to drive a tractor and could back up a wagon full of hay into the feed yard. That backing-up ability served me well in my later urban driving experiences. In fourth grade, my public education teacher sent me home and told my mother I was “mentally retarded” because I could not learn the times tables, which the class had supposedly spent all year learning. He said I had wiled away the time reading books instead of paying attention in class. When I arrived home, my mother took me down to the basement and told me to climb up on the wringer clothes washer. She told me I would not be allowed to get down until I learned the times tables. After two hours, we came upstairs. The next day, Mother took me back to school and re-enrolled me, showing the teacher that all I needed was a little motivation because I had learned the times tables in two hours.

I attended Utah State University and then Boston University, where I met and married Eric Olson, a Harvard student. After graduation, Eric was required to serve time in the military in Berlin, Germany, and I was soon commissioned as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves. I worked at the military hospital. It turned out to be a famous facility where the Nazis had performed experiments on people. When I gave birth to my first child, Eden, I felt like another victim as the obstetrician gave me drugs, kept Eric outside the room, and took my baby away after it was born and quarantined it because it had a slightly yellow hue. My parents had traveled to Berlin to see the baby but were sent home disappointed, and even Eric and I were sent home to wait for the medical staff to cure our baby of what is, in fact, a normal phenomenon in newborns.

With our next baby, I made demands. There would be no drugs, I said. The nurses, who had never seen a natural birth before, winced during my labor. This was not very helpful. We insisted that Eric be allowed to participate and that the baby not be carried away after birth. They agreed, but put me in a vacant ward so other patients would not see what was happening. The staff thought we were crazy. Contrary to expectations, I delivered Erica without complications and then we happily returned home the next day. We were so happy and convinced we did not need the assistance of doctors, we decided to have our next three children at home.

In 1972, Eric and I were both accepted to graduate school, he at the University of Chicago to study Egyptology and I at Northwestern University to study psychology. My major professor, Niles Newton, had a research emphasis in the chemistry and psychology of breastfeeding. She was known to have almost singlehandedly brought breast feeding back to the United States in the 1960s when her research helped motivate the founders of the La Leche League. What she discovered was the role of oxytocin in human physiology. She called it the “hormone of love” because it contributed to sexual intercourse, as well as to birth and lactation. This had been exhaustively studied in animals because of their economic value but not yet in humans.

Dr. Newton was fascinated to learn that I had polygamous ancestors. She had also noticed that I brought my baby with me to class, breastfeeding her during the lectures, which may have been normal enough in Salina but not in Chicago. Dr. Newton encouraged me to study, as my dissertation was ultimately titled, “The Family Structure and Dynamics in Early Utah Mormon Families between 1847 and 1885.” When I traveled to Salt Lake City to use the Mormon archives, I was told I could only use the resources if I promised not to use the word “polygamy” in my title. That was fine with me because a scholar would call it polygyny in any case, but such was the sensitivity at that time to a topic the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) was trying to put behind it. Things were more complicated than I can mention here because I received an LDS fellowship for my research, with help from Church Historian Leonard Arrington, who nevertheless would not let me consult the works of early Mormon leader Heber C. Kimball.

When the time came to give birth to number three, I made inquiries in our Hyde Park neighborhood about what my options were and was referred to a prominent physician, Mayer Eisenstein, who had become a home-birth advocate when his own baby was dropped on the floor in the hospital. Dr. Eisenstein said he would be pleased to be my birth attendant. Everything went well. Seth came into the world, I rested for two days, and the next day Seth and I participated in my graduation at Northwestern. Knowing I was recovering, the dean of the medical school escorted me across the stage. We all flew to Utah the next day so Eric could begin teaching at Brigham Young University in Provo, where my fourth child was born.

Trying to find someone to assist me in this birth, I was told that Dr. Roger Lewis was unconventional enough that he might be persuaded to help with a home birth. My neighbor made an appointment and accompanied me, but was surprised by his attire when he entered the room without a smock. She asked if he was really a doctor, at which he hurried out of the room and returned a minute later wearing a white smock. I liked the idea of a physician wanting to meet the requirements of his patients in that way. He said he had never seen a home birth before but would be happy to assist. When the time came, he and my husband, along with our friend Jan Tyler (a godparent we called our goddess mother) and three children, all joined in helping me deliver little Abraham. Dr. Lewis was so satisfied with this, he advertised that he was available for other home births until he was opposed by Provo’s obstetricians and had to retract this offer.

My husband and I returned to military service in Berlin, where we lived and worked for three years. When I decided to have my final child, Zachary, in Utah, it was then that I met Ronna, without whom I would not have been able to deliver a twelve-pound son at home, drug-free. Today Zachary is studying to be a nurse practitioner at the University of Illinois in Chicago. (As a proud mother, I cannot help but mention that Eden is a psychologist, Erica is head of a high school science department, Seth is a retired dancer of thirty-five years and now in nursing school, and Abraham is an attorney who spent many years in the army as a JAG officer.)

I have continued my association with Utah’s midwives. My research prompted me to write The History of Homebirth and Midwifery in Utah, of which Laurine’s career and activism constituted a major part. When I showed the manuscript to Signature Books, they expressed interest in having me expand on Laurine’s life and write a biography of her. I enthusiastically agreed and spent about two hours at a time, twice a week, for a year interviewing Laurine, through her great patience and cooperation, and looking at the photographs and documents that verify her family history. We were thus able to piece together the facts and I was able to offer some interpretation to general themes that emerge as the major focus of her life’s work. Aside from being an advocate for midwifery, I was devoid of any agenda in approaching this project. However, as we got to know each other—even better than we had previously known each other, that is—my admiration for her grew. She is not only a genius, but she is a model for many older women who aspire to age gracefully and remain self-actualized. I have tried to retain a degree of objectivity throughout the book, but attentive readers will notice my hero worship showing through at times.

4.
Midwifery

A midwife can be an obstetrical assistant or a wise woman who has a sixth sense about things. She may be female or male despite the fact that the terms midwife, sage-femme (French, wise woman), doula (Danish, earth mother), and so on traditionally implied women. In some cultures, such as among the Guatemalan Mayans, midwives are also spiritual guides who not only help deliver the child but also predict its future. In most places in the world, throughout history, there have been women who have assisted other women in giving birth. A hundred years ago in the United States, 95 percent of all babies were born at home. Around the world, 70 percent of all deliveries are homebirths, according to Marsden Wagner, a representative of the World Health Organization who spoke in Salt Lake City in 1996 at a midwifery conference.

Home births result in fewer deaths than hospital births, in part because midwives let the hospitals treat complications; but even so, it is worth noting that midwife-assisted births are safe. They are also inexpensive. A midwife charges about $1,000 per birth, including pre- and post-natal visits, while a hospital’s charges begin at about $8,000 for the same services. Another advantage to home birth is the avoidance of technology which, although heaven-sent when things go wrong, create an impersonal and intrusive environment in place of a more comfortable family setting. In fact, there are unintended, harmful effects for some medical treatments women can be subjected to in the hospital, including risks associated with over-medication or over-zealous surgical intervention, which tend to balance out the risks associated with home births separated from the life-saving assistance of medical personnel.

As midwives like to explain, in a hospital environment time is money, so a woman who has been in labor too long will need to have the birth artificially induced. Once that is done, one thing can lead to another. For instance, the woman will probably be given an epidural analgesia, by which opiates are injected into the spinal column, eliminating sensation in the lower body. This lessens a woman’s ability to control her muscles and means that the doctor will probably have to remove the baby with forceps or a suction cup called a ventrouse, if not by caesarian section. All of these procedures have unusually high rates of occurrence in Utah, according to Dr. Wagner.

From the standpoint of a midwife, the mother should deliver her own baby, with only as much intervention from the midwife as is necessary. Midwives have a saying that “mothers give birth,” not health care providers. To a midwife, birth is a natural phenomenon, more like sneezing or some other bodily function than a disorder that requires surgery. They have a high tolerance for extended periods of labor, false starts, and longer recoveries if necessary. They see birth as a peak experience that a mother should fully participate in. As she gives birth, her body produces oxytocin, which creates the strong bond between mother and child. If the mother is overwhelmed by drugs or medical technology, she misses the effects of her body’s natural drug. Birth involves pain, but it can be managed more comfortably at home, all things considered. For example, squatting is more comfortable for a birthing mother than sitting upright or lying flat. Lying in a hospital bed is convenient for medical personnel, not for the mother. In studying births cross-culturally, researchers have found that mothers giving birth in natural settings most often kneel or squat to give birth.

There is a formal career track in the United States to becoming a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) involving a rigorous written exam and an evaluation of the midwife’s performance in the field. Tests are administered by the North American Registry of Midwives in about half the states. There are also Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) who receive a B.S. degree accredited by the American College of Nurse Midwives. The CNMs assist obstetricians in the hospital. The University of Utah was one of the first schools in the country to initiate the CNM degree. In addition to these, there are lay midwives, who are uncertified birth assistants. They sometimes refer to themselves by other terms such as Christian birth guides or community midwives. In any case, they resist government regulation of their craft. As an LPN, Laurine was a special case. Although initially it was difficult for her to navigate the dangers of serving the polygamist community, for whom many births are themselves evidence of a crime, eventually she became certified with the state (CM) through the Utah Midwife Association.

Laurine entered midwifery as an assistant to Rulon Allred. Other lay midwives take this route of learning at the hands of an experienced midwife through a multi-year apprenticeship. Those seeking formal training enroll in a university curriculum, and the level of schooling determines whether a midwife will practice in a hospital and rely mostly on modern medicine or practice out of their home (including sometimes a tent, teepee, yurt, or cave) and rely more on herbal antidotes. Some midwives wear gloves and some do not. Traditionalists sometimes accompany the birth with prayers, chants, or aroma therapy. Lay midwives are keen observers of a mother’s state of being and derive what information they need from auscultation and various body measurements, which they follow up with nutritional herbs, massage, and good advice, not only for the delivery but for life in general. Auscultation refers to listening to the baby’s heart through the uterine wall.

A good midwife makes plans for emergency support if things go wrong. If she can tell during a consultation that a birth will likely involve complications, she often refers the woman to a clinic, hospital, or mental health facility, depending on the need. Midwives also refer women to lactation stations and other resources. They will generally decline to assist in the birth of twins, births to diabetic mothers, premature births, ectopic (fallopian) pregnancies, prolapsed umbilical cords (when the cord precedes the baby), and placenta previa (bleeding). However, if the mother is within the 95 percentile of normalcy, the midwife will provide a safe, harmonious birthing environment that includes accommodation for the woman’s husband, parents, and in-laws, who also need attention during the birthing. Midwives know that it is difficult for the baby’s grandmother to see her daughter go through birth. If the grandmother’s anxiety can be turned into a calming influence, it will be passed along to the nervous mother.

A short history
After World War I, there was a significant increase in hospital deliveries in the United States, and beginning in the 1930s home birth, breastfeeding, and midwifery went into decline. Americans had come to worship science and the so-called “specialist care” provided by doctors, most of whom were male. The beginnings of Board Certified Obstetricians emerged, most of whom did not want to travel to people’s homes because it was not cost-effective. Family doctors continued to perform home births along with other emergency calls but did not have a lot of time to devote to it. Obstetricians came to think that their services were indispensable, not just for difficult births but for normal deliveries, and that women were more or less incapable of giving birth on their own.

Prior to this development, hospitals were the places one went to die or nearly die. In that sense, it improved the hospital’s image to include birth in its repertoire. Health insurance companies proliferated during this time and preferred the efficiency of hospital staffs, especially in managing paperwork. This was also the era of a new drug cocktail called “twilight sleep” (Dämmerschlaf), a type of anesthesia developed in Germany whereby women were injected during labor with morphine and scopolamine and the baby was pulled out with forceps. When the mother recovered, she retained no memory of the birth. Doctors referred to this procedure as the “knock-out, drag-out” approach.

Later, intravenous drugs were replaced by “epidurals” injected into the epidural space in the lower back. As Grantly Dick-Read, a famous British obstetrician, put it, epidurals made it possible for a doctor as “magician” to deliver a baby through “a paralyzed birth canal.” Of course, women don’t want to experience pain in birth or otherwise and are understandably apprehensive about being able to withstand the intensity of it. They enter the hospital afraid that the pain may become so intense, they will regret not having asked for anesthetics. In contrast to this, midwives prepare women for the pain through exercise and mental tasks that are partly designed to help them with their fears. The women are reminded that by giving birth naturally, they protect their baby from the bad effects of the drugs they would otherwise be subjected to. Once a drug is delivered into the mother’s system, it affects the baby just as much as the mother. Nor is the drugged woman able to fully participate in the birth process, which is less than ideal. If she can report on and interpret the pain, her feedback is important to the midwife.

A naturally occurring morphine-like substance, beta-endorphin, saturates the mother’s and baby’s bodies during labor and delivery. With oxytocin, it helps create a euphoric peak experience that at least momentarily overcomes the pain of childbirth and is enjoyable. Christiane Northrup, an MD who writes about women’s health issues, calls this feeling one of “joy, love, and ecstasy.” The feeling is abbreviated in the hospital experience where everything is hurried up, the sensations masked by pain relievers, and a woman only spends, on average, two hours and fifteen minutes with the obstetrician, including pre- and post-natal care, according to the Wasatch Childbirth Educators Association.

One argument people give for hospital birth is cleanliness, but despite appearances, homes are generally more germ-free than hospitals. Sick people bring a constant infusion of fresh pathogens into the hospital, whereas at home, the fetus is already accustomed to the germs the mother encounters there. According to a 2011 American­ Association of Retired People Bulletin, there are about 100,000 deaths each year in the United States from infections that are contracted in hospitals. Who would want to have a baby there? Especially since a hospital room is less comfortably appointed than a living room or bedroom. Through the 1950s, hospital birth became even less comfortable when fetal monitoring machines were introduced like something out of a futuristic horror movie. The laboring women were strapped to the fetal monitors, making their labor even more unpleasant. A survey in Britain in the early 1980s showed that many of these machines did not work properly anyway, but doctors loved them. For the mother, it wreaks havoc with her ability to bond with the emerging child.

Midwifery in Utah
There have been famous midwives in Utah history. Many people know of Patty Sessions, for instance, who traveled long distances to help women deliver a total of 3,977 babies. In pioneer times, the midwives knew more about birth than doctors, who often lacked proper training, and the midwives were more trusted in any case.­ ­Patty’s low opinion of doctors is well-known, as is the support she enjoyed from Mormon leader Brigham Young,­ who thought it made perfect sense that women should assist women in childbirth. For a similar reason, he promoted the training of female obstetricians in the l870s. Eliza Snow, one of Young’s plural wives, said at a meeting of the Women’s Retrenchment Society that women should­ become doctors in order to keep men out of delivery rooms.

The first Utah woman to earn a medical degree was Romania Pratt. In the fall of 1874, she traveled to Philadelphia and entered the Women’s Medical College (WMC) of Pennsylvania. Founded in 1850, it was the oldest and most prominent college in the country to offer M.D. degrees to women. Another Utah woman, Ellis Reynolds Shipp, enrolled in the same college in 1876. As a polygamist, she enjoyed the support of three sister-wives who raised her children while she was away. She gave birth to her sixth child in 1877 in Pennsylvania, where she hired the landlady to look after her baby while she completed a residency at a nearby hospital. Dr. Shipp would eventually have ten children, so her obstetrical work was enhanced by her own experience.

Ellis’s sister-wife Margaret (“Maggie”) enrolled in WMC in 1875 but soon returned due to homesickness. Upon Ellis’s graduation and return to Utah, Maggie found the determination to go back east and re-enter the college, earning her medical degree in 1883. In Salt Lake City, Dr. Ellis Shipp opened a School of Obstetrics and Nursing in the fall of 1878 to raise up an army of midwives, as she said, to provide for birthing mothers in every Utah community. By 1893, one hundred graduates had been certified for obstetrical work. The Utah State Board of Registration licensed a total of 467 midwives between then and 1906, leaving no doubt as to the thriving demand for their services.

From 1877 to 1881, Dr. Ellen Brooke Ferguson practiced medicine in Utah and taught classes to “ladies” in anatomy, physiology, obstetrics, puerperal disease (infection relating to the placenta), and diseases of children. She was a suffragist and defender of polygamy, which she believed gave women with the aptitude for a career the opportunity to work outside the home. While one woman went to school or worked, a sister-wife could care for her children while another did the housework, each one performing tasks according to her interests and abilities.

Male physicians were getting as much schooling and experience as the female doctors by 1920 but did not immediately replace midwives. They either worked as general practitioners and left birthing to the women or specialized in fields unrelated to reproduction. Dr. Shipp continued to teach her obstetrical course through the 1930s, although a circular issued in 1927 indicates that her school shifted its emphasis to nursing. This was a reflection of the advancing medical professionalism in Utah, which nearly squeezed midwives out of the picture. Obstetrics as a field of specialty was offered to men in the 1930s, and over time they began to take over the discipline. There was a growing sense in the twentieth century that women belonged at home and that men should be the wage earners in the family. This was a concept that had not previously prevailed in America as an explicit expectation where colonial women had helped run the shops and taverns and do the farm chores alongside the men. Even at home the women ran cottage industries, manufacturing sausages, candles, clothing, and soap and running such errands as taking grain to be milled.

The resurgence of home birth in the late 1960s came by way of the hippy, natural food, and anti-industrial trends of the day. One of its Utah advocates was David Warden, an army flight surgeon who had been to Vietnam and was now the base surgeon at Fort Douglas, overlooking Salt Lake City, as well as being a member of a Mormon bishopric. His wife, Mary Lou, a nurse, was equally enthusiastic in promoting natural birth. They answered people’s questions about technical issues surrounding home birth; for this, they were often denigrated by other physicians, and David had the impression that some opposition came from the Mormon Church, which took advice from prominent members who were physicians and were advocating modern medical practices. The Church was concerned about appearing backward or odd in promoting anything outside of the mainstream of American life.

In 1974 at a seminar on home birth in California, Dr. Warden and his wife met Ronna Hand, who herself had years of experience in home birth and had worked as a midwife apprentice to a physician whose specialty was high-risk pregnancies. She was a Latter-day Saint, so he encouraged her to come to Utah. After being in the state a short while, Ronna was surprised to discover how much hostility she encountered from physicians opposed to midwifery. She nevertheless organized the Domiciliary Midwives of Utah to train midwives and childbirth educators. Home-birth folks comprised an odd coupling of hippies, polygamists, progressives, and Old World traditionalists, all of whom found their way to her Birthing Center in Kaysville after its inauguration in May 1980. Laurine joined the Domiciliary Midwives and sat in on some of Ronna’s classes and even tried unsuccessfully to learn Spanish; she offered her help as a midwife for some of the births at the center. She enjoyed the home-like atmosphere of the center and the support from a handful of physicians who would step in when nurse- and lay-midwives encountered complications. The center also energized the opposition by obstetricians, who insisted that home birth was foolhardy and counter-cultural. Home birth had done an about-face since the days of Brigham Young.

In spite of this opposition, the home-birth movement became increasingly popular. Even at the start in Utah, at the first meeting Warden and Hand organized, about a thousand people attended. By 1997 the Associated Press could report a thawing in the initial chilly reception obstetricians had given to midwives, who that year had assisted in some 200,000 hospital births, in addition to helping a growing number of mothers deliver at home. Nearby New Mexico, due to its culture and encouragement by the state, had the highest number of home births in the country, 20 percent.

The legal fight
In 1981 the Utah State Legislature entertained an attachment to a bill making home births illegal. The support for this bill waned after opponents asked the legislators who had been born at home to stand. The majority of older members stood. The legislature decided to create a committee to investigate the matter, and that was the end of the issue for the time being. Another effort was made in 2005 to ban home birth, but proponents of natural birth rallied support and saw House Bill 25 pass, legalizing lay midwifery and making it easier to give birth at home. It seemed that whenever attacked, the midwives gained ground rather than losing any.

The new law established education and training requirements for midwives and listed medicines they could administer. For example, the Rho(D) shot, which is used when the mother’s blood type is Rh negative and the ­father’s is Rh positive, was allowed. Oxytocin, which increases the intensity of uterine contractions during a slow birth, was put on the list of medications a lay midwife can administer. It was illegal in the past for them to use any synthetic drugs or even forceps—not that they were ­eager to use either. Most of them are, to various degrees, opposed to artificial ways of controlling birth and many have resisted the certification that is required to administer RhoGAM, Pitocin, or other manufactured drugs. In that sense, they are in agreement with the Utah Medical Association (UMA) efforts to modify the Direct-Entry Midwife Act of 2005 to keep high-risk births away from midwives. By “direct-entry,” the act refers to midwives who enter the profession without formal medical training, directly from the general population.

Despite some continuing opposition from obstetricians, Utah now sees about 600 home births each year, according to the state Office of Vital Records. This means the state has twice the national average, even without estimating the number of births that escape detection by Vital Records. It means that home birth remains an attractive alternative for healthy, low-risk women. For their part, lay midwives remain renegades in some ways, resisting bureaucratization and coming into conflict with nurse midwives, who resent the lay practice of medicine without having gone through the rigors of a formal education. Occasionally the state has prosecuted midwives for the unauthorized use of drugs. In 2000, Elizabeth Camp-Smith, a St. George midwife, was charged for administering Pitocin, though a plea bargain reduced the charges from felonies to misdemeanors.

Not all midwives are as competent or careful as King­ston. In March 2012, two certified midwives had their licenses suspended in Idaho when three babies died at their clinic. In two instances, the women had delayed calling for help. Laurine feels that a birth assistant should be careful not to “wait until the last minute before seeking medical assistance. Doctors make mistakes too and are disciplined for it. Midwives should be held accountable, according to their level of proficiency.” Laurine is quick to point out that “midwifery is by nature amateurish” and “not the same thing as the practice of medicine.” “Birth is natural,” she explains. “It is an individual’s right to give birth at home, assisted by the father and a midwife. This is simple and preferable to treating birth as a surgical procedure.” Where midwives and doctors are able to work together or in tandem, it produces a good result. When not, tragedy can occur. The real problem, though, may be that in Idaho there was already tension between the midwives and doctors, which is a shame.

Philosophy
Laurine describes the role of the traditional midwife as that of a dwindling minority. She says her clients, like the midwives themselves, were the “salt of the earth,” people who “chose to take responsibility for themselves” rather than turn over their health and safety to a bureaucratic medical establishment. She adds that “birth is 97 percent completely normal,” requiring little artificial intervention. Occasionally things go wrong, and “when you have a bad experience, it sticks in your mind and makes you cautious, sometimes overly cautious.” Of course, “this can happen to anyone in any profession.”

“When I enter someone’s home,” she continues, “a child will sometimes announce the arrival of what she calls ‘the baby doctor.’ I say, ‘No, I am not a doctor. I am the baby lady.’” In homes where she has helped deliver several babies, the older children know that her presence suggests the imminent arrival of a new member of the family. Laurine sees herself as “a loyal friend” rather than a doctor. She is there to help “clean the house, get the washing done, prepare food, make phone calls, and do whatever it takes to help. I have medical training and have taken classes to prepare for home-birth emergencies, but my list of teachers includes husbands, grandmothers, babies, and even animals.”

She has found that she loves “all kinds of people. I look deep into their hearts for whatever needs and potential they have, and that awakens a desire to nurture. It gives me a zest for the adventure of life. The memories I have of people are priceless.” She says that if she were creating a woman’s body, she would not put reproduction and elimination in the the same area. She would put sensation under one arm pit and reproduction under the other and keep them both separate from elimination, which she would keep between the legs. It seems to her that having sensation, reproduction, and elimination all together in one area confuses the mind. There is no sexual sensation associated with pregnancy and childbirth. If reproduction were separate from sensation, then maybe people would make it a more conscious decision to have children. It would also be cleaner and more pure. But in this world, “we have to deal with reality, and it happens to be messier than the ideal we hold in our minds,” she says of beatific women blissfully nursing infants in filtered light.

“As I apprentice aspiring midwives,” Laurine reports, “I caution them that they should not work so hard that they burn out. It is a demanding practice that requires twenty-four-hour accessibility.” The divorce rate among midwives is high. Midwives, she says, are like goats among sheep, and “goats have more personality.” The midwife needs to be an entertainer and comforter. She likes to draw analogies between animals and humans, reminding women that animals deliver their babies without any assistance and do just fine. She adds, tongue-in-cheek, that it is a matter of superior intelligence that animals do not need doctors.

Her philosophy includes the traditional concept that the baby is imprinted by the circumstances of its delivery, including who is there and what the atmosphere is like. Those initial impressions leave a blueprint that remains with the individual until death. She also believes that the child is an important, sentient participant in the birth, too often taken for granted at the hospital. Sometimes when she is confused during a prenatal examination or birth, Laurine asks the baby what it is trying to tell her. She thinks the midwife needs to be able to feel the body and the spirit of the baby and considers it a privilege to be present at its birth. In some way, she says, the baby chooses to be born. She draws on an idea taught by Mormon founder Joseph Smith that human beings exist prior to their mortal existence as unembodied spirits which are intelligent and will themselves into the families where they end up. She believes the spirit enters the body at conception but loses its memory of a past existence and matures along with the body.

In order to be up to the challenge of assisting a birth and communing with spirits, Laurine feels she needs to be in good shape physically, spiritually, and mentally. She also needs to recognize the limitations of her abilities and ask for help when needed. She tells apprentices it is not a shame to step back and refuse to assist a birth they do not have a good feeling about or lack the strength to see through. They need to be able to introduce optimism into a home. She asks potential midwives if they can maintain a positive attitude in the face of tragedy, if they can accept God’s will over their personal desires, if they can tolerate stress with a clear mind—taking criticism without becoming discouraged and receiving praise in the same modulated way. If not, they might be headed in the wrong direction because midwives come from a tradition that draws on nurturing, spirituality, and healing as epitomized in the work of such pioneers as Hildegard of ­Bingen, Maria Montessori, Anne Hutchinson, and Elizabeth Fry, as well as more recent models such as Mary Breckinridge and Jeanne Prentice.

Methods
Laurine considered herself and her clients to be a team, acting in concert as they followed the lessons of experience and of nature to produce a healthy baby. The mother was a thermometer gauge for the condition of the child. The child had needs that were sometimes obvious and sometimes not. The same was true for the mother. Through about 3,000 births, Laurine never lost a mother, nor a baby without first seeking emergency hospital care.

The way she ran her practice, she would begin by interviewing a client to determine whether or not the mother was suitable for home birth. If the woman needed financial help, Laurine would help her obtain it. She would tell a first-time mother she needed to undergo a consultation with an obstetrician and, for moral support, would often accompany the young expecting mother to the hospital as her “birth coach.” She would also insist that a young woman receive an overall physical examination and blood work before they proceeded further. The first baby will always be difficult for a mother, not yet knowing what to expect and not yet having experienced the changes her body will go through, after which it becomes easier for her to give birth again.

During the interview with a prospective client, Laurine­ would ask why the mother wanted a home birth. In addition to considering the answer, Laurine would watch carefully to study the woman’s body language to know how comfortable she was with what was to come. Laurine would ask about the woman’s medical history, especially injuries and surgery. It was important to know if the woman was prone to bruise easily or if she had any veins that bothered her. Laurine wanted to know about hormones, the thyroid gland, the general shape of the abdomen, and neurological problems. Allergies were considered, the results of the woman’s last gynecological exam or pap smear, and the condition of her teeth, eyes, ears, and nose. Laurine asked how many sore throats the woman got each year, if her skin had changed with the pregnancy, and what her emotional state was.

Sometimes when the husband was in the room, which Laurine encouraged, he would answer for his wife. Later, when Laurine was able to talk to the woman alone, for instance on the phone, she learned that the man wanted a home birth and the woman did not. If the woman answered questions differently on the phone than in front of her husband, this piqued Laurine’s interest to dig a little deeper to see whose thoughts were being communicated to her.

She also asked the client to provide a family medical history in areas that midwives know are predictive of a woman’s childbirth success, where a mother or sisters might have undergone difficult pregnancies, drawn-out labor, or c-section births. Laurine had young women ask their mothers whether they had taken synthetic estrogen (diethylstilbestrol) after giving birth. Although this was no longer done, it was indicative of a vaginal inflammation or some other problem. Laurine gave each woman a form to take home and fill out regarding birth control and sexual behavior, how they slept, whether they had a cat, and other probing questions. She asked them to think about a designated driver who could take the birthing mother to the hospital if necessary. Laurine asked the women how their family would react if she or her child died within their home. She was amazed by some of the answers, some of which were painfully honest and others remarkably superficial, all contributing to some degree to how Laurine proceeded with the client.

At prenatal visits, Laurine liked to invite the children, husbands, sister-wives, grandmother, and anyone else the mother felt comfortable about having on hand, all of whom were also told they could attend the actual birth if they so desired. Laurine told the children what a special event it was to have a baby. Speaking to the entire family, she would ask about the state of cleanliness of the bathroom, the bathtub especially, because, as she would explain, that is where the mother would need to bathe before and after birth. She would enlist the family members to help clean it, sometimes showing them exactly how to do so. She directed questions to the mother regarding the fetus’s movements, its personality, and how she was bonding with it. She checked the mother’s blood pressure and listened to the baby’s heart tone, also measuring the fetus’s growth. She showed the prospective mother how to weigh herself and check for protein and glucose levels in her urine.

A former client took notes on how Laurine led her through the birth of her child, including what occurred during the visits before and after the birth:

l. First visit. I filled out paperwork just like in a doctor’s office. She asked me about my:

a. medical history
b. birth history
c. family’s/mother’s birth history
d. why I wanted a home birth

2. Second visit. Prenatal examination.

a. We discussed the first trimester of baby development
b. She taught me Lamaze breathing techniques

3. Monthly visits.

a. She would ask if I had noticed any changes to my body, positive or negative. I would get a new assignment to practice for the birth.

4. Semi-monthly. After the thirtieth week since my last normal menstrual period, she wanted me to visit her every other week.

5. Thirty-sixth week. I began visiting her weekly.

a. She gave me a list of things to procure for the birth
b. She reviewed the procedure in case I had to be transported to the hospital, what to expect at the hospital, and which hospital we would go to.

6. Fortieth week. She occasionally telephoned and made herself available for calls.

a. She told me to call as soon as my contractions started, the mucus plug was expelled, or my water broke
b. She asked for directions to my home and visited me there

7. Labor. Laurine was in and out of the house every few hours, and after I was at about six centimeters she stayed with me.

a. She organized all of her equipment on a small table in my bedroom
b. She encouraged me to sit on the exercise ball and move around on it until I felt comfortable
c. I enjoyed being in the bathtub, so she showed me a technique where with each contraction she poured a pitcher of water over my pubic bone area. This helped to increase the effect and lessen the pain of the contraction.

8. Birth.

a. After I was at nine centimeters, she encour­aged me to find a position I liked and felt comfortable in for pushing
b. She stayed for an hour after the birth

9. Post-partum care. She came back twenty-four hours later.

a. She changed the baby’s diaper to check the color of the stool
b. She made sure I had my antibody titer count completed for a RhoGAM shot
c. She called every twenty-four hours and came back three days post-partum to see if my milk had come in and how the baby was nursing

… continued.

“Without Paul there would be no church and no Christianity. He’s the most decisive person that shaped Christianity as it developed. Without Paul we would have had reformed Judaism … but no Christianity.”  —Gerd Lüdemann, Chair of History and Literature of Early Christianity at the University of Göttingen

For many decades now, it has been common practice among scholars, academics, and even Sunday School students to consider Paul of Tarsus as the de facto co-founder of Christianity. The preeminence of his missionary, theological, and literary contributions has risen above all others in importance and influence, such that it hardly seems possible to imagine the growth and evolution of the Christian faith without him.

This perception of Paul has troubled me for more than a decade now, and many scholars have articulated (and shaped) this concern for me. Much of what many consider as Paul’s signature contributions do, upon further careful analysis, seem artificially laden with importance by those who either appropriated his message in support of their own particular religious views or simply and unscrupulously appropriated his persona and shaped it to fit their own religious views.

In either case, it seems virtually undeniable for anyone that, regardless of the actual magnitude of his original influence and importance, Paul had created a reputation and an authority among early Christians enough for him to be cited, or appropriated by them, in their shaping of the evolving faith.

Well, not for everyone.

Robert Price is an accomplished and erudite New Testament scholar, with a prolific publishing career in biblical studies that is only surpassed in quantity by its quality. In his new title The Amazing Colossal Apostle:  The Search for the Historical Paul, recently published by Signature Books, he makes a comprehensive and coherent case against, if not the actual historicity of, the person of Paul of Tarsus, then of his importance and relevance in the historical foundations of Christian origins.

It must be said that these are hardly new or revolutionary ideas or arguments. Students familiar with the works of scholars such as Peter Gandy, Timothy Freke, Earl Doherty, and the earlier G. A. Wells, who mostly argue against a Historical Jesus, will hardly be surprised by the analytical tools and modes of reasoning employed by Price. Even in Pauline studies, the so-called “Dutch Radical” school, beginning in the late 19th century with Allard Pierson, A. D. Loman, and G. J. P. J. Bolland, all the way to their modern-day successor Hermann Detering, has long argued for the non-historicity of Paul, employing much—if not all—of the same arguments.

This is not lost on Price, of course, who readily and openly admits—even embraces—the work and the contributions of all of these authors from the past and present. If anything, Price may have the often annoying tendency to quote or mention too many academics, authors, and ancient texts or engage too many of their arguments in rapid succession without properly laying an expository background for the reader to follow. This may disrupt the flow of the reading and may be off-putting for those readers who are less familiar with the scholars and ideas mentioned (it seems, unfortunately, to be an idiosyncrasy of Price that can be found in most of his other works), but it may also be an excellent starting point for a more interested and curious student for further research.

In any case, regardless of how well explored and developed the theme (i.e., non-historicity of Paul) has been in the past or in other venues, this book has the outstanding advantage of presenting a concise, coherent case within one set of covers, encompassing most—if not all—of the relevant scholarship on the issue.

The book can roughly be divided in two major sections. The first section contains 8 chapters in which Price tackles the major academic and historical-critical subjects surrounding Paul individually and thematically, thereby introducing ideas and laying the groundwork for further reflection. The second section, arguably the most relevant and important original contribution by Price and worth the price of the book on its own, consists of analyses and exegeses of the Pauline epistles individually, where Price will quote each epistle section by section, and provide academic and historical-critical consideration of each sequentially.

SECTION 1

Chapter 1 deals with Paul’s conversion narratives (legends).

In this brief but very interesting chapter, Price discusses the inconsistencies of the many extant conversion narratives of Paul and argues for their historical unlikelihood. While the obvious embellishments from Acts of the Apostles are duly noted, his dismissal of Paul’s own epistolary hints seems striking and a bit cavalier, even though he elaborates on them with more profundity in section 2.

The argument of interpolation is textually and intellectually valid, but it seems to demand a bit more caution and reservation than that of prima facie evidence, especially since Price himself strongly (cogently) argues against the use of the argument of interpolation to excuse seemingly anachronistic Christologies in the Pauline epistles.

(It should be noted here that Price takes a decided step-wise approach, whereby his exact opinions are not entirely manifest and obvious from the onset, but gradually emerge throughout the book. For instance, in this chapter he claims that the Galatians conversion self-reference must be an interpolation, as argued by Bauer and O’Neill. However, Price himself thinks Galatians is an outright Marcionite text, which means the passage is not interpolated, but rather anachronistic for a first-century letter but entirely fitting within its own historical context.)

Nevertheless, the chapter is thought-provoking and should raise further considerations regarding this historical nugget many (most?) scholars simply take for granted. Price’s analogy with the historical problems with the conversion of Constantine, particularly, are very apropos and illuminating.

Chapter 2 deals with the authorship of the Pauline epistles.

In this all too brief chapter, Price superficially enumerates the many arguments scholars, of differing schools and opinions, have espoused to discredit the authorship claims of many (if not most) of the Pauline epistles.

Among them, he lists (and ever so briefly discusses) form criticism, redaction and interpolations, anachronisms, and lack of historical context. He also elaborates (again, briefly) on some key concerns about the lack of a coherent picture of Paul’s opponents, the uneven leadership relationship Paul seems to maintain over his churches, the historical retrospective tones, and other such anachronistic insertions.

This chapter is too short and superficial, offering little to any reader familiar with Pauline scholarship, and overwhelming with statements underdeveloped to any reader so unfamiliar. Also, there is little argument here that would convince anyone over the pseudographic nature of the “established” Pauline epistles, considering few (apologists excepted) would argue for authenticity of the Pastoral or the Deutero-Pauline epistles.

Nevertheless, the chapter does serve the purpose of establishing, especially for the unaccustomed reader, these textual-critical and historical-critical questions, which will be discussed more in-depth in section 2.

Chapter 3 deals with the collection and historical evolution of the corpus of Pauline canon.

This chapter offers an interesting and insightful discussion on how the corpus of Pauline epistles came into existence. It is hardly an obvious and common question, but it proves to be invaluable, and quite intriguing, viz. how did a collection of letters written by Paul come to exist to begin with.  The easier, more common answer (that Marcion came up with his set of letters that would eventually become known as the first Christian canon, in the middle of the second century CE) completely ignores the question as to how he came by them in the first place.

Price surveys the academic literature and comes up with a 4-theories summary that permeates the scholarly community: 1) Paul kept copies of his own letters and collected them for future reference; 2) disciples of Paul, immediately after his death, distributed among themselves copies of letters each community had received (and kept for decades) as a way of continuing Paul’s influence and presence among themselves; 3) organically, these letters cropped up here and there as situations and controversies erupted, and Christians turned to older writings of past charismatic leaders, such as Paul; and 4) the publication and circulation of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles sparked tremendous interest in Paul, which ensured his letters (or recently forged letters in his name) would come out of the woodwork and fill a demand for more material on such a heroic figure (as per Luke).

Price, as expected, eventually embraces Marcion as the ultimate Pauline collector/creator, including the reigning ur-Lukas hypothesis (a hypothetical primitive version of the Gospel of Lucas that supposedly circulated long before it evolved into its present form, popular in certain circles of New Testament schools).  Unfortunately, he does not spend time defeating arguments for a first century, non-Marcionite authorship of ur-Lukas as much as he does (expertly) demolishing the scaffolding for the competing collectors’ hypotheses, but one can expect only so much detail in one book. Such as it is, Price manages to construct a plausible—if not complete—intellectual framework for a second century origin.

Chapter 4 deals with the apocryphal Pauline literature.

In this chapter, Price explores works from the second to fifth centuries CE, that never made it into the forming Catholic canon. Countering that Church Fathers and early apologists avoided Paul’s writing altogether (i.e., Clement, Polycarp, Justin, etc.) because Paul was used by the “wrong” Christians (i.e., Marcionites and Gnostics) as Tertullian’s “Apostle of the heretics,” Price finds hints and traces of the Pauline epistles in such works as the “Prayer of the Apostle Paul,” the “Revelation of Paul,” the “Apocalypse of Paul,” the Coptic “Apocalypse of Paul,” “Third Corinthians,” and the “Acts of Paul.” Herein, Price argues that this marks a movement, coincident with the gradual acceptance of Paul by Irenaeus and Tertullian in the late second century, toward a “Catholicizing” of Paul and the Pauline material.

Chapter 5 deals with Jewish Gnosticism and the concept of Apostles.

This chapter offers a thought-provoking analysis of second- to fifth-century apocryphal ‘Acts’ literature on the formation of the original concepts of apostleship and docetic Christologies. Price argues, weakly, that these represent the original initial outlines of the Christian sect within a Hellenized Judaism, infused with proto-Gnostic philosophies. The intellectual, philosophical discussion is expert and engaging, even though its historical analysis is somewhat lacking. For instance, there is no adequate debate of dating materials and chronological cogency, but he offers one powerful insight that cannot be ignored: Paul never mentions the apostles by numbers (i.e., the Twelve), save in one established posterior interpolation.

Chapter 6 deals with the propagandistic nature of early Christian historiography.

This chapter explores, through a precise and concise case study approach of the canonical Acts of the Apostles compared to the non-canonical Acts of John, how it could be argued that the Lukan work reflects later (second century) congregational strifes, and attempts to mollify them. Price’s overarching theme here, however, is to lay the ground for further discussion of how the Pauline literature will be (or has been) used later to establish and settle posterior discords.

Chapter 7 deals with Simon Magus.

Simon Magus might well be the most important subject of the book, in Price’s own estimation. It certainly is the most important chapter in the first section of the book, the longest chapter, the mid-point of the entire book, and probably the most controversial discussion therein.

Expertly building on the material discussed in previous chapters, Price tracks the narrative evolution of Simon Magus through the canonical Acts, to other second-century writings of Clementine and the Acts of Peter, the Ebionite Preachings of Peter, then on to fourth-century pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions. Paralleling the literary evolution of the Magus with the real life stories and conflicts of Marcion of Pontus, Price creates a compelling, albeit controversial, case that Simon Magus might’ve been a literary construction partly based on, partly used to malign, Paul and some of his (alleged) heretical teachings.

Then, further down the controversial river, Price sides with Detering in the supposition that the Magus (a historical figure known to Josephus) was the real personage while Paul of Tarsus became a fictive literary device onto which certain theological expectations could more easily be pinned.

Price’s case for conflating both Simon Magus in the Christian literature and in Josephus is quite compelling, and while his argumentation regarding the conflation with Paul is sketchy, it is not entirely irrational and illogical. Drawing heavily on Josephus’s accounts of Simon and his dealings in Queen Helena’s court, Price reconstructs a relatively well documented view of the historical Simon. He then proceeds to extrapolate from numerous other less obvious (and less trustworthy) accounts that hint at the magician. His final historical reconstruction is of a splintering sect rudderless after the sudden death of its spiritual leader (i.e., the Essene Teacher of Righteousness or John the Baptist), evolving into diverging factions under different leaderships (e.g., Ebionites, Sabeans, Mandeans, Nasoreans, Gnostics, etc.). Some of the leaders emerging from this traumatizing event might have included Simon the Samaritan (a.k.a. the Magician), Jesus the Nasorean (a.k.a. the Anointed), and later, Marcion of Pontus.

Price then moves to re-creating a compelling narrative for early Christian evolution, though not without problems. His allusion to the Toledoth Jeschu (the Generations of Jesus Gospel) is thought-provoking and exciting (Simeon is Paul for the Nazerenes), but he fails to contextualize its very late date of composition and obvious polemic (read: suspicious) nature. Also, his review of Marcionite evolution is, although reasonable, mostly devoid of actual historical documentation.

The argumentation and the documentary/literary evidence is interesting, compelling, and intellectually sound, if convoluted and sketchy at places. No one, however, could possibly excuse the frailties of the historical framework better than Price himself:  “… if someone objects that the whole procedure is subjective and circular, I deny it. Right or wrong, I have laid out my criteria, derived from a paradigm of widely attested religious evolution. If someone charges that my endeavor here is wholly speculative, I congratulate him on his grasp of the obvious.”

Regardless of whether Price is correct in his precise historical reconstruction (viz. regarding Simon Magus and Paul of Tarsus), he elaborates on very important, substantive points. Expanding F. C. Baur’s notion of Christian factions and D. F. Strauss’s notion of emerging cults, Price asks whether the Corinthian mention of Paul, Apollos, Cephas, and Christ does not suggest a fossilized remnant of an ideology of pre-Christian contentions between “rivals, distinct saviors, avatars, gurus, or gods …” which coalesced into an eventual supremacy for Christ, “with Paul, Apollos (perhaps the same as Apollonius of Tyana), and Simon Peter (Cephas) being reinterpreted as subordinates of Christ.” Furthermore, Price’s assessment of a possible Marcionite influence in the development stages of the canonical Gospels (particularly Mark and John) is quite intriguing and deserving of further scrutiny.

Specific historiographical problems aside, this chapter is a tour de force in rethinking current paradigms in early Christian history, and might suggest clues for further, sorely needed, research. Every serious Bible student needs to read this essay, and most scholars benefit from engaging it, as well.

Chapter 8 deals with the evolving Christian conceptions of Soteriology.

In this chapter, Price attempts to lay out his own reconstruction of how early Christianity evolved theologically by countenancing what he perceives are the chronological markers of Christian thought regarding the concept of salvation. He establishes Christianity as moving from Primitive Sacramentalism to Gnosticism, then to Apocalyptic theology, to Marcionism, and ultimately to Catholicism. He describes each theological identity briefly, coupled with succinct expositions as to the rationale behind this historical reconstruction.

Interesting and didactic as an introduction, though entirely superficial (to some, it may be unfulfilling, but it’s possible Price might just be working on an entire book on this topic, given his proclivity for writing) to the subject of evolving soteriologies, this chapter seems but a preamble—a contextualization, of sorts—for the next section of the book.

SECTION 2

As mentioned previously, section 2 of the book consists of chapters devoted to exploring the texts (generously provided in the main text) of all the Pauline New Testament corpus with extensive annotations and discussions, most especially pertaining to such minutiae as dating the texts, establishing authorship, debating themes and motifs (e.g. Christologies, ecclesiastical structures, theologies, etc.), determining specific sitz-im-leben for the texts, providing summaries of many scholarly views on specific sections of the texts, and commentary on early Christian fathers’ and apologists’ approaches to them.

The structure of the chapters is laid out thusly: The entire New Testament epistle is transcribed (translation by the author, apparatus unmentioned) in paragraph form but with standard modern verses in upper script (for ease of citation), from 3 or 4 paragraphs to several pages at a time, and printed in red. Interspersed between each block of scriptural text are blocks from 3 or 4 paragraphs to several pages of academic discussion pertaining to the previous citation, usually debating the various Marcionite, Simonian, and Catholic elements in that particular segment, plus a discussion on interpolations from a wide array of sources. Each chapter is prefaced by an introductory essay of varying length and depth.

Chapter 9 deals with the Epistle to the Romans.
Chapter 10 deals with the First Epistle to the Corinthians.
Chapter 11 deals with the Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
Chapter 12 deals with the Epistle to the Galatians.
Chapter 13 deals with the Epistles to the (Laodiceans) Ephesians.
Chapter 14 deals with the Epistle to the Philippians.
Chapter 15 deals with the Epistle to the Colossians.
Chapter 16 deals with the Epistles to the (I and II) Thessalonians.
Chapter 17 deals with the Epistle to Philemon.
Chapter 18 deals with the Pastoral Epistles (I and II Timothy and Titus).

The majority of the discussions are too long to be included in a book review, but several examples might provide a clear flavor.

1) After the text for II Corinthians 10:1-6, Price writes:

“Most scholars believe chapter 10 was originally the beginning of a separate epistle, perhaps even of the ‘severe letter’ for which Paul was half-apologizing in 7:8 and that had shaken them up. That may be, but the scenario envisioned is fictive. The emphatic claim to be Paul, as always in such cases, indicates that the writer is not who he pretends to be. It is a staple of pseudepigrapha.”

[Footnote 7 here then lists 73 such examples from canonical and deutero-canonical sources.]

2) After the text for Ephesians 4-6, Price writes:

“In verse 4:6, the reference to ‘one God’ refutes the doctrine of the Marcionites that posits two Gods (1:17; 2:2; 3:9-12). If the Catholic writer seeks to reduce the number of deities, he equally wants to expand the number of apostles (4:11). Marcionism is subtly dismissed as a fad without merit in 4:14 and the author is just as intent, despite some vagueness, in 4:31 when he mentions blasphemy. Can he have thought his readers might be casually maligning God? No, of course, he refers to the unwitting but real blasphemy of the Marcionites who deny the identification of the Christian God with the Hebrew Jehovah.

“Notice that our Catholic writer is at home with language of sacrifice (5:2), which was alien to Marcionites but re-applied allegorically to Jesus by Catholics. He does not hesitate to quote Jewish scripture (4:8; 5:14, 31; 6:3, 17), and already in 2:17 he may have inserted an anti-Marcionite verse. The Catholic response was to allegorize the Old Testament and make it seem to teach Christianity. An excellent example greets us in 5:32, where the union of man and woman in Genesis 2:24 is said to really be about the union of Christ and the church, much as Rabbinic allegory abstracted the spicy Song of Solomon to make it an unlikely paean to Jehovah’s love of Israel.”

[No footnotes for these paragraphs]

Here the reviewer must freely admit that these are among the simplest, shortest entries, but that the more interesting, scholarly discussions are much too long to include herein. It should be said, as well, that one of the strengths of Price’s discussions and exegeses is that, regardless of making his case or coming across as convincing, he offers excellent summaries of the positions of a large array of differing scholars, and thus paints an interesting picture of what the academic landscape looks like in these particular topics, naturally with precedence of citing the scholars who will provide support for this or that specific issue surrounding his overall theme. While one might complain of undue bias, it only serves to demonstrate that Price’s overarching hypothesis is completely within the bounds of current New Testament scholarship.

This section is worth the price of the book by itself. Aside from a very informative, thought-provoking read, it offers an invaluable New Testament study tool, as it doubles as a Pauline New Testament with very long, very extensive in-depth annotations. Undoubtedly, this is the part of the book I will be returning to again and again over the course of the next years, as my own personal studies into the New Testament evolve.

CONCLUSION

Robert Price offers but brief conclusory remarks, probably trusting the merits of his arguments and exegeses to stand on their own. All things considered, the presentation is forceful and reasonable, even if not entirely convincing. Given the paucity of the historical data, and the historical blemish of its provenance, it is entirely unreasonable to expect any argument to be more conclusive than that.

In the concluding words of Robert Price himself:

“If New Testament scholars, at least those who retain any Christian faith, were to lose Paul, they wouldn’t know what to do! To whom would they appeal for a true vision of God and his purposes for mankind?” Nevertheless, “[h]ere at the end of this exploration of the amazing colossal Paul, who looms so large over the religious landscape, it is worth asking whether and in what sense we have retained a useful Paul.”

The main academic and intellectual problem remains that “Paul does not have a unitary voice, is not a single author whose implied opinions might be synthesized and parroted. He is not even a single historical figure” and there is “[n]o author, no authority, only texts—and finally not even texts but fragments.” One must conclude, therefore, that “[a]ll we can do, it seems to me, is read them for what they have to say, or seem to be saying and let them strike us as they may. Very likely, many of them will open our eyes to interesting new possibilities, may unveil responsibilities we tried our best to forget we had. Some will edify and some will challenge, and it will no doubt prove to have been well worth reading them, but we cannot hide behind the artificial figure of Paul” any longer.

Reassessing the historical data surrounding the actual person of Paul of Tarsus and, more poignantly, whatever religious philosophies he might have bequeathed us, may be a never-ending proposition, but it may prove enormous academic dividends and it will undoubtedly improve our religious and spiritual understandings.

For the religious, this book provides intellectual stimulation to better contextualize early Christian history and thought, and perhaps allow one’s faith to become more flexible and comprehensive, sorely needed traits in a world that constantly flirts with intolerance and destructive dogmatism. For the academic—and, naturally, for the student—of the Bible and early Christian history, this book provides a trove of reasoned arguments and historical-critical thought experiments that will enrich and deepen one’s own understanding of the origins of Christianity, perhaps even convince and change entire paradigms.

All in all, The Amazing Colossal Apostle is an amazing colossal book that provides a concise, though comprehensive, overview of the historical-critical method as applied to a specific theme (i.e., Paul of Tarsus) and an excellent in-depth discussion of the Pauline epistles that will undoubtedly provide tools and insights for any student of the New Testament, lay and professional, while enlivening—perhaps changing, even—the future of academic biblical research.

Salt Lake City – Susan Elizabeth Howe’s extraordinary collection of poems, Salt, draws inspiration from an element so common in the Great Basin we almost forget it’s there. We float in it, we race across it, and when the wind blows the wrong way, we can even smell it.

Howe, an Associate Professor at Brigham Young University finds salt in everyday locations—the white veins that cut through red sandstone, animal lures set out for deer at sunset, and in the sweat she licks from the base of her husband’s neck. To Howe’s fans, this collection will seem like normal fare. They expect pages that sizzle a bit, such as the description of when one woman drives through town and sees a 1965 Thunderbird, then angles over to take a look. “Not of the car,” she confesses, but “the owner—Jake of Jake’s Autos.” Or when she muses about a chorus line of poppies dressed in flimsy skirts over black and green underthings. Howe’s creative eye sees bands of ancient beings holding hands along Canyonland walls. She also quotes from ads for stallion stud services compiled from the Horseshoe Trader, which offers unexpected poetry in its references to “Belles Femmes” and “special considerations for multiple mares.”

Recognized as one of the most important local poets, Howe was invited in 2011 to write the foreword to the anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets, a compilation of some eighty word artists. Her poetry has been performed with accompaniment by the Utah Symphony and she is a librettist for the opera, The Long Walk Home, by English composer Harriet Petherick Bushman.

In an environment where most copies of poetry books are soon relegated to bookstore discount tables, Howe’s first volume of poems, Stone Spirits, had exceptional sales. “We distributed Susan’s earlier award-winning collection,” says Tom Kimball, marketing director for Signature Books, “and I have to admit that I was impressed as I watched box after box of her book go out the door through to the last copy, and people still ask for it.”

Salt can be found in local Utah bookstores and from Amazon.com. It has 126 pages and sells for $19.95. Peter Makuck of Tar River Poetry calls it an especially “memorable” collection that “reminds us of our humanity, provides us with solace for hard news, and makes us occasionally rock with laughter as well. This is a most rewarding book, every poem a keeper.”

Many examples of missionary journals are available from early days of the Church. (See, for example, the diaries collected in Brigham Young University’s online archive collection http://lib.byu.edu/digital/mmd/). In reading through them, one finds that they often share a remarkable number of common themes: the depraved state of the locals, the horrible food, slacker companions, and the struggles with competing missionaries of other faiths. It would seem that little has changed in the contents of these journals over time. Indeed, there must be some ur-text for missionary journals, some platonic form for writing of the mixture of doldrums, panic, and interpersonal struggle that seems common to all who embark on the Lord’s errand while in their youth.

While the original missionary pictographs may be on some cave walls somewhere near Spring Hill, Missouri, this book provides a new and extremely valuable set of missionary diaries: the Sandwich Island diaries of Joseph F. Smith, tracking his mission in the Hawaiian Islands from January 1, 1856, to October 21, 1857, the last two of his three-year service on the islands These diaries cover twenty-two months; two earlier volumes, spanning presumably from his arrival in September 1854 to the end of 1855, were destroyed in a fire in June 1856. Transcribed with great attention to detail by Nathaniel Ricks, who received his master’s degree in history from Brigham Young University, the diaries trace the day-to-day acts of Joseph F. through an extremely formative time. Ricks occasionally includes historical background at key points, as well as biographical detail for individuals whom Joseph F. encounters or with whom he corresponds. On the whole, the diaries are invaluable—they provide unique insight into the adolescent days of the sixth president of the Church, as he complains of bad food and ignorant natives, as he quarrels with mission companions, and writes to potential future wives.

At age fifteen, Joseph F. departed from Salt Lake City shortly after being ordained an elder in April 1854 and spent the next three years traveling between Hawaii, Oahu, and other Hawaiian islands, at first learning the language, then presiding over various areas. Already known as something of a firebrand, Joseph F. had a headstrong personality that shines through the journals; he is unafraid, bold in declaring the messages of the Restoration and of the gathering, and brash at times in his judgments of native Hawaiians and his fellow Saints. Nonetheless, there is much that these diaries do not include. Those who are looking for the original occurrence of legendary JFS stories like that of his Hawaiian “Ma” http://www.scienceviews.com/photo/library/SIA2838.html), the “True Blue” story (http://lds.org/manual/teachingsjoseph-f-smith/chapter-2?lang=eng), or his “Dream of Manhood” (http://lds.org/general-conference/2007/04/i-am-clean?lang=eng) will be disappointed, for there is nothing in the diaries to suggest that any of these experiences ever took place. These omissions may be due to the limited time span covered by the diaries, but they still leave us without an original record about these landmark events in Joseph F.’s life. As a result, these diaries do little to corroborate the formative stories told by Joseph F. himself.

That said, the diaries themselves have some great moments of their own that have previously been unknown—nothing perhaps as grandiose as the Dream of Manhood, but a few interesting themes of note emerge:

•Joseph as hothead. One particular highlight is that of JFS getting into a fistfight with a missionary companion who calls him a “Damn Shit Ass” and charges that Joseph F. purposely misplaced the companion’s scissors. But Joseph F. regularly loses his temper, shouting at Saints in his sermons, hotly debating local preachers, or berating natives for hoarding food instead of feeding him.

•Joseph as racist. His view of the native islanders ranges from love and appreciation, to expressed confidence in the eventual white skins that righteous Hawaiians will achieve, to condemning them as fundamentally lazy and dishonest. It’s unclear how or whether his view of the people evolved during the course of hismission; by my own estimation more praise is given to native islanders in the early parts of the diaries.

•Joseph as omnivore. Yes, a great deal of the diaries describes Joseph’s reading a wide variety of texts and continually applying himself intellectually, but he didn’t just hunger intellectually. A surprising amount of the diaries is composed of descriptions of food—or lack thereof. I daresay Joseph F. never ate another sweet potato, and it’s clear he lost his taste for poi before he ever acquired it. A typical entry reads: “we have Been with out anything to ear [sic], having nothing this morning but about a half a pint of goats milk, and a little Boiled squash! we had nothing els[e]. no! not somuch as Salt!! hard times.” I estimate that at least half of the diary entries include complaints about the food.

•Joseph as teenager. Like any good missionary, Joseph F. spends a good deal of time loafing. Many days are spent in reading the Deseret News, mending his shoes, hiking in the jungle, or watching ships come in to the harbor at Lahaina. To his credit, however, there is little indication in the diaries that Joseph F. got trunky as the time of his return home approached.

To summarize: Joseph F. was a seventeen-year-old on a mission in Hawaii, and behaved like one. Joseph F. served in Hawaii during a very interesting time in LDS history: The gathering of the Hawaiian Saints to Lanai had scarcely begun, the Mormon Reformation of 1856–57 would soon be in full swing and the specter of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in September 1857 was just around the corner. Hints of these themes are seen throughout the diaries, both in Joseph F.’s own writings and in the letters he receives. Ricks helpfully includes portions of such letters when Joseph F.’s diaries indicate having received them, although they are provided selectively and perhaps not as uniformly as more voracious readers might prefer. But despite living in such tumultuous times, Joseph F.’s diaries are reassuringly familiar; he was desperate for word from home, living among a people who seemed utterly foreign to him, while trying his best to live up to his birthright. As a result, the Sandwich Island diaries are immediately recognizable as an LDS missionary experience and yet retain an intensely foreign quality, both because of cultural shifts over time and because of Joseph F.’s unique character. The diaries are helpful and engaging, both as a resource and as a reminder to us that, when it comes to missionary work, the more things change the more they remain the same.

The Journal of Mormon History, reviewed by John J Hammond

Nathaniel R. Ricks, who earned an M.A. in history at Brigham Young University–Provo and currently teaches at Pikes Peak Community College and Falcon Middle School in Colorado Springs, has performed an admirable service for those interested in Mormon and Hawaiian history by publishing an annotated typescript of the Sandwich Islands diaries/journals of the teenage missionary Joseph F. Smith.

In a brief but informative eleven-page introduction, Ricks indicates that Joseph F. was the son of the martyred Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. No doubt traumatized by his father’s violent death and funeral when he was about five, Joseph F. was further traumatized by the death of his mother in 1852 when he was thirteen: “Over the ensuing months and years Joseph F. struggled to find himself,” becoming “something of a troublemaker.” This difficult period involved “experimentation with both tobacco and alcohol,” as well as a physical assault on his male schoolteacher (vii–viii, 23 note 3).

Although Ricks does not mention it, by the spring of 1854 Brigham Young had been informed by leaders in the Hawaiian mission that older men found it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn the native language,¹ so fifteen-year-old Joseph F., sixteen-year-old John R. Young (Brigham’s nephew),and others in their early twenties, were dispatched to Hawaii—in Joseph F.’s case, probably with the double hope that he could boost missionary work in the islands and get “reformed” in the process.

On the first page there is a wonderful photograph of Joseph F., taken just after his return to Utah from the Islands. Before beginning the typescript, Ricks provides six pages of brief but helpful biographical information on seventy-nine “Prominent Characters” whose names appear in the diaries, including Protestant missionaries and other “gentiles.” There is a good physical description of the six-volume diary, which consists of makeshift collections of pages sewn together by hand. Unfortunately, the first two volumes were destroyed when a cottage burned in early June 1856 at the mission “gathering place” on Lana’i. (Joseph F. was then on the Big Island of Hawaii.) These lost diaries apparently covered his journey to the islands, his arrival at Honolulu in September 1854, and roughly the first twenty months of his mission, which lasted until October 1857. Virtually all of Joseph F.’s personal possessions in the islands were consumed in the fire, including, he claims, “a deguarian likeness of my father, uncle Joseph [Smith Jr.] and Brigham Young, a present and priceless to me.”² After painfully listing all his many losses, he wrote: “Well these dear fiew things is gon[e] and not one saved, and now I am destitute, but with old Jobe exclaim: ‘The Lord givith and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I am confident that he has and will provide for his servents, so all is well.”

Ricks does not tell us much about those months before Joseph F.’s first surviving diary begins, failing to mention a point made by Joseph F.’s biographer Scott Kenney: “Other missionaries received mail routinely, but for six months, none came for him. Finally a letter arrived from [his cousin, once removed] George A. Smith, the first communication from home since he had arrived.”³ Joseph F. learned Hawaiian very quickly, and Ricks points out the fact—clearly evident in Joseph F.’s diaries—that during his mission “he worked to educate and improve himself,” reading “voraciously in history, philosophy, poetry, the classics, current events, [and] virtually anything he could acquire” (xiv), including light novels. From a negative standpoint, however, he spent an enormous amount of time on this non-missionary activity.

Joseph F. began his mission on Maui where, on July 24, 1855, he was appointed president of the “Maui Conference,” which did not then include the nearby islands ofMoloka’i and Lana’i. In April 1856, he was called to preside over one of the two conferences on Hawai’i and, on his way there on April 17, wrote the following grammatically imperfect but aesthetically sophisticated description of his voyage:

We ware soon left in a compleat callm, the sails flittering and flop-[p]ing at each rock of our appearantly or seemingly deserted and forsaken craft. We ware alone and in silence, the howling of the wind had seased, and and [sic] the swol[l]en wave had sank to its level, and all was still, but now the luminary of midnight had arisen to a considerable highth, its silvery rays shone softly upon the unrippled sea, which threw around us the most loving, and majestic of all sceneries, on our left & right ware the riseing hills of Maui & Lanai towering far above the milky clouds that hung thickly beneath their sum[m]its, and yet a little farther on ware the towering peakes of Maunakea and Maunaloa of Hawaii, with their snowy mantles spread by the hand of nature never to be removed, standing, to defy the tempests of ages gone by and to come, and from it[s] bowels ware belching forth the liquid flames of everlasting torment as is made know by our good and self righteous priests of this progressive and enlightened age.

 Doing missionary work in the Sandwich Islands in the 1850s was no easy task. Utah missionaries generally lived with the natives in thatched huts, ate their exotic food, and constantly complained of being bitten all night by ticks and fleas. For example, for “breckfast” on March 19, 1856, Joseph F. “feasted” on “one potatoe and a little salt, Dinner and supper was the same, I had many strong thoughts, but in a oath thanked the lord for the privelige I then enjoyed.” The next day he reported: “Last night my rest was disturbed by being bit 4 or 5 times by a centipede which had cralled inmy bead [bed]. I sleept no more till morning, (this was about midnight) in the morning attended meeting, and pertook of my breckfast which consisted of one potatoe and salt, as before.” Ricks notes that “Hawaiian centipedes vary in size, color, and potency of sting; the largest can reach twelve inches in length.” (17 note 30)

Even more candidly, Joseph recorded:

I have seen whol[e] families who ware on sallid [solid] mass of scabes, (having the itch[)] and every sti[t]ch, or rag they had about them or on their premisis, ware alive with the itch. I have slept in these circumstances, I have shaken handes with those whos[e] body and hands ware a scab! I have eaten food mixed up like unto batter with such handes. . . . I have slept in places where should my hog sleep my stumache would forbid me eating of it. . . . I have slept with my bretheren on the same mat with those who ware rotten! And stunk with diseas! And I have seen more than this, the fact of it is, this nation is rot[t]en, and stink[s] because of, and with their own wickedness, and but fiew are exceptionable, with but fiew exceptions their hogs, doges and cates and they live together, and I have seen doges particularly besides other animals, completely covered with the itch so that their hair had all left their bodies in a scabe. . . . Once I entered a house where several persons was eating and there was a huge dog [that] stood with his head over the calabash of Poi, his mouth and eyes ware drooling & run[n]ing watter, matter &c. he had some fiew heres [hairs] upon him, but scabes, running sores, some skin, no flesh, bones &c. . . . (July 4, 1856, 40–41)

 The typescript Ricks provides is clearly presented and serviceable, native language words and phrases are helpfully translated, and much useful information is communicated in the footnotes.  He seems to have relied a great deal for these annotations on material in the Joseph F. Smith Papers Collection (LDS Church History Library).⁴  In footnotes he includes summaries and quotations from almost all of the extensive correspondence Joseph F. received from friends and relatives during the latter part of his mission, although these quotations tend to move the focus of the narrative away from Hawaii and toward Utah.

Ricks sometimes engages in unjustifiable speculations concerning passages in the typescript. For example Joseph F. wrote that he and his companion, Thomas A.Dowell, stayed one night on Moloka’i with “three persons who professed to be mormons.  We had to go to bed with out supper after traveling as we did.  The folks afforded us one old dirty sheet or Kikei to sleep under, my thoughts have been, curious, a long [while?] back.”  Ricks comments: “It is unclear on what Joseph F.’s ‘curious’ thoughts focused. It is possible that he is simply referring to the physical and spiritual degeneracy of the natives, or something completely unrelated. Perhaps this is even a veiled reference to curiosity about sexuality, suggested by the emphasis he places on the phrase and its seeming disjointed [sic] from the previous phrase” (96 and note 8).

The major shortcoming of this work, however, is Ricks’s apparent failure to consult any of the numerous journals being kept by Joseph F.’s fellow missionaries. Thus, his knowledge of mission history oftentimes is inadequate. For example, Joseph F.’s long-term companion on the Big Island of Hawaii was Washington B. Rogers. Ricks is apparently unaware that Rogers, early in his mission, was extremely paranoid, convinced that the native brethren on the east coast of Maui were determined to kill him. This episode occurred while Joseph F. also was on Maui and is thoroughly documented in Francis (“Frank”) Asbury Hammond’s journal.⁵  Apparently Rogers had moved past this problem when Joseph F. was his companion on Hawaii, however, since he notes only that Rogers was a “somewhat deficient” preacher and lacked proficiency in Hawaiian (June 22, 1856; May 5, 1857; 36, 99).

As a second example, Ricks apparently does not know that the whaleboats which were the main means of travel between Maui, Lana’i, andMoloka’i were also powered by sails (23 notes 1–2).  Third, he states that the Lahainaluna Seminary above Lahaina was a “Methodist-run high school established in 1831.” In fact, the “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions” had founded the school, and it was primarily “Congregationalist or Calvinist, but open to other denominations.”⁶

Fourth, Ricks quotes from a letter Henry P. Richards on Maui wrote to Joseph F. complaining of the idleness and disobedience of “these infernal servants of Napela’s.” Ricks suggests that they were “probably native elders” (34–35 note 31); but in addition to being a lawyer, judge, and prominent Mormon convert, Jonathan Napela ran a profitable potato-growing operation at Kula. It seems more likely that Richards was complaining about Napela’s employees.

Fifth, on March 29, 1856, Joseph F. had an angry verbal and physical confrontation with another missionary whom he calls “Bro. Linn,” and “Bro. G. Linn.”  Ricks identifies him as “Elder Gordon Linn” (xxii, notes 14, 18–20, 38), but there was no Utah Mormon missionary in the Sandwich Islands in the 1850s by that name.He actually was Gustaf (or maybe Gustov) Linn (or Lynn), whom Henry Bigler baptized on June 29, 1852, on O’ahu.⁷  He was an elderly carpenter, married to a native woman, and fluent in Swedish, English, and native Hawaiian. He served a full-time mission on the Big Island of Hawaii with James Keeler and Reddick Allred,⁸ and worked with other Utah missionaries on Maui and O’ahu.

The confrontation was over a pair of scissors that Linn had loaned to Joseph F. According to Ricks, the lengthy (page and a half) journal entry describing this event (18–19) is all in Joseph F.’s handwriting, though Joseph F. prefaced his description of the altercation by saying “a scene followed that I shall leave for bro. [Simpson] Molen to describe, as he was a spectator.” Ricks speculates that “Molen [Joseph F.’s companion] dictated his version of events to Joseph” (19 note 35). According to this description—which is ambiguous and seemingly very contradictory—Linn asked for his scissors, Joseph F. failed to produce them immediately, Linn became angry, there was a heated verbal exchange, and Linn called him a rude name.  At that point, “Linn drawed up and struck him [Joseph Jr.] with his fist on the temple,” but everything that follows makes it fairly clear that it was Joseph F. who walked over and punched Linn while the latter was sitting down. Linn rubbed his head, complained about Joseph F.’s action, and threatened: “I will try the law for it and see if it well uphold you in imposeing upon another like this. S[mith said] Go ahead and sue me if you wish.” Joseph F. had gotten into several conflicts with other Utah missionaries early in his mission—documented in Hammond’s journal—and clearly had a hot temper. The contradictory, problematic account of the altercation with Linn may be an indication that Joseph F. had an uneasy conscience and attempted to cover up his action.

One of the great values of Joseph F.’s diary is its documentation of the serious decline in the mission, especially in the period covered by his extant journals. On Hawaii as early as the summer of 1856, he noted that “we have been nine days on a stretch with out a morsel of meat, and as poor poi as I could eat!” (42) In 1856 and 1857, many of the Utah elders reported that the native Mormons throughout the mission became increasingly unwilling to feed them.  On February 9, 1857, Joseph F. struggled to provide a just assessment:  “Ware I to speak with Strict verasity I would call this people any thing but Saints, for indeed they are as destitute of that quality as, as the winters’ chilliest Blast is of the destitute of the ardent rais [rays] of a Summers’ Sun! this is strictly true, yet I will admit that some—a precious fiew!—are honest, Kind and hospitable as their limited knowlage, dispositions, vageres [vagaries] and educations will permit, and I do feel to say god Bless that precious fiew!” (79)

Two months later on Moloka’i, Joseph F. found only lapsed Mormons who totally refused to feed him and his companion. Joseph F. exploded wrathfully:

I have ate enough dirt and filth, put up with anough inconveniencies, slept sufficiently in their filth, muck & mire, lice and every thing els[e], I have been ill treated, abused, and trod on by these nefarious ethnicks just long enough. I believe it is no longer a virtue, if they will not treat me as I merit, if they will not obey my testimony—and my counsels, but persist in their wickedness, hard heartedness, and indifference, their lyngins, lyings, decietfulness, and hard hearted cruelty as regards the servents of the lord, I will not stay with them, but leave them to their fait. (April 8, 1857)

To survive, Smith and his companion (Dowell) milked cows for a non-Mormon dairyman in the area, trying unsuccessfully to convert him and a few other whites. Joseph F. then ended his mission at the City of Joseph on Lana’i, where he spent most of his time reading books and writing letters. When he left the islands on October 6, 1857, Brigham Young (only in part, one could argue, because of the Utah War) was closing down the mission.

Ricks offers four reasons for the mission’s serious decline after 1854. First, “inexperienced” converts were given leadership responsibilities; second, as already noted, the demands of supporting the missionaries were a heavy drain on members’ resources; third, “cultural schisms” alienated the members from “the Anglo missionaries”; and fourth, the “Protestant community” experienced “growing anti-Mormon sentiment” (3). In fact, Protestant missionaries had been working vigorously against the Mormons since 1851.

Ricks’s first reason—inexperienced local leaders—was less of a problem than traditional Hawaiian sexual promiscuity and missionary inconsistency in dealing with it. Native Elders Jonathan Napela, J. W. H. Kauwahi, and William H. Uaua committed adultery quite regularly, felt great remorse, and were quickly “forgiven” by the Utah elders (who often excommunicated less important native sexual transgressors), because these Hawaiian leaders were crucial to the success of the Mormon effort.  While exploiting the social position and affluence of these native Mormon luminaries, the Utah elders patronizingly referred to native priesthood holders in general as “children” and seldom included them in mission decisions. This exclusion certainly led directly to “cultural schisms,” and in fact the native brethren angrily “revolted” at the mission conference on Lana’i in late July 1855, though Ricks does not mention it. Their protest was summarily quashed.⁹

As for the financial burden imposed by the missionaries, the mission was required to be self-sustaining, and the missionaries themselves were certainly poor. However, the native Saints resented pressures to pay for the translation of the Book of Mormon and George Q. Cannon’s pamphlet in Hawaiian promoting it, but they more deeply resented Brigham Young’s order to move what had started out as the “Hawaiian Mission press” (purchased with money principally supplied by the native Saints) to San Francisco where it was employed mostly in publishing the Mormon Western Standard in English. The native Saints also sacrificed substantially to underwrite Elder Nathan Tanner’s scheme to buy a “mission vessel” in San Francisco (a financial failure) followed by the badly constructed sloop Lanai, also a total failure. Furthermore, the missionaries usually took for granted the native Saints’ efforts to provide food, lodging, and laundry services. The elders virtually never washed their own clothes and would go to great lengths to get native women to do it for them.

A further source of disillusionment, not noted by Ricks, was the failed attempt to “gather” all of the native Saints to Palawai on Lanai. Such a move violated the deep-seated commitment of natives to their specific island and traditional village. My great-great-grandfather Frank Hammond was the primary mover in this attempt to create what the native convert “pioneers” on Lana’i took to calling “Zion 2” (“Zion 1” being Utah), and he compounded the problem by attempting to force them to live a radical version of the communitarian Mormon law of consecration. Other major negative factors in the decline of the mission, which Ricks does not mention, were the public announcement in 1852 that polygamy was Mormon Church policy and the failure of priesthood administrations to protect the Oahu and East Maui Saints from a terrible smallpox epidemic in 1853. These many negative factors led to the publicly proclaimed apostasy in late 1856 of the highly influential Elders Kauwahi and, for a time, Uaua. At about the same time, Utah Mormon missionary John Hyde Jr. immediately apostatized upon reaching Honolulu and, enthusiastically aided by Protestant missionaries, dramatically aired his views in public meetings, newspaper articles, and a pamphlet. Ricks provides useful information regarding these sensational events. In his diary, Joseph F. acknowledged that these developments profoundly troubled the native Saints, caused many of them to drop away, and made others less willing to provide food and laundry services for the Utah elders. He recorded spending most of Sunday, February 25, 1857, in “partially . . . removing the load of cankering doubt resting upon the minds of the people, because of the reasent attempts of Hyde and Kauwahi to thwart Mormonism, and anihiliate its propogaters” (81).

It is clear in Joseph F.’s journal that he became increasingly contemptuous of the native Hawaiian people in general during the mission’s decline in 1856 and 1857. In 1864 at age twenty-five, he returned to Hawaii as part of a high-level Church delegation assigned to deal with the problems created by Walter Murray Gibson; and although Brigham Young invited him to remain and assist in re-opening and re-building the mission, he declined.  The next time he returned to Hawaii was in the 1880s to avoid arrest for unlawful cohabitation in Utah.

My criticisms of this edition aside, the book has many positive features, and historians owe Nathan Ricks a debt of gratitude for making much more accessible the mission diaries of Joseph F. Smith, who, despite his extreme youth, was a perceptive and powerful figure in the early Hawaiian Mission and LDS Church.

Notes:

1. See, for example, Phillip B. Lewis, president of the Sandwich Islands Mission, Letter to the First Presidency, March 6, 1853, in Manuscript History of the Hawaiian Mission; and Phillip B. Lewis, Letter to Parley P. Pratt, March 19, 1853, MS 2248, both in LDS Church History Library.

2. Joseph F., Journal, June 26, 1856, 37–39. Ricks notes: “Were this truly a daguerreotype, it was certainly one of a kind and most definitely invaluable. . . . [N]o verified daguerreotypes of Mormonism’s founder or of his brother Hyrum are known to have survived” (39 note 43).

3. Scott G. Kenney, “Before the Beard: Trials of the Young Joseph F. Smith,” Sunstone, Issue 120 (November 2001): 25.

4. He identifies these documents as being in Richard E. Turley Jr., ed., Selected Collections from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2 vols., DVD (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, [December 2002] (viii note 3).

5. Francis A. Hammond, Journal, December 21–23, 1854, – January 12, 1855. The nine-volume holograph diary of Hammond’s Hawaiian Mission is in the LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City. Several years ago, I made typescripts of this journal and donated copies to the LDS Church History Library and to libraries at the University of Utah, BYU–Provo, BYU–Hawaii, the Utah State Historical Society, and the Maui Historical Society at Wailuku, Maui.

6. Nicole McMullen, executive director of the Bailey House Museum, Maui Historical Society, Wailuku, Maui, email to John J Hammond, July 29, 2011.

7. William Farrar, Journal, March 29, April 2, and July 3, 1852, MSS 1521, holograph and typescript, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

8. James Keeler, Journal, March 11–25, 1854, MSS 834, fd. 3, Perry Special Collections, copy of holograph in my possession; Reddin A. Allred, Journal, July 26, 1854, Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum (Salt Lake City) typescript. Allred calls him “Gustaf Linn.”

9. Hammond, Journal, July 23–24, 1855; see also John StillmanWoodbury, Diary, July 23–24, 1855, holograph and typescript, MSS 168, Box 1, fd. 13, Perry Special Collections.

Hatch was born and raised in Salt Lake to parents who were “admittedly much cooler than I was,” he says. “I embraced geekery at an early age,” and he fell in love with history over football, tech over partying, old movies, current events, cutting-edge literature such as Blood Meridian, and films by David Fincher.

“Okay, he’s sort of a walking encyclopedia,” says Tom Kimball, marketing director at Signature Books. “That will be useful here at Signature—the history background, his knowledge of pop culture, and the technology side of his personal interests.”

After Hatch’s LDS mission to upstate New York, his first job was with Deseret Book, where he became the lead supervisor of one of their large stores. He earned a degree in history from the University of Utah and was managing editor of Sunstone magazine. He later supervised a team at the Verizon Wireless tech support department.

In 2006 he annotated a first-person account of a Mormon dignitary, published as Danish Apostle: The Diaries of Anthon H. Lund. Hatch has presented at the annual conference of the Mormon History Association. He was a staff editor for the Journal of Mormon History and blogger for “By Common Consent” in its early days.

Hatch, who is 36 years old, says he “loves to read, write, watch old detective movies, cook dinner for my family, and discuss politics and religion—even in polite company.” He has written four feature-length screenplays and numerous shorts. One script, based in part on research by Signature editor Devery Anderson and having to do with the Emmett Till murder, was a finalist at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and semi-finalist for the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Hatch is hoping to publish his senior thesis tracing Cecil B. DeMille’s involvement in erecting monuments to the Ten Commandments in city parks. He has done research on LDS church president George Albert Smith.

John’s spouse Emily is the owner of Carpe Diem Photography in Salt Lake City. They have two boys, Ethan, 10, and Matthew, 9.

For instance, Jason worked as a film stripper at a local newspaper called the Davis County Clipper and now jokes that “not everyone gets to be a stripper for the Clipper.” That was several years ago. At 36 years of age, with a wife and daughter, he has also worked at the Utah Tax Commission archives and eventually became the graphic artist at Weber State Printing Services, a job he enjoyed because he was able to work and continue at school simultaneously.

Jason has lived in Davis County most of his life. He met his wife, Michelle, “at an LDS singles ward and we got married in 1999.” They “love the ocean and visit it as often as possible,” he adds. So why stay in Utah? “We also like Bear Lake,” he says, “and have it as a backup to the ocean when we can’t get there.”

What does he think about Signature Books? “It’s a long way from my Clearfield high school graphic arts class,” he says. “I can’t wait to get started.”

Jason will be getting acclimated over the next six months with help from Connie Disney, who is retiring from Signature after 26 years with the company. “Connie has always been our secret weapon,” says Ron Priddis, managing director. “She adds so much to the books that we’ve always seen her contribution as job insurance for the rest of us. Her designs set our books apart from those of other local publishers.”

Connie was hired at Signature from Sunstone magazine, where she worked for several years after studying at Brigham Young University and developed a reputation as a creative genius who was dedicated to cause célèbres. “Back in those days, production meant laying out the magazine with X-Acto knives and sticky wax and pasting up segments of text columns onto paste-up boards,” she explained. “Production is so much cleaner now than back in the olden days!”

As an example of what Connie has meant to the company, Signature Books won two design awards in 2012 from PubWest, a trade organization that serves the western-states publishers. “Connie is the standard bearer for design trends in Mormon history,” adds Curt Bench of Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City. “Her work has been outstanding.”

Several authors, who have benefited from her talent and experience, said they agree with this sentiment. “Connie’s attention to detail allowed her to transform large chunks of primary source documents from my manuscript into a readable volume,” commented John S. Dinger, whose Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes won Best Book Awards from the John Whitmer Historical Association and Mormon History Association. “My book isn’t the only one she has breathed life into. Everyone will miss her sensitivity and skill,” says Dinger.

Connie plans to spend her retirement catching up with grandchildren and traveling with her husband who has had three books on Italy published by St. Martin’s Press and has a contract for a fourth book. Recently Connie and a friend enjoyed taking a class together on the history of Judaism and she would like to take classes in related topics or even learn what it’s like to be on the other side of the table and pull together an anthology of essays for Signature Books.

The Perils of Pauline Studies

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is a strange time for Pauline studies. After seemingly having run out of other ideas to beat to death, the academy has ventured into new territory. One might even say that, on analogy with the intrepid Netherlanders of old, Pauline scholars have created new territory to settle. A visit to the seminary book store or the religion aisle at Barnes & Noble will acquaint the reader with books arguing that Paul was a culture critic of Hellenistic Judaism, that he was a Jew and remained a Jew, that he wrote against U.S. foreign policy, and so on. Indeed, more than ever, he seems like a new Oracle of Delphi whose equivocal utterances may be read as conveying whatever message one most wants to hear. Like the infamous “historical Jesus,” Paul has become a reflection of the scholars studying him.

Part of the reason for this state of affairs is that Jesus has recently been unavailable for these uses. As scholars have become more skeptical about recovering the goods on the historical Jesus (as witness the Jesus Seminar’s claim that only 18 percent of the sayings database was reliable), the less plausible it has seemed to make him the poster boy for green politics, feminism, whatever. Granted, this hasn’t stopped a number of scholars who still write books manufacturing and manicuring Jesus to look like them, since the less evidence there is, the more room is left for speculation; but some have retreated to Paul instead. Perhaps he can be the bulwark theologians once thought they had in Jesus. But great ironies lie this way.

First, the closer scrutiny the Pauline texts receive, the clearer it becomes (and by now it seems mighty clear indeed) that the epistles present us with many of the same challenges the Gospels did. They appear to be filled with the same variety of redactional seams, non-sequiturs, and double-audience rhetorical tricks we find in the Gospels. In short, the historical Jesus problem replicates itself in the case of Paul. The epistles reveal themselves to the discerning reader to have exactly the same sort of limitations as the Gospels do: both are collections of fragments and pericopae contributed and fabricated by authors and communities of very different theological leanings. Both present barriers to the access of the individuals under whose names they appear, not open doors.

Confronting the Protestant Christ

Second, scholars are more reluctant to recognize the data surrounding Paul and their implications. In short, Protestants of whatever vestigial degree have long ago elevated Paul over Jesus as their dogmatic master. Conservative evangelical Edward J. Carnell¹ was forthright about this: the epistles interpret or, in other words, trump the Gospels, and Romans and Galatians interpret (or trump) all the other epistles. I find a certain analogy from religious history helpful at this point. In esoteric Ismail’i Islam,² there is a belief that Allah sends pairs of incarnations of himself. First comes the “proclaimer” who gives as much of the gospel to the masses as they can understand: the milk, not meat. Shortly after him the “foundation” arrives, the master of esoteric meaning of what was preached by the proclaimer, truth that may sound quite strange to the run-of-the-mill believer and may indeed be rejected by them as heresy. But this is the meat. Rudolf Bultmann³ understood the Gospel of John to be cognizant of something like this when it has Jesus predict the advent of the paraclete who will unveil new truths to the disciples, for which they were not yet ready during Jesus’s earthly sojourn. The Beloved Disciple implicitly filled the role of the paraclete, and this is why the Gospel of John differs so much as to content and style from the Synoptics. It embodies the advanced course provided by the paraclete. Some Marcionites believed Paul was the paraclete, seeing in him the definitive interpreter of Jesus Christ’s significance. Marcionites liked to depict Jesus sitting on a central throne with Paul to his right hand and Marcion to his left, and I would say that Protestants believe that too. Jesus gets reduced to “the Christ event,” the naked and mute act of God which means nothing until some prophetic voice (Paul’s) comes along to tell us what it means.

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the so-called magisterial reformers made Paul their figurehead and the source of their theology. It is he, not Jesus, who speaks in terms of justification by faith. It is Jesus who threatens to unravel the whole thing by enumerating commandments of the Torah and telling inquirers, “Do this and you will live.” Ahem, enough of that, if you please! On the other hand, it is the Anabaptist Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites who take their marching orders from Jesus: turn the other cheek, do not swear oaths. Three centuries later, liberal Protestants of the Harnack stripe discarded Paul for Jesus. “Paul” meant Protestant orthodoxy. And it was the ostensible historical Jesus they sought as a substitute for him, a Jesus who could be assumed to have preached a kind of Reform Judaism. This was a relief: no more Nicene Creed, no more worship of Christ, no more theology at all, just individual piety and the social gospel. Liberals wanted the religion of Jesus, the one he himself practiced, and no longer the religion about Jesus. They held Paul responsible for the changeover from one to the other. They dubbed Paul the “second founder of Christianity.”⁴

Post World War I neo-orthodox theology went back to Reformation-era Paulinism, relieved at the seeming failure of the historical Jesus enterprise. As Albert Schweitzer showed, most of the historical Jesus models proposed by scholars reflected only their own biases. Schweitzer felt keenly Jesus’s moral demands and famously obeyed them by founding a hospital in French Equatorial Africa but did not feel obliged to agree with Jesus theologically. He was able to see Jesus preaching a message of apocalypticism that sounded fanatical to modern ears, his own included, but categorized it as somewhat irrelevant theology. The neo-orthodox seized the distinction and reinterpreted the apocalyptic discourse of Schweitzer’s Jesus in a different key. Jesus had come to bring, not the literal end of the world, but the end of the Jewish dispensation, to be followed by the Christian Church, not by the sky-descending kingdom of God. It was a bit of a shell game, but it provided passage back from Jesus to Paul. Indeed, it was surprising to see theologians willing to admit that Jesus had been wrong about the end of the world. But then, that only meant one could more easily put Jesus on the shelf and have recourse to Paul as one’s chief theological oracle.

One receives the impression that Protestants, however liberal, have retreated from the perimeter wall—Jesus Christ—and taken refuge in the castle keep—namely Paul. The same moves made in the case of Jesus (refitting him as a post-colonialist, a feminist, an Orthodox Jew, and a green activist) have been made in the case of Paul. After this, there is nowhere to run. That is why scholars, so critical about the historical Jesus, have proven reluctant to accept significant higher criticism of the Pauline epistles. Just as an earlier generation of theological moderates surrendered John as unhistorical but retained the Synoptics for their picture of the historical­ Jesus, so Pauline scholars have cut off the Pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) and relegated Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians to deutero-canonical status, products of the “Pauline school.” Having done so, they nevertheless insist on the inviolable Pauline corpus containing the magic number seven: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Ferdinand C. Baur already debunked all but the first four as spurious, but even Bultmann dared not follow Baur that far. Bultmann needed enough of Paul’s writings to build a theology on. Is the will to believe corrupting scientific criticism—again? I think so.

Paul and Sisyphus

I have been privileged to study with some outstanding New Testament scholars, including J. Ramsey Michaels, Andrew T. Lincoln, Gordon D. Fee, David M. Scholer, Donald Juel, Helmut Koester, Howard Clark Kee, Darrell J. Doughty, William Stroker, and Kalyan Dey. Lucky for me, they expressed a wide range of viewpoints, and all were seemingly omniscient. I recall Gordon Fee⁵ bringing 2 Corinthians to life almost as if he were channeling the writer! I remember how he would hoist himself from one mighty peak of 1 Corinthians to the next, trying to demonstrate what one passage had to do with another, how text B was an answer to the question brought up in text A. There must have been some connection, but what was it? But then I recall several years later listening as Darrell Doughty pointed out that such reasoning was essentially harmonization, the kind of thing critics had long since stopped doing in the case of the Gospels. When we notice that a chapter of the Gospels is jumping from one topic to the next with no real connection except broad topics or catchwords, we learn to read this as a collection of originally separate sayings, stories, and aphorisms and do not insist that a single individual said all these things, much less that he did it in just that order and on that occasion. However, when reading the epistles, we see the same sort of rough edges and we want to make sense of them as moments of a single, spontaneous discourse set to paper. What is stopping us from recognizing, precisely on the basis of such phenomena, that we have been barking up the wrong tree? We have been harmonizing instead of exegeting. Doughty commented that virtually all commentaries on the epistles, including Fee’s erudite tome on 1 Corinthians, are largely exercises in harmonization: What would the text have to mean if it were a unitary discourse? But it isn’t one, and therefore such an approach bids us construct elaborate theological latticeworks, giving every verse a place in the structure that makes a synthetic whole much greater than its parts.

Doughty and I began to look into the neglected work of the Dutch Radical Critics who denied that the historical Paul had written any of the letters ascribed to him. On second thought, for instance, Walter Schmithals’s brilliant book Gnosticism in Corinth explains many puzzles in the first letter to the Corinthians by reference to Gnostic trends that are attested only for the second century. It would make much more sense if he had placed 1 Corinthians in the second century. I began to weigh Willem van Manen’s claim that the epistles made no lasting impact on any of the church communities to which they were ostensibly sent. From this, Van Manen inferred that the letters had not in fact been written or sent within the lifetime of the historical Paul but later. The Pauline letters were the favorites of Gnostics, Encratites, and Marcionites. Tertullian called Paul “the apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics,” and indeed it was Gnostics and Marcionites who wrote the first commentaries on the Pauline epistles and on the Gospel of John. Elaine Pagels’s book The Gnostic Paul⁶ demonstrated how much sense hitherto strange Pauline texts made when inserted into a Gnostic framework. By contrast, one looks in vain for any real Pauline influence on second-century writers. I began to frame a most unaccustomed question: What if there were no Pauline communities, no Paulinists, until the late first and early second centuries?­ The earliest Pauline Christians we know of were Marcionites and Gnostics. We have always inferred the existence of a Pauline wing of the early church from reading the epistles as products of the mid-first century. But what if their narrator was not the same as their author? What if their narratees were not the same as their actual readers? The Corinthians, for instance, may have been fictive characters like the Pharisees and the disciples whom Jesus addresses in the Gospels. Jesus is really talking over their heads to the reader.⁷ So is Paul in the epistles, or so I am beginning to think. Just as in the Gospels, Jesus is really dispensing the views of the evangelists and other early Christians, so why not admit that the writers of these epistles were not Paul?

The deeper I have penetrated into the work of the Dutch Radicals and other critics, the more humbled I have become in finding the inevitable; what I thought were new insights I had found were discoveries already elaborated on by the old critics. It was a comfort, a corroboration of sorts, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain sense of futility and frustration. The great Pauline scholar Winsome Munro, who nominated me for the Westar Institute Paul Seminar, told me once after looking at some of the work of Doughty, myself, and a couple of others, that she had begun to wonder whether we were not merely reinventing the wheel. That’s okay. It’s necessary since most people seem to have forgotten the wheel and its use. As I view it, the field of Pauline studies has been largely moribund for many years. It is high time we extricate ourselves from the Sargasso Sea of traditionalism and reclaim what our critical forebears achieved.

The Colossus of Tarsus

Now, as to the plan of the present book, the figure of the Apostle Paul looms, dwarfs everything, and towers over all. It is not easy to take it all in with a single glance. We must approach the subject of our study from various angles. Accordingly, I have tried to cover sections of the great figure in individual studies in these chapters.

Eventually I dropped out of the Paul Seminar because I didn’t care for the direction it was taking. Instead I joined the Acts Seminar, where I felt more at home. Arthur J. Dewey, Chris Shea, Joseph B. Tyson, Dennis Smith, Richard I. Pervo, Gerd Lüdemann and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin. Papering over bitter schisms and disputes known to us from the Pauline letters, Acts is a catholicizing document that wants to reconcile, as Baur thought, two factions: the Jewish-Torah Christians led by Peter and the Law-free gentile and Hellenistic Jewish believers led by Paul. It may be that Acts seeks to reconcile the Catholics who wanted to retain the Old Testament, symbolized by Peter, with the Marcionites who wanted to cut it loose and were symbolized by Paul. In either case, Acts draws extensive and contrived parallels between its two chief heroes, showing that the partisans of one can hardly discount the divine imprimatur on the other. Peter and Paul both raise someone from the dead (Acts 9:36-40; 20:9-12); heal a paralytic (3:1-8; 14:8-10); heal by extraordinary, magical means (5:15; 19:11-12); vanquish a magician (8:18-23; 13:6-11); and miraculously escape prison (12:6-10; 16:25-26). Paul is made over into a clone of Peter, keeping the Torah and circumcising the occasional convert, while Peter is given Paul’s traditional role as the pioneer preacher to the gentiles, arguing that they needn’t be circumcised or keep the Torah.⁸

In short, we should not look optimistically at Acts as a source for reconstructing the historical Paul. In “The Legend of Paul’s Conversion,” I show the probable literary sources of Luke’s stories of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Either the author of Acts did not know how Paul came to Christianity or thought the facts too mundane, replacing them with something much more exciting.

The second chapter introduces and summarizes the research that led scholars to abandon some or all of the Pauline letters as spurious. This means that the quest for the historical Paul becomes more difficult: neither Acts nor the epistles will be much help to us. On the other hand, the epistles are fascinating and important in their own right. Where did we get them? Who preserved them, collected them, and perhaps edited them? How sure can we be that we have what their original authors wrote? Chapter two deals with these issues.

Scholars are agreed that there was at least a hiatus during most of the second century when the Pauline epistles were ignored or suppressed by the early Catholic Church because of their appeal to heretics or because they were actually heretical in character. I deal with that question a bit in chapter 3 but return to it in greater detail in chapter 4, where I review the Acts and Apocalypses of Paul current in the second century, asking who did and didn’t quote the epistles and why.

Chapter 5 sets aside the letters for a moment to ask after the apostles. What did it mean to be an apostle? Exactly what was at stake when some affirmed that Paul was an apostle and others denied it? Did the historical Paul have disputes over such matters? Was it perhaps a later debate that was unknown in the first century?­ I examine the most important of the apocryphal Acts, the Acts of Paul, Peter, Andrew, and Thomas, together with their mythic or novelistic sources. We will see how originally wide-open and flexible the category of wandering preachers was until it was eventually shrunk down to twelve men who functioned as guarantors for an official Jesus for a single faction of Christians. Such a dispute can never have taken place in the lifetime of the historical Paul.

In chapter 6, I examine an additional strategy employed by the Catholic Church to suppress Paul’s heretical legacy. Not only did they discourage the use of the Pauline writings, they began to squeeze him out of the history of the founding of the churches, crediting his accomplishments to other, safer apostolic names. Walter­ Bauer, in his Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, called attention to the mysterious replacement of Paul by John, son of Zebedee, as the founder of the Ephesian church.⁹ I examine that theory, comparing legends attached variously to Paul or John in Ephesus. This anti-Pauline turf war wound up prompting a good bit of discussion in the Pauline epistles, whose authors stoutly defended Paul’s historic role against others who retroactively claimed glory for themselves.

The Lion of Pontus

Chapter 7 approaches the identity of the historical Paul from a different angle to propose, with Hermann Detering,¹⁰ that Paul was actually the same man remembered as Simon Magus, which may be why both men are said to have been the father of all heresy. There were other historical Pauls, namely the writers of the epistles. Marcion was one of these, having authored at least portions of Galatians and Ephesians and perhaps more. He must have used extant Simonian writings or at least teachings, modifying them in his own more socially conservative direction.

The remaining chapters of The Amazing Colossal Apostle venture analyses of each of the canonical Pauline epistles. I seek to distinguish various earlier and later layers within the texts, corresponding to Simonian, Marcionite, and early Catholic elements, plus interpolations from various sources. Interesting surprises await!

As I have pursued this research over many years, I have reached more and more radical and far-reaching conclusions. I began with fairly mainstream critical assumptions, and as the years passed I learned to appreciate, more and more, what Paul de Man called the dialectic of blindness and insight.¹¹ I realized that there were many big things I could never see until I had seen all of the little ones first. Small keys began to open bigger doors to larger rooms within. I began to have bigger and bigger suspicions, the larger ones made possible by the smaller ones. I have preserved this progression in the following chapters. Early on, I don’t disabuse readers of their assumptions but begin by assuming that the epistles are substantially Pauline until we find reason to believe differently. Once we do, the puzzle pieces start fitting into unsuspected, much broader patterns. At first, my arguments may seem to strain at a gnat, whereas later on I will be swallowing whole camels or squeezing them through the eye of a needle. I will seem more conservative in both assumptions and conclusions in the beginning, partly because I was more conservative when I did my initial research, but equally because I know I must meet you readers where you are if I hope to convince you to come with me to where I end up. Feel free to jump off the train at any point if you are afraid we might crash. Especially when the train runs out of track.

Notes
1. Edward John Carnell, The Case for Orthodox Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959), 57-58.

2. Sami Nasib Makarem, The Doctrine of the Ismailis (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1972), chapter 3, “Prophethood and Imamate,” 35-47.

3. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. George R. Beasley-Murray, et al. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 566-67.

4. William Wrede, Paul, trans. Edward Lummis (London: Philip Green, 1907), 179: “It follows then conclusively from all this that Paul is to be regarded as the second founder of Christianity.”

5. Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Commentary on the New Testament Series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).

6. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).

7. Robert M. Fowler, Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991).

8. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings, trans. Allan Menzies, 2 vols. (1873; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 1:5-11.

9. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, eds. Robert Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, trans. Paul J. Achtemeier, et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).

10. Hermann Detering, “The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight,” trans. Darrell J. Doughty, Journal of Higher Criticism 10 (Fall 2003).

11. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Theory and History of Literature Series, 2d. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), chap. 7, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” 102-41.

Chapter 3
The Evolution of the Pauline Canon

Introduction

When considering the letters ascribed to the Apostle Paul, we are accustomed to speaking of justification. When we seek to tunnel beneath the theological ground we stand on, to deconstruct the notion of Pauline theological authority (that is, to take it apart and find out better how it works), we might better speak of reification, that process whereby a thing contrived by human beings like ourselves comes to assume an aura of inviolable sacredness, an autonomous reality, a wholeness greater than the sum of its parts. The Sabbath is reified when we begin to forget that it was made for men and women, not the other way around. The biblical canon is a classic case of reification. Most students and laypersons are both surprised and dismayed to discover that the Bible’s contents are not self-evident, that a choice between accepting or rejecting certain writings was made at all, and this by mere mortals like themselves at a particular time in history. How can the eternal Word of God be subjected to such things?

The canon of holy scripture is like the holy place in the temple at Jerusalem: it is shielded from prying mortal eyes by a veil of sanctity. One is curious to peer inside yet fearful of being disappointed should one dare steal a glimpse like the profane usurper Titus who was startled to find an empty chamber. Or, worse yet, will one find a stammering man behind the curtain at the controls of a hidden booth as in The Wizard of Oz?

If the biblical canon is the holy place, perhaps the Pauline corpus can be likened to the Holy of Holies; for even among those for whom the outer veil has long ago been rent, this inner zone of canonicity retains its numinous inviolability. For Christian scholars, whether apologists or supposed critics, the Pauline epistles are like the metaphysical Presence of traditional ontotheology.¹ We are reluctant to have someone come along and play Jacques Derrida’s² trick of showing us where the seams and junctures are.

Yet the game is afoot already, and profane feet have trodden the sacred courts. For the better part of a century, scholars have crossed swords, or at least pens (which are mightier), over the question of the collected Pauline epistles: who first collected them, when, where, and why? It will be our task to sift through a pile of these speculations, which, as Walter Schmithals³ reminds us, is all such reconstructions can ever be. In the process, we may feel like we are sitting in the poorly-lit attic, exploring the confusing souvenirs of our ancestors as they emerge, one by one, from a neglected old steamer trunk. Let’s get started.

Four approaches

I believe we can distinguish four clear lines of thought in approaching the question before us, and it will be useful to list our theories according to the distance they posit between Paul’s career and his epistolary collection. Admittedly, this taxonomy violates the chronology of the history of scholarship in favor of a different sort of chronology. I believe little will be lost, however, as each major group of theories seems to have evolved autonomously. Though one may have arisen in reaction to another, that is seldom crucial to the logic of each theory. When it is important, it will be easy enough to note the fact. Within each family of theories, I will trace historical development. Furthermore, by arranging the theories in a timeline from minimal to maximal intervals between the apostle and the collection, we may come to see something important about the theories, their tendencies, and motives.

“Pauline Testament” theories

The first type of collection theory to consider may be called the “Pauline Testament” approach. Here there is virtually no interval at all between the apostle and the collection of his writings; as these scholars posit it, Paul himself collected them. The earliest exponent of this theory appears to be R. L. Archer,⁴ who reasoned that Paul had kept copies of his epistles and that sometime after his death the Christians who inherited them hit upon the scheme of publishing them. They derived this notion from reading Seneca, a great publisher of collected letters. While Seneca frowned upon publication of strictly personal letters, Cicero, as is well known, found value in publishing even personal correspondence. Paul’s posthumous admirers agreed with Cicero, and thus the Pauline writings, both literary epistles and personal letters, were published.

Donald Guthrie thinks Archer did well to look to the contemporary practice of letter collection and publication but remains skeptical whether early Pauline Christians would have been much interested in or influenced by the likes of Cicero and Seneca.⁵ Against Guthrie’s criticism, one may question whether he is in­fluenced too heavily by Adolf Deissmann’s⁶ belief, based on 1 Corinthians 1:26, that the early church was a pedestrian, plebeian, and proletarian movement. Abraham Malherbe’s more recent studies⁷ might persuade us differently, but Guthrie still might have noticed that if “not many” of the Corinthians or Pauline Christians were to be numbered among the educated elite generally, the very wording of the verse in question implies that a few were. We need think only of the householders Stephanas, who “delivered the formal,­ written questions or statements of the community,” and Chloe,­ who “supplied the oral information, hearsay, and gossip” mentioned by Paul.⁸
As for early Christian interest in the literary luminaries Seneca and Cicero, let us not forget the apocryphal Epistles of Paul and Seneca.­ Someone before Archer certainly envisioned early Christians as interested in Seneca; remember also St. Jerome’s famous dream in which his Christian conscience rebuked his classical inclinations. An angel like the one who appeared to Hermas cast this in Jerome’s teeth: “Thou art not a follower of Christ, but of Cicero!”

A more recent theory along similar lines is that of David Trobisch.⁹ Trobisch, like Archer, deserves praise for exploring the contemporary practices of collecting and publishing letters, having studied many hundreds of epistles and letter collections from several centuries adjacent to the Pauline period on either side (300 BCE to 400 CE). He notes that in many cases the initial collection of an author’s letters was made by the author himself with a view to publishing “selected” rather than “collected” letters. These might have been arranged in chronological order, but as Trobisch observes, when others undertook to publish more correspondence after the author’s death, the additional letters were simply appended to the original set, not placed among them according to the original chronological sequence principle. The new letters would observe the same order among themselves, but they would follow the original corpus as a new block of correspondence. Trobisch calls an author’s own selection of letters the “authorized recension.” Posthumous additional collections might be published as separate volumes or, if thematically related to the authorized recension, they might be appended to the original volume and published together as what Trobisch calls an “expanded edition.” Finally, scribes may try to unearth and publish all known letters together in a single manuscript in what Trobisch calls a “comprehensive edition.” And in all expanded and comprehensive editions, Trobisch says, the added material starts over, recapitulating the sequential order of the originals but not intermingling with the letters of the author’s own collection, leaving the integrity of the original collection intact. It would be comparable to a current-day author merely adding a new preface, an introduction to a new edition, or some appendices to the original text of a reprinted early work, rather than revising and updating it: “What I have written, I have written.”

Trobisch calls attention to the fact that, with very few exceptions, the mass of ancient manuscripts arranges Paul’s letters the same way, in an almost perfect order flowing from the longest to the shortest except that Ephesians is longer than Galatians and yet follows it. The descending length principle starts over once we reach the Pastorals, but no one seems surprised by this since we have reached a new category of, ostensibly, personal letters to individuals. However, what of Ephesians? After considering previous theories, Trobisch suggests it would make the most sense if Ephesians represented the point where a new expanded edition had been added. Of what did this expanded edition consist? Here Trobisch tips his hat to Edgar J. Goodspeed. One expects Trobisch to say, as did Schmithals,¹⁰ that Ephesians led off a second, posthumous collection of a few letters, perhaps containing Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon. Goodspeed, as we will see below, had suggested that Ephesians had once begun the whole corpus and was written by the Colossian freedman Onesimus for that purpose. Schmithals was­ will­ing to let Goodspeed be right only about the threefold corpus of Ephesians-Colossians-Philemon, but Trobisch is more generous, though less consistent. He explains: “If my analysis is correct, the letter to the Ephesians functioned as an introduction to the expand­­ed edition of the thirteen letters because it is the first letter of the appendix.”¹¹ However, it is difficult to see how Ephesians might serve as an introduction to the whole corpus of thirteen letters if it comes fifth! This, of course, is why Goodspeed posited a lead-off position for Ephesians, even without any manuscript evidence to back him up.

This is not the only problem with Trobisch’s reconstruction. For one thing, while there is no prima facie unreasonableness in the suggestion that the initial four letters (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians) were Paul’s own choice for a letters volume, with Ephesians beginning a posthumous appendix, Trobisch seems merely to have shown that such a scenario, if true, would fit the analogy of a widespread practice of an author publishing his own letters. It seems that this is a viable form-critical argument, but Trobisch leaves it unclear whether the initial letter collections to which expansions were appended were always or usually collections by the author himself. We have in the case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s letters something that at first seems to parallel the ancient practice as Trobisch describes it. Shortly following Lovecraft’s death in 1937, two of his correspondents, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, decided to collect and publish their late friend’s letters. Lovecraft wrote innumerable epistles of fantastic length, so Derleth and Wandrei knew they must make a selection. At first they planned on a single volume of Selected Letters, but as the years went by and the sifting process continued, the project expanded to three, then four volumes. Following the deaths of Derleth and Wandrei, James Turner took up the task and compiled a fifth volume. All letters, edited and condensed for publication, were presented in chronological order from Arkham House Publishers.

Many Lovecraft aficionados were not satisfied, however, as their appetites had been merely whetted. So a couple of them, S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, scoured the archives of Brown University and contacted various obscure Lovecraft correspondents, seeking even more letters. Their labors produced several more volumes, A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, to Richard Searight, to Robert Bloch, etc. And chronological order is observed within each such volume of Tosefta.¹² Finally, these editors hope one day to compile a definitive Collected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft.

It all sounds very much like Trobisch’s assumptions about Paul—except that Lovecraft was dead when it all began. Do we know that first collections were always put together by the epistolarian himself? Trobisch does not tell us, and yet his reconstruction is considerably weakened if it is not so.

One suspects the underlying motive of the Pauline Testament theories is an apologetical one: it would seem to secure a set of texts with both authenticity and integrity guaranteed. After all, the inference goes, Paul himself wrote and edited them. And here one is reminded of the fundamentalist apologetic for the New Testament canon list as a whole. John Warwick Montgomery and others assert that in John 16:12-14, Jesus authorized in advance the entire New Testament canon just as he put his imprimatur on the whole Old Testament canon in John 10:35. Think of Vincent Taylor’s argument¹³ that the synoptic tradition must be basically sound since the apostles were still around to oversee the progress of the oral tradition. Are not Archer and especially Trobisch trying to make it seem that Paul collected the Pauline corpus, or at least the Hauptbriefe, to rescue us from text-critical anxieties?

Such a purpose would not seem alien to Trobisch, who explicitly wants to return to a harmonizing reading not only of Paul but of the entire New Testament.¹⁴ This would appear to be a move to neo-conservative hermeneutics, a la Brevard Childs. Trobisch surprises us, however, for what he gains in authenticity, he squanders in textual integrity. We are surprised to discover that he takes a leaf from Schmithals’s codex and subdivides the Corinthian correspondence into no less than seven mini-letters. He discerns the seams in between, much as Schmithals does, in vestigial letter openings and closings; he maps out digressive passages, labeling them as Pauline redactional notes. Why Paul would have done this, especially since Trobisch has him leave the basic letter forms of Galatians­ and Romans intact, is a puzzle. “Behold, I show you a mystery,” but not, alas, a solution. Schmithals’s controversial surgery on the epistles is at least supplied with a motive: the redactor needed to conflate his fragmentary sources into the catholicizing seven-fold form. Whether this is judged persuasive is one thing; whether it is better than no reason at all is another.

What is strikingly ironic is that Trobisch offers as his theory’s chief merit that it makes possible a harmonizing reading of the Pauline corpus, or at least the Hauptbriefe, though he seems to want to go farther. Is this purpose served by breaking up the Corinthian letters? Or does he mean that Paul wanted the letters to be re-read as if they formed one or two longer texts? It seems Trobisch does not intend this, but in any case, he has undermined his own goal. To borrow another analogy from Lovecraft, Trobisch’s reconstruction reminds us of the editing of Lovecraft’s serialized story, “Herbert West—Reanimator.” Each of his six installments began with a capsule résumé of the previous one(s). In book form, these capsules seemed redundant. Eventually, when Jeffery Combs prepared an audiotape version, he decided to trim away the summaries reasoning that, once the six episodes were read continuously, the summaries became counterproductive: first intended to reinforce continuity of reading, they now tended to interrupt it. Fair enough, but why would Paul trim away the beginning and end of most of the Corinthian mini-letters? This would make sense only if what Paul pared away was a set of “Now where are we’s” and “More next time’s.” That is not the character of most of the Pauline greetings and closings, however. According to Schmithals and Knox, openings and closings may have been added to make a heap of random fragments into letters to begin with, and it is difficult to understand the procedure proposed by Trobisch.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Trobisch’s version of the Pauline Testament approach is his connection of the two Pauline col­lections, i.e., Paul’s own collection of alms for the Jerusalem saints and the collection of Paul’s epistles. Typically, though, Trobisch casts this potent seed on rocky ground and continues on his way. He notes that 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians all mention the alms collection and that the thread of continuity seems to be that Paul agreed to the chore in the first place to conciliate the pillar saints of Jerusalem who had since, like Cephas in Antioch, betrayed their accord. As a result, he feared that the fruits of his harvest on their behalf might be rejected and become a bone of contention rather than an olive branch of peace. One purpose in Paul collecting letters and sending them to Ephesus would be to put his side of the story on file in view of the conflict anticipated in Jerusalem. I view this as a brilliant suggestion, though not compelling. Why wouldn’t Paul sim­ply write it out in a single new letter, using the same kind of plain talk he had used in Galatians? It is significant that, at the close of Trobisch’s book, Paul’s Letter Collection, there is a “fictive cover letter” in which Paul explains his object in compiling the corpus. Trobisch thus admits that some such word of explanation is necessary if his theory is to carry conviction—and yet, Paul did not supply one.

If one found the collection theory persuasive, one need not count it as evidence that Paul himself collected the Hauptbriefe (Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians). Paul’s motive in collecting the money remained an issue between the Pauline communities and Jewish Jesus-sectarians who cast Paul in the role of Simon Magus crassly trying to purchase an apostolate with filthy lucre, as F. C. Baur argued. One can easily imagine (and that is all one may do) Paul’s friends collecting the letters as a defense against Ebionite detractors, much as later Catholics would fabricate the Pastorals to distance Paul from the blasphemies of the Encratites.¹⁵

Paper-apostle theories

Our second group of theories calls to mind Rudolf Bultmann’s dictum that Jesus “rose into the kerygma,” the gospel preaching of the early church. These theories, to some of which Guthrie¹⁶ applied the rubric “theories of immediate value,” in effect have Paul die and immediately rise in the form of a collection of his writings which replaced the irreplaceable apostle. I dub this the paper-apostle approach, the person who emerges in the writings becoming more important than any biographical realities. The scenario envisioned here is much like that described in Islamic tradition following the death of the Prophet Muhammad when the voice of prophecy fell forever silent. Just the opposite of the Deuteronomic Moses, Muhammad was the definitive seal of the prophets: no “prophet like unto me” would be expected to succeed him. Thus, the Muslim faithful began to cherish and trade remembered surahs of revelation, recording these on whatever materials came to hand: scraps of leather, papyrus leaves, parchments, potsherds, even shoulder blades of sheep. At length the first caliph, Abu-bekr, decreed that the surahs should be collected, and the corpus of the Koran (Qur’an) was the eventual result. Thus the book of the prophet was the only successor to the prophet.

Adolf Harnack¹⁷ reasoned that Paul’s letters were treasured by enthusiastic readers who could not wait for further installments. “Did not our hearts burn within us as he opened the scriptures unto us?” Not content to wait for the apostle to post another missive to their own church, Pauline Christians would check through a network of scribes in other locations and copy each other’s epistles till each church had a complete set, much like avid fans of an author today. The keen longing for more of Paul did not arise only after his death. His absence during his life, when working elsewhere far away, already led his fans to make up collections of his letters to serve as substitutes for his presence, like a treasured photograph of an absent lover. Thus, the groundwork for the Pauline canon was already in place when Paul himself passed away. One might say the Pauline corpus was already warming up even as the Pauline corpse was cooling off. Indeed, his death was a mere formality; as Roland Barthes¹⁸ and Jacques Derrida¹⁹ tell us, the author was dead as soon as he produced his text, which as a “dangerous supplement” took on a prodigal life of its own.

Harnack was persuaded of the immediate impact of the letters by four factors. First, we perceive Paul’s letters as rhetorically and theologically powerful, and Harnack assumes ancient readers must have been just as astute. Yet we should not be too hasty in identifying our tastes with ancient predilections. For instance, someone, somewhere must have thought the Upanishads or the Saddharma Pundarika sounded good even though Max Müller²⁰ didn’t. Mormon missionaries grow teary-eyed about the heart-warming experience of reading the Book of Mormon, but Mark Twain found it “chloroform in print.” Wasn’t Harnack reading the text through a haze of eighteen centuries of Christian piety? One thinks of the scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, when thousands assemble to hear Jesus as if they realize that this is their chance to hear the soon-to-be-famous Sermon on the Mount.

Harnack took 2 Corinthians 10:10 (“His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, his speech of no account”) as denoting that even Paul’s opponents had to admit his letters were powerful. However, isn’t the point rather that Paul merely talks a good fight and can’t back it up? As Paul himself says elsewhere: “The kingdom of God is not talk, but power” (1 Cor. 4:20). First Corinthians 7:17 (“And so I ordain in all the churches”) meant to Harnack that what Paul had written here, he had written in epistles to all his churches, implying a large volume of letters. Not only is this an arbitrary reading of the verse, which might simply refer to oral instructions in person, but it had not occurred to Harnack that such a verse was likely a post-Pauline catholicizing gloss, added to facilitate the use of 1 Corinthians as an encyclical. “What I say to you, I say to all.”

Finally, Harnack inferred from 2 Thessalonians 2:2 and 3:17 that in Paul’s day, his letters were already numerous and authoritative enough to have called forth cheap imitations. In both his third and fourth arguments, however, Harnack gets himself into trouble. He seemed to realize that if Paul had written as many letters as his arguments implied, we must be missing most of them. Therefore, Harnack reasoned that a selection was made and that our Pauline corpus represents the cream of the crop. However, doesn’t this notion undercut Harnack’s whole reconstruction? For the true fan, there is no such thing as an embarrassment of riches. Rather, one seeks to preserve every scrap, just as P. N. Harrison pictured a redactor of Pauline fragments in 2 Timothy doing.²¹
As F. C. Baur pointed out long ago, as he felled another tree in a forest empty of anyone listening, the references to pseudepigraphy in 2 Thessalonians, like the request to have 1 Thessalonians read in church (1 Thess. 5:27), is a case of my four fingers pointing back at me when I point one at you. First and Second Thessalonians presuppose an earlier paper-apostle. As is well known, Harnack was a foe of Baur and Tübingen, and his apologetical tendency is no more difficult to spot here than in his early dating of Acts.

Donald Guthrie also wanted to close the gap between Paul and his letters to ensure the authenticity and integrity of the corpus. It is no surprise to see him favoring the Vincent Taylor/F. F. Bruce theory of oral transmission to shorten a dark and frightening tunnel period. Guthrie imagines that just after Paul’s death, one of his associates—probably Timothy—saw to the collection of his master’s literary remains.²² After all, Timothy would have been present to hear Galatians read in his home church of Lystra. And years later he himself had brought Paul his suitcase full of parchments and scrolls, which might well have been a file of copies of his own epistles a la Archer. It is clear that for Guthrie, the Timothy character continues to play the guarantor role assigned him by the Pastoral author (2 Tim. 2:2). Guthrie’s theory requires Acts to be historically accurate and the Pastorals to be genuinely Paul’s.

We find ourselves in familiar territory with C.F.D. Moule’s version of the paper apostle. For Moule, it was Luke, serving as Paul’s amanuensis with a very long leash, who both wrote the Pastorals and collected the genuine Paulines after penning Luke and Acts.²³ A few subsequent scholars have also affirmed common authorship for Luke-Acts and the Pastorals, such as Stephen G. Wilson²⁴ and Jerome D. Quinn,²⁵ but unlike them, Moule pictured the author as being Luke the beloved physician and companion of Paul.

After developing suggestions from Hans Conzelmann²⁶ and Eduard Lohse,²⁷ Hans-Martin Schenke²⁸ allowed the pendulum to settle down in the middle of the paper-apostle options. Eschewing both Harnack’s faceless “creative Volk community” approach, and Moule’s and Guthrie’s nomination of a single Pauline disciple, Schenke ascribed both the collection of the corpus and the writing of some deutero-Pauline epistles to a Pauline School, disciples of Paul who, like the anonymous sons of the prophets who passed on the traditions of Elijah, Elisha, and Isaiah, took on both the task of continuing Paul’s work and the mantle of his authority as they made his voice sound forth again to meet new challenges and answer new questions. Harry Gamble²⁹ approves this notion since it avoids “the dubious idea of one particular collector.” Yet we may ask, what is so dubious about the notion of a single collector? Perhaps Gamble, who shows himself elsewhere to be shy of all but the most cautious speculation, is willing, in his Textual History of the Letter to the Romans, to take but a carefully circumscribed Sabbath day’s journey from the data and disdain the “scandal of particularity” involved in picking a single name like Luke, Timothy, or Onesimus. More likely, he finds theologically distasteful the lurking idea of a Marcion-like “second founder of Paulinism” (see below).

The image of Paul resurrected in his letters is especially apt for Schenke’s³⁰ theory: “They were concerned with the living Paul, his work and word in the present, with the memory of him and his continuing work among them, with the work and teaching of the itinerant, fully-authorized representatives of Paul, with the work of those in the church who could serve as the extended arm of Paul, and with everything that was related concerning Paul.” And though Schenke himself does not invoke the analogy of the schools of the Old Testament prophets, I believe the comparison is a helpful one. It invites us to understand the Pauline corpus, as Marcion did, as the private canon, the sectarian scripture, of a particular Christian body, the Pauline School in this case. This is much like the composite book of Isaiah, which contains not only the oracles of the original Isaiah of Jerusalem but also the deutero- and trito-Isaianic supplements of his latter-day heirs. As in the case of the Isaiah canon where (a la Paul D. Hanson³¹) we find intra-canonical collisions (cf. Ernst Käsemann³²), so we find Pauline versus deutero-Pauline clashes here and there.

The living Paul who continues, as it were, to write through the pens of the Pauline School, is obviously the twin of the risen Christ to whose self-appointed prophets Bultmann³³ (and many others on down to M. Eugene Boring)³⁴ had ascribed many of the inauthentic sayings of Jesus. However, at least Schenke’s “risen Paul” who thus lives on in Geschichte had lived a previous life in Histoire. (“If once we knew [Paul] after the flesh we know him so no longer.”)³⁵ Next, however, we come to a much older theory of a Pauline School which surely fulfills the name “paper apostle” to the letter. Willem Christiaan van Manen was the greatest of the Dutch Radical Critics who sought to carry to their logical conclusion (some would say their reductio ad absurdum, but not me) the critical insights of Baur and the Tübingen School. Van Manen, Allard Pierson, Samuel Naber, Abraham Loman, and their predecessor Bruno Bauer denied the authenticity of every single Pauline letter despite the attempts of F. C. Baur to swat them away, much as Luther had dismissed the Radical Reformer Caspar von Schwenkfeld.³⁶ Van Manen saw no reason to doubt the existence of Paul as an early Christian preacher, whose genuine itinerary he thought had been preserved in Acts, but he judged the so-called Pauline epistles to have as little direct connection to this early apostle as the so-called Johannine and ­Petrine writings have with their historically obscure namesakes. The epistles, Van Manen argued, display a universalizing and philosophizing tenor unthinkable for the apocalyptic sect pictured in Acts or the Gospels. Their greatest affinity was with Syrian Gnosticism. Nor did they represent the thinking of one theologian (the “Paulus Episcopus” of Pierson and Naber). Rather, in the Pauline epistles, we overhear intra-scholastic debates between different wings of Paulinism. Has God finally cast off the Jewish people or not? Does grace imply libertinism, as some hold? Do some preach circumcision in Paul’s name? Can women prophesy or not?

Van Manen locates the home of Paulinism at Antioch or perhaps Asia Minor beginning at the end of the first century or the start of the second and thriving by 150 CE.³⁷ Fragments from this Gnostic Pauline circle were later compiled into the familiar epistles, each and all of which are in their present form redactional compositions, finally receiving a catholicizing overlay. “We do not know by whom the collection was made, nor yet what influence his work had upon the traditional text. Perhaps we may suppose that it led to some changes. Probably the collection was not wholly the work of one person, but arose gradually through additions.”³⁸ Van Manen’s theory belongs with the others we have lumped together under the paper-apostle approach in that it tends to minimize the interval between the writing of the letters and their collection. In this case, both the writing and the collecting are seen as occurring early in the second century.

“Snowball theories”

We find much less diversity among the theories Guthrie groups under the heading “theories of partial collections.” I, however, prefer Moule’s nomenclature of

the slow, anonymous process of accretion, the snowball theory. We have to suppose … that the intercourse between one Pauline ­centre and another gradually led to the exchange of copies of letters, until, at any given centre, there came to be not only the l­etter or letters originally sent to it, but also copies of certain others ­collected from other Pauline churches. Thus in each centre there would come to be little nests of letters, and gradually these would move into wider circulation and would be augmented, until the full number, as we know it, was reached. Then all that remained to be done was the making of a careful “edition” of the whole corpus.³⁹

Kirsopp Lake⁴⁰ had said the same in 1911: “Small and partial collections came into existence in various centers, before the Corpus in its completed form fully replaced them.” Similarly Günther Zuntz⁴¹ suggests that “smaller collections may have been made in and around Ephesus.”

P. N. Harrison⁴² thought the Corinthian correspondence was something of a collection of fragments, to which was then added Romans and later a Macedonian collection of Philippians and Thessalonians. Together these formed a European corpus, while an Asia Minor collection of Galatians, Colossians, the Letter for Phoebe (Romans 16), and Philemon developed. Once the latter had been added to the European corpus, some Asian Christian penned Ephesians on the basis of all the others.

Lucetta Mowry⁴³ saw it the same way: “We can distinguish three such regions each with its own body of material, the Asian hinterland, with Galatians, Colossians and Philemon; Macedonia, with 1 Thessalonians and Philippians; and Achaia with I Corinthians and Romans.” I will return later to Walter Schmithals,⁴⁴ but I should probably include him here since he understands Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon to have constituted a separate Asian collection, joined subsequently with a seven-letter collection (1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, l and 2 Thessalonians, Romans).
What is the difference between a paper-apostle theory like Harnack’s and the snowball theory? It is simply a question of time intervals. Snowball theories cannot credit so early a collection as Harnack posits nor such a later one, ex nihilo, as does Goodspeed (see below). The collection came to fruition late, says the snowball theory, but we can supply the missing link by positing partial collections, like small multicellular creatures joining to form a more complex jellyfish. Yet, come to think of it, how did we get the multicellular creatures? How did they evolve from unicellular beasties? A development of the snowball theory supplies an answer.

Mowry, Nils Dahl and others have gathered evidence that various Pauline epistles must have circulated between the time of their initial appearance and that of the formation of local collections of encyclicals and hitherto uncirculated local letters. There are copies of Romans with no addressee and manuscripts lacking the last two chapters. Lightfoot, Dahl reports,⁴⁵ had already sought to account for this textual data by suggesting that Paul had sent out earlier copies, omitting personal and local concerns, to some of his churches. Lake put the shoe on the other foot and proposed that Paul had added the specifics to an earlier encyclical letter, making it into our Romans.

The famous catholicizing gloss of 1 Corinthians 1:2b (“together with all who in every place invoke the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord as well as ours”) was seen by Schmithals, following Johannes Weiss, as evidence that 1 Corinthians once led off the Pauline corpus. However, Dahl reasoned that it might be more naturally understood (along with other glosses like 7:17; 11:16; 14:33) as the tool that made 1 Corinthians itself an encyclical letter. I would go further in the same direction pursued by those who view the letter as a set of fragments and compare 1 Corinthians and its “now concerning” transitions with the Didache, where such phrases are clearly mechanical introductions like Mark’s redactional “immediately”s to begin discussion of new topics in a generic church manual, which I consider 1 Corinthians to be.

The grand epilogue to Romans (16:25-27) also makes better­ sense as a way of refitting Romans for a wider audience. Schmithals,⁴⁶ like Weiss, thinks Romans was adapted to close the sevenfold corpus. Mowry notes that since Galatians is addressed to “the churches of Galatia,” then even if original it was more than a local possession. She sees 2 Thessalonians as a later pseudonymous encyclical aimed at dampening the premature apocalyptic fervor ignited by 1Thessalonians. In fact, the fabrication of 2 Thessalonians would be symptomatic of the whole situation as Mowry sees it: as the living voice of charismatic prophecy fell more and more silent, the written word was needed to fill the gap. Ephesians, also without an addressee in the earliest manuscripts, is obviously another ideal candidate for an encyclical, a universalizing redaction of Colossians.

Walter Bauer⁴⁷ had long ago contended that the only Pauline epistle we have definite allusions to among the Apostolic Fathers is 1 Corinthians: “Whenever we come from the marshy ground of ‘reminiscences’ and ‘allusions’ to firmer territory, again and again we confront I Corinthians.” Why? Because, as 1 Clement makes plain, the epistle was useful to combat heretics and schismatics, foes of emerging Roman orthodoxy. The encyclical use of 1 Corinthians for which Dahl and Mowry argue fits Walter Bauer’s thesis perfectly.

Whence 2 Corinthians, then? Mowry⁴⁸ sees it as a second collection of scraps intended to supplement its predecessor, explaining that “II Corinthians owes its composite character to the desire to produce something analogous in scope to I Corinthians. If any weight attaches to this suggestion, the inference would seem to be that I Corinthians, at least, had already circulated locally before the collector began his work.” Mowry insinuates that the fragments used to compile 2 Corinthians came from the archives of the Corinthian church. It need not be so, however. Second Corinthians might simply denote a sequel to 1 Corinthians, just as 2 Thessalonians, on her theory, is a pseudonymous sequel.

Depending on what sort of Gnosticism, proto-Gnosticism, or gnosticizing Paulinism one sniffs out in 1 Corinthians (and I, for one, think Schmithals’s case is a pretty good one), one might even want to reconsider one of Simone Petrement’s fascinating guesses⁴⁹ that there is some connection between “Corinthians” and “Cerinthians.” She thinks Cerinthus was like Ebion, an unhistorical eponymous founder, posited by heresiologists, in this case, of a gnosis originally associated with the Corinthians. I would turn it around, rehabilitate Cerinthus and ask if the antiheretical Corinthian epistles punningly refer to Cerinthian Jewish Gnostics. Knowing that the historical Paul lived before Cerinthus, he could not be made to address him directly, but some readers would take the hint, just as they did with the winking reference to Marcion’s Antitheses and heretical gnosis in 1 Timothy 6:20.

We can also use Mowry’s thinking on 1 and 2 Corinthians to shed light on the origin of the apocryphal Third Corinthians. The writer of the Acts of Paul obligingly constructed a fictive Sitz-im-Leben for the letter when he included it in his narrative, but in its previous, independent circulation, how had it justified its name? What was its connection with Corinth? Most likely none, but it was an attempt at a third antiheretical treatise and thus “Corinthian.” In fact, as the Acts of Paul is singularly bereft of definite allusions to any canonical Pauline epistles at all (even the Iconium Beatitudes are an independent reflection of the paraenetic material shared with 1 Corinthians, as I attempt to show in Chapter Four), I suspect that Third Corinthians was the only Pauline letter available to the author of the Acts of Paul. This was no accident. Third Corinthians, which reads much like the short apocryphal Laodiceans, is a cento of phrases filched from canonical Pauline texts. My guess is that Third Corinthians was a local attempt to supplant and replace the Pauline collection which had become, as Walter Bauer and Goodspeed suggest, guilty by association with the heretics who so loved it.

Second-coming theories

Edgar J. Goodspeed and Walter Bauer (together with Hans von Campenhausen⁵⁰ and others) have maintained that there is a reason for the crushing silence throughout the second century regarding the Pauline epistles. For instance, Justin Martyr never mentions Paul in his voluminous writings. When he is mentioned by other writers, Paul has nothing distinctive to say: he is a pale shadow and obedient lackey of the Twelve, as in Acts. When Ignatius, Polycarp, and 1 Clement (all too blithely taken for genuine as early second-century writings) make reference to Pauline letters, as Bauer noted, they sound like ill-prepared students faking their way through a discussion of a book they neglected to read. First Clement (47:1) appears to have thought there was but a single Pauline letter to Corinth. Ignatius, in his letter to the Ephesians (12:2), somehow imagined that Paul had eulogized the Ephesians in every one of his epistles. Polycarp thought there were several letters to the church at Philippi (Philippians 3:2) and that all Paul’s letters mentioned the Philippian congregation (11:3). The special pleading of Andreas Lindemann,⁵¹ attempting to reinterpret these peculiar references, as well as to supply some citations of Paul for these writings, only serves to underline the embarrassment of his position.

Goodspeed saw a period of neglect of Pauline literature but placed it between Paul’s death and the collection of his letters about 90 CE. Bauer saw the church in the role of Peter, denying his Lord when the latter’s popularity waned or, perhaps better, like the haughty scribes who shunned Jesus because they didn’t like the riffraff he associated with. Goodspeed, on the other hand, might have likened the church, who neglected Paul, to that “wicked lazy servant” who buried a valuable talent in the ground. Bauer would not disagree with this. Implicit in his theory, as John Knox puts it, was that Paul had never had the centrality in his own lifetime that the publication of his letters gave him posthumously. In any case, that influence was a long time coming, according to Bauer, Goodspeed, Knox, and C. Leslie Mitton. Then, through the first collector of the Pauline epistles, says Albert E. Barnett, a disciple of Goodspeed, “Paul becomes a literary influence.” We may call this the “second coming” approach.

The essentials of Goodspeed’s widely discussed theory are easily stated. Taking up an idea put forth earlier by Johannes Weiss,⁵² that Ephesians was written by the first editor of the Pauline collection, Goodspeed argued that Paul’s influence had sputtered out until publication of Luke’s Acts, which reawakened interest in the great apostle. This would have happened about 90 CE. Someone in the Ephesian church (Goodspeed nominated Onesimus, the runaway slave mentioned in Philemon) read Acts and thrilled to the gospel exploits of the man to whom he owed so much. If the reader were indeed Onesimus, as John Knox⁵³ would subsequently argue with some ingenuity, he had Paul to thank both for his freedom and his Christian faith. In any case, Goodspeed pictured a man who cherished his church’s copies of Colossians and Philemon. Reading Acts set him to wondering whether there might be more such epistolary gems in the various churches, so he set out to retrace Paul’s steps and his hunch bore out.

Goodspeed imagines that the church clerks at Corinth, Galatia, Philippi, Rome, and Thessalonika did manage to retrieve copies of letters that had languished beneath old church ledgers, membership rolls, and Sunday School lessons. They blew the dust off and handed them over. Like the new owner of the treasure hidden in the field, Onesimus (or whoever) went on his way rejoicing. Back in his study, as he thought over the matter, he was both determined to share his discovery with the wider Christian world and uncertain as to the best way to do it. At length he hit upon the idea of publishing a collection and writing a kind of digest of Pauline sentiments, a new Colossians, beefed up with gems from the Septuagint and Paul’s other letters, to serve as an introduction to the whole. This new epistle bore no title. However, because it was published in Ephesus and began circulating outward from there, people eventually took it for a genuine epistle and simply assumed it had been mailed by Paul to the city whence it had subsequently emerged. Thus it came to be known as the Epistle to the Ephesians.

Goodspeed had essentially cast Onesimus in Goodspeed’s own role of reviving and noising abroad the neglected work of a noble predecessor, which in Goodspeed’s case was Johannes Weiss’s theory about Ephesians. What evidence led them to draw their conclusions? Goodspeed noticed that Christian writings dating before circa 90 CE betrayed no evidence of familiarity with Paul’s letters or influence by him. Here Goodspeed thought mainly of the Synoptic Gospels. After 90 CE, however, Paul’s shadow is long and falls across the whole literary landscape. His ideas echo in the pages of Hebrews, 1 Clement, 1 Peter, and the Gospel of John. The sudden flood of epistles, and particularly of the sevenfold epistle collections (Revelation 1-3; Ignatius, Dionysius of Corinth), all attest to  the great impact of Paul’s letters organized as if written to seven churches, with the Corinthian letters being conflated or at least counted together, likewise the Thessalonians, and even Philemon riding the coattails of Colossians. What happened in or around 90 CE that could account for such an overnight change? Only one thing, according to Goodspeed, and that was the publication of the Acts of the Apostles. It was the catalyst for the publication of the Pauline corpus.

Those are the main lines of Goodspeed’s argument. Several problems become evident at once, however, and critics were not slow in pointing them out. For one thing, the degree of Pauline influence on a document is largely in the eye of the beholder. Ralph P. Martin makes Mark, not unreasonably, a Paulinist Gospel.⁵⁴ Why is there talk in Luke of “justifying” oneself and of being “justified”? Is not Paul in view in Matthew 5:17-19? On the other hand, is John’s Gospel so very Pauline?

The same problem arises with respect to Goodspeed’s dates. Guthrie thinks Goodspeed dated everything too late, but I would have the opposite objection. Why not place the Gospels in the early to mid-second century? As for Acts itself, even Goodspeed’s own disciple, Knox, places it just before 150 CE. Though otherwise he follows Goodspeed as loyally as Onesimus followed Paul, Knox does not think Onesimus would have needed to read Acts to be moved to collect the epistles

Regarding the sevenfold collections, one has to cheat, as Schmithals points out,⁵⁵ to squeeze Philemon together with Colossians. Did the idea of seven letters from Paul have to come from John of Patmos? The Apocalypse is crawling with sevens, as Guthrie noted against Goodspeed, and not even Goodspeed dared claim John got all of them from Paul.

Mowry thinks Goodspeed made Onesimus into a first-century Tischendorf,⁵⁶ traveling to exotic locales, hot on the trail of rare manuscript finds. Apparently Tyrrell’s quip about the nineteenth-century questers for the historical Jesus applied no less to questers for the origins of the Pauline collection: they looked down a deep well and saw only their own faces reflected. No doubt, F. F. Bruce⁵⁷ is correct when he dismisses the whole thing as “a romantic embellishment.” Specifically, it is cut from the same bolt as the patristic fictions of Mark the evangelist being Peter’s major domo or Luke playing Bones to Paul’s Kirk (“Damn it, Paul, I’m a doctor, not an ecclesiastical historian!”).

Goodspeed, Knox, and Mitton are happy to point to Walter Bauer’s thesis to strengthen their own about a period of Pauline neglect, but Bauer⁵⁸ had a rather different candidate in mind for the herald of Paul’s second coming: Marcion of Pontus, the second founder of Pauline Christianity. Says Bauer: “I would regard him as the first systematic collector of the Pauline heritage.” This opinion, like Goodspeed’s, was hardly unprecedented. F. C. Burkitt⁵⁹ had haz­arded the same educated guess.

When … we consider Marcion’s special interest in S[aint] Paul, he being, according to Marcion, the only one who understood the doctrine that Jesus came to deliver to mankind; and when, further, we remember that Marcion was perhaps more of a traveler than any other Christian in the second century, and therefore had opportunities for collection above most of his contemporaries; when we consider these things, we may be permitted to wonder whether Marcion may not have been the first to make a regular collection of the Pauline Epistles.

Incidentally, both Bauer and Burkitt thought that at least 1 Corinthians must have circulated widely before Marcion’s collection.

John Knox, an advocate of Goodspeed’s Onesimus as the first collector, seems to realize he should follow Bauer’s lead instead. After all, in Knox’s Marcion and the New Testament (1942), he demonstrates the soundness of the view—defended by Baur, Ritschl, Volkmar, and Hilgenfeld—that Marcion’s Gospel was not an abridgment of canonical Luke but rather a more modest abridgment of a shorter Ur-Lukas, which was also subsequently used by the writer/redactor of canonical Luke-Acts in the second century.⁶⁰ Lukan themes and favorite vocabulary are thickly concentrated in special Lukan material not shared with Marcion’s text (patristic writings list what was “missing” from Marcion’s versions), but are largely absent from material present in both Marcion and canonical Luke. Sometimes mundane non-Lukan synonyms appear where canonical Luke has favorite Lukan words, and none of these has any conceivable theological-polemical relevance; that is, Marcion would not have switched them, whereas they are just the sort of stylistic changes Luke regularly makes in his copying from Mark.

To make a long story short, Knox argues persuasively along many lines that Luke-Acts was a second-century Catholic response to Marcion’s Sputnik, the Apostolicon. Canonical Luke was a catholicizing expansion of the same Ur-Lukas Marcion had slightly abbreviated, while Acts was a sanitized substitute for Marcion’s Pauline corpus. Thus it presents a Paul who, though glorified, is co-opted, made the merest narcissistic reflection of the Twelve—and who writes no epistles but only delivers an epistle from the Jerusalem apostles! Knox sees the restoration of the Pauline letters—domesticated by the “dangerous supplement” of the Pastorals—and the addition of three other Gospels and several non-Pauline epistles, in short the whole formation of the New Testament canon, as a response to the challenge of Marcion and the Marcionite Church.

In light of all this, why does not Knox abandon Goodspeed, as Andrew and his friends did John the Baptist, and attach himself to Bauer instead? There are four reasons. First, he believes the Catholic Pauline collection reflects a different text than Marcion’s, so it must be based on another version of the corpus already available before Marcion. On the one hand, Knox himself admits we cannot know for sure how Marcion’s text read since we read it through the thick lenses of the Catholic apologists. They, in turn, may have read an already evolved post-Marcion text from the Marcionite Church or the splinter-sect of Apelles. On the other hand, why not assume that Marcion’s opponents simply reacted to Marcion’s collection by making their own collection of Pauline letters from different sources? As we have already seen, it is likely enough that, if one looked hard enough, one could find one’s own texts of 1 Corinthians, Romans, and perhaps any of the others. Even Bauer does not ask us to believe that no one had access to the Pauline epistles before Marcion, as if Marcion had discovered them in a cave at Qumran. If the Catholic Pauline corpus was a counter-collection (not just the same collection of texts, but an attempt to restore Marcion’s “omissions”), then the question of a variant textual tradition need not worry us too much. Knox imagines Bauer’s theory to require, so to speak, a Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version when it could just as easily have entailed a fresh Catholic corpus like the Jerusalem Bible.

Knox’s second reason for rejecting Marcion as the first collector is that he believes, contra Bauer, that the Apostolic Fathers do show familiarity with various Pauline letters. The only way to settle this is to compare each supposed allusion with the corresponding Pauline text and to ask whether we are dealing only with a similar turn of phrase or a piece of common ecclesiastical jargon. Admittedly, we do still find Polycarp to be filled with Paulinisms, but in this case the allusions suggest too much. The epistle of Polycarp, To the Philippians, reveals itself upon close inspection to be little more than a clumsy and pointless pastiche composed of Pauline and Pastoral formulas. Anyone might have written it, and one would certainly have expected the great Polycarp to have had a bit more of his own to say. It is only acquiescence to tradition that causes “critical” scholars, weary with debates over Pauline authenticity, to accept Polycarp’s To the Philippians, at face value. (And think of 1 Clement, as anonymous as Hebrews!) Knox, then, ought to have thought twice before banishing Bauer by invoking Polycarp. On the other hand, it may be that Polycarp was the author of the epistle To the Philippians and also of the Pastoral Epistles, which is why Pastoral material is “reflected” in his epistle.

Knox cannot imagine the collection taking form as late as Marcion’s time, since Ephesians already presupposes the other nine letters. However, R. Joseph Hoffmann argues cogently that “Laodiceans” was not merely Marcion’s name for our familiar Ephesians, it was an earlier Marcionite version. Just as canonical Luke is a catholicized, anti-Marcionite version of Ur-Lukas, so, according to Hoffmann⁶¹ (a latter-day admirer of Knox’s book on Marcion), canonical Ephesians is a catholicized reworking of an original Marcionite Laodiceans. This Laodiceans was the work of Marcion himself. As with Knox’s argument on these texts (Luke, Marcion’s Gospel, and the Ur-Lukas), one must engage Hoffmann’s extensive exegesis before reaching a judgment. It is impossible to present it adequately here.
Van Manen⁶² had made almost exactly the same diagnosis of Galatians, in which we read of an encounter between Paul and the Jerusalem pillars, strikingly reminiscent of Marcion’s clash with the Roman Church hierarchy: it was at first a Marcionite text, later catholicized by his opponents, who then covered their tracks by accusing Marcion of abbreviating it.

The identification of Marcion as possibly the first collector is now generally considered to be dead in the water, though, ironically, for almost the opposite reason to one of Knox’s arguments. Knox felt the difference between Marcion’s text and that of the Catholic edition of Paul implied Marcion had chosen one of perhaps several editions of the corpus already available. However, Nils Dahl, John J. Clabeaux,⁶³ and other scholars think they have found evidence of a widespread textual tradition to which Marcion’s text appears to have belonged. In other words, now it is Marcion’s textual similarity to other texts of Paul that eliminates him as the first collector. How have things turned about? It is no longer solely a question of textual relatedness or difference. We have already suggested that the availability of several copies of various individual Pauline letters would have allowed different collections of the same documents to reflect different streams of textual transmission. By far, most of Clabeaux’s valuable study reinforces this conclusion; not surprisingly, other editions of Paul had drawn on some of the same textual streams that Marcion’s did.

The new factor is the possibility that Marcion’s collection was an edited version of a collection already arranged in the same distinctive order, one that had always been considered Marcion’s innovation: Galatians first (no surprise if Marcion himself wrote it!), then 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thes­salonians, Laodiceans/Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon. This order, or something like it, is attested in two other places: in the so-called Marcionite Prologues and in the Old Syriac canon, as attested in Ephraim and in a canon list from the late third century. If these instances could be shown not to derive from Marcion’s Apostolicon, we would see them instead as evidence of a more widely current edition of the corpus with this arrangement. Dahl, building upon the argument of Hermann Josef Frede,⁶⁴ tries to disassociate both sources from Marcion. His argument centers on the theological slant of the Prologues.

Dahl’s two major arguments are first, that the false apostles everywhere denounced in the prologues as Paul’s opponents need not be the Judaizing Twelve of Marcionite polemic; second, that Paul is not pictured as the sole authentic apostle in the prologues. I think he is wrong, at least wholly unpersuasive, on both counts. First, the pseudo-apostles of Corinth are said to represent “the sect of the Jewish Law.” This by itself could mean many things, but the Prologue to Romans speaks of the unwary being lured by the false apostles “into the Law and the Prophets” as opposed to “the true Evangelical faith.” Dahl’s attempt⁶⁵ to evade the force of the “Law and Prophets vs. Gospel” opposition is special pleading. If the author of the prologue was not a Marcionite, he had a funny way of showing it.

Dahl also thinks that the Corinthian Prologue depicts Paul fighting on two different fronts against two different groups of false apostles, one specializing in “Jewish Law,” to be sure, while the other dealt in “the wordy eloquence of philosophy.” This reflects the contents of the Corinthian letters themselves, to borrow Dahl’s own observation on the Galatian Prologue, and in no way means the prologist did not view the Corinthian opponents of Paul as the Jerusalem pillars. After all, F. C. Baur thought the same thing.

And as for the possibility that the Prologue to Corinthians speaks favorably of other apostles besides Paul, there is some textual confusion here. Where Dahl reads that the Corinthians “heard the word of truth from the apostles,” plural, ab apostalis, he is making a text-critical choice. A number of manuscripts do have this reading, but others have it the way Knox reads it, with the singular ab apostolo, “from the apostle.” In view of the fact that the singular (ab revocat apostolus) occurs also at the conclusion of the Corinthian prologue, the most likely option is surely that the plural reading preferred by Dahl is an orthodox, catholicizing “correction.” Dahl’s⁶⁶ own motive in attempting to read the prologues as endorsing Cephas and Apollos alongside Paul is obviously the same.

If the prologues remain tilting to the Marcionite side, their order must be assumed to derive from the Apostolicon of Marcion. What about the Old Syriac? Of this, Dahl says,⁶⁷ “the arrangement of the letters in the Old Syriac version seems to be due to an amalgamation of an order like that of Marcion and the Prologues for the first four letters and an order more like that of our Greek manuscripts for the others. Textual affinities are not so striking that they suggest Marcionite influence upon the Old Syriac version of Paul.” In other words, the textual evidence is inconclusive. In that case, why simply assume it was “an order like that of Marcion” and not Marcion’s own?

Mowry⁶⁸ accepts most of Goodspeed’s reconstruction, except that she fills in the emptiness of the tunnel period, as we have seen, with the circulation of individual epistles. As for Marcion, Mowry hypothesizes that he obtained a copy of Goodspeed’s/Onesimus’s ten-letter (or seven-church) corpus but, having learned of earlier versions of individual letters, he obtained them and undertook his own critical edition on that basis. This would explain Marcion’s use of the short ending of Romans, the encyclical version. If there is good reason to accept Marcion as the first collector, however, why not simply turn Mowry’s reconstruction on its head and suggest, as we have above, that it was the Catholic opposition who scrambled to assemble their own counter-collection from different textual sources? The one seems as likely as the other. Obviously, all such speculations remain educated guesses, unverifiable at present, as Burkitt admitted, but why is the identification of Marcion as the first collector so unthinkable even to someone like Knox, who comes so close to that conclusion? Again, we may only speculate that Guthrie⁶⁹ speaks for many: “It is highly improbable that a heretic should have been the first to appreciate the value of the Pauline­ corpus.” The hands are the hands of historical criticism, but the voice is that of Eusebian apologetics.

The archetype debate

Having reviewed several distinct theories of how the Pauline corpus first came to be, we must now give some attention to the disputed question whether all of our texts of the Pauline epistles descend and diverge from a particular, definitive edition of the Pauline corpus. This is not to ask whether there had ever been different Pauline collections or different ancient editions. Almost everyone agrees that there would have been, but did one of these supersede all the others to form the basis of all our extant manuscripts? Or do our manuscripts still reflect (because they descend from) several, albeit quite similar, Pauline corpus editions? Let us survey a handful of proposals regarding a definitive archetype.

Günther Zuntz decided that the best way to account for a Pauline textual tradition that differs so much in minor respects but hardly at all in major ones was to posit the compilation of a definitive variorum edition about a half-century after the original writings. In the meantime there would have been extensive copying of various individual letters, giving rise to the variants catalogued in the archetype. The only tradition of ancient scholarship capable of producing such a critical text was the Alexandrian school, and there seemed to Zuntz no particular reason to prevent our locating the operation in Alexandria itself. Zuntz believed he could identify several glosses introduced into the text by Alexandrian scholars. Later scribes who made copies on the basis of the resultant master text would not be so careful (pedantic?) as to bother noting variant readings but, like some modern Bible translators, would simply choose one of the alternatives in each case and go on. Thus the definitive edition provided a precedent for its own undoing. In broad outline, Bruce accepts Zuntz’s reconstruction. As we will see, others think quite differently.

Walter Schmithals,⁷⁰ notorious for his division of most of the Paul­ine epistles into hypothetical earlier fragmentary letters, adopted­ the older theory of Johannes Weiss that the earliest collection of Paul’s letters must have begun with 1 Corinthians, with the catholicizing gloss in 1:2 introducing the whole corpus to a wider­ readership. He thought it must have ended with Romans, the grand doxology of 16:25-27 ringing down the curtain on a broader ecumenical stage. Schmithals pictured an original seven-letter collection excluding Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, and the later Pastorals; these may have been, a la Trobisch, two independent three-­letter collections later appended to the original. The number seven was important to the compiler/collector, just as it was to John of Patmos, to Ignatius, and to Eusebius (collector of letters of Dionysius of Corinth) because it “expressed original and perfect unity.”⁷¹ The corpus was meant to stand for the truth of Catholic orthodoxy against Gnostic heresy.

It was this symbolic constraint, felt by various other letter collectors as well, that provides the motive for the compiler stitching together the various Pauline fragments as he did. He could not leave any of the precious text on the cutting room floor so, by hook or by crook, he got it all in. This scenario would also account for the anti-Gnostic polemic Schmithals finds in every letter. It is not so much that Schmithals thinks Paul was a first-century Joe McCarthy looking for a Gnostic under every bush. Rather, it was the concern of the redactor to include some of Paul’s anti-Gnostic polemic in each of the seven letters.

Schmithals feels that Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon do not show signs of the distinctive hand of the redactor and therefore cannot have belonged to the original collection. He knows that Goodspeed and Knox, who also invoke the analogy of other early seven-letter collections, try to squeeze in these three by combining the pairs of Corinthian and Thessalonian letters, but Schmithals says that to go on and make Philemon and Colossians count as one letter is to force a square peg into a round hole. Schmithals points out that the key thing is not letters to seven churches (neither the Ignatian nor the Dionysian collection fits that pattern—some letters being to individuals, others to more than one congregation), but rather seven letters to churches. Thus, Schmithals anticipated the criticism of Gamble that it had to be seven letters to seven churches for the symbolism to make any sense.⁷² Perhaps so, but don’t tell Schmithals; tell it to the compilers of the letters of Dionysius and Ignatius. As to place and time, Schmithals approves Harnack’s suggestion that the letters were compiled at Corinth, and he thinks it happened already by 80 CE. The first collector was also the redactor, and he bequeathed us our archetype.

Winsome Munro argued with great ingenuity and attention both to general criteria and to specific detail that all our copies of Paul’s epistles descend from a particular archetype, which she, unlike Zuntz and Schmithals, did not identify with the original collection. She demonstrated the existence of a comprehensive and systematic set of textual interpolations across the whole Pauline corpus as well as in 1 Peter, long recognized as something of a Paulinist adjunct anyway. These interpolations stand out because of their great affinity with the socio-political stance and pious quietism of the Pastorals and for their clash with the many elements of apocalyptic egalitarianism and sectarian radicalism in the other Pauline letters. Munro reviews a raft of previous critical treatments of these jarring “subjection texts” and notes that not infrequently scholars would peg this or that individual text (e.g., Rom. 13:1-7; Eph. 5:21-33; 1 Cor. 11:1-16; 14:34-38) as a possible interpolation. Munro draws all these suggestions together, isolates criteria for identifying what she calls a “Pastoral stratum,” and uncovers several more passages of the same type. This stratum “does not come from the original collector and redactor of a Pauline letter corpus, but from different circles at a more advanced stage of Christian history. The later stratum, together with the Pastoral epistles, will therefore be characterized as ‘Pastoral’ or trito-Pauline … its milieu is the Roman hellenism of the first half of the second century, when the Christian movement was prey to sporadic persecution, but was nevertheless hopeful that it might gain recognition and tolerance from the Roman authorities under the Antonine emperors.”⁷³

However, the Pastoral redactor couldn’t have been either the first collector or one who reissued the corpus in a new edition after a period of neglect. In either of these cases, Munro felt sure, the Pastoral reviser would have been much freer to excise remaining elements of Pauline radicalism distasteful to him. “The inescapable conclusion is that the ten-letter collection was in circulation at the time of the Pastoral revision. That means it must have been taken over from an opposition group and revised in order to counteract its influence.”⁷⁴ Dennis R. MacDonald made much the same case, though in brief outline, in The Legend and the Apostle.⁷⁵ He too saw the hand of the Pastor in the editing of what became our textual archetype, though in my opinion MacDonald’s profile of the opponents is more convincing than Munro’s. He makes them a motley collection of Encratite Christian radicals, whereas Munro has spoken more narrowly of Jewish-Christian ascetics.

Let us remind ourselves briefly of Trobisch, whose theory certainly entails an archetype corpus, since his method depends significantly on the study of the order of the Pauline letters in extant manuscripts. He notes that various canon lists have atypical orders but that virtually no extant manuscripts do. He ascribes the order, at least of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians, to Paul. Trobisch concludes that Paul himself edited this collection and provided the archetype. He leaves unanswered (even unasked) whether there were other collections made after Paul’s death by people who were ignorant of the sheaf of copies he had sent to Ephesus. If so, they must have utilized copies of the unedited versions of Paul’s letters. Then which edition would have been considered more authoritative?

If Bruce, MacDonald, Munro, Schmithals, Trobisch, and Zuntz believe a single archetype edition lies behind all extant manuscripts, their agreement is impressive but by no means unanimous. Significant voices taking the opposite view include Kurt Aland and Harry Gamble. Aland pronounces thusly on the matter

The opinion that a uniform “ur-Corpus” of seven Pauline Epistles had been collected by the close of the first century, from which all later witnesses have descended, is nothing but a “phantasy of wishful thinking” … By about AD 90 several “Ur-Corpora” of Pauline Epistles began to be made available at various places, and … these collections, of differing extent, could have included some or all of the following: 1 and 2 Corinthians, Hebrews, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians. Eventually other traditional Pauline Epistles were added to the several collections and a more or less stabilized collection finally emerged.⁷⁶

In several publications, Gamble voices essentially the same sen­timents. Yet one should not imagine that Aland and Gamble envision a radically diverse textual tradition. Just the opposite. In general, they believe the stream of textual transmission flowed pure and without deviation. It was like the disciple of Rabbi Johannon ben Zakkai, a plastered cistern that lost not a drop. No archetypal ur-corpus was needed to ensure faithful transmission of the text, and none is needed to account theoretically for textual near-­unanimity. Gamble says:

If, then, the Pauline textual tradition goes back to multiple sources, it remains a matter of note in relation to redactional hypotheses [like Schmithals’s] that the forms of the Pauline letters remain fundamentally the same in all known witnesses. Except in the case of Romans [with its longer and shorter endings], the tradition preserves no textual evidence that any of the letters ever had basically different forms than the forms in which we know them. The case of Romans offers the exception that proves the rule: when textual revisions have taken place they have left their marks in the evidence.⁷⁷

In other words, there is just enough textual variation to show that there was not a uniform and universal archetype, in which case all texts would agree completely, but there is by no means enough textual variation to indicate the existence of significantly different text forms. Earlier, shorter (non-interpolated) versions of Pauline letters might have existed without managing to leave any traces in the manuscript tradition. In fact, Aland and Gamble ignore the fact that when scribes compared longer and shorter versions of the same epistle, they naturally would have harmonized the two by choosing the longer reading. Mowry understood this: “The new collection came into immediate demand, and soon supplanted every other edition still in circulation. But copies of letters, in the form they had had when circulating individually and locally, survived here and there and left their mark either directly or indirectly in [the] manuscript tradition … Their textual additions survived; their omissions tended to disappear.”⁷⁸

Similarly Knox:

Once a book came to be officially adopted in a particular form, older forms which lacked any such ecclesiastical approval tended to disappear. Manuscripts would gradually, and fairly rapidly, be conformed to the “correct” text. The process would never have become complete, and thus we have the various local texts, which emerge clearly enough in the early third century. These, however, differ relatively little from one another; and that is true not because the autographs were so faithfully followed in the late first and early second centuries but rather, on the contrary, because official editions and publications so completely drove the autographs (if there were any surviving) and their descendants from the field.⁷⁹

William O. Walker, Jr., is not surprised that there should be no surviving manuscript evidence for literary interpolations: “Indeed, if a collector-editor’s real goal was to include all available Pauline writings, as seems at least plausible, the tendency almost inevitably would have been to err on the side of inclusion, not of exclusion. In addition, deliberate or inadvertent interpolations may well have been introduced prior to the final editing of the letters. Also to be noted in this context, of course, is the well-documented practice of copying glosses into the texts of later manuscripts.”⁸⁰ As John C. O’Neill anticipates:

[The answer to] the objection … that we might well expect more [consequential] texts than Marcion and D [without glosses] … is that scribes would on the whole prefer to transcribe the long­est text, being unwilling to lose anything precious. Every addition would tend to be recorded, even if the addition depended for its sense on an omission that the scribe was unwilling to adopt. That means that Vaticanus in fact bears traces of the whole history of the text. That history cannot, however, be read from Vaticanus, without evidence from other manuscripts which have gone a different way.⁸¹
The other consideration neglected by Aland and Gamble is the possibility of official ecclesiastical suppression of earlier or otherwise deviant text forms. Winsome Munro thinks of it in terms of more or less voluntary conformity within the orthodox plausibility structure: “Though episcopacy was probably not yet firmly established in the Aegean region [at the time of the Pastoral revision], it would have been possible to maintain a standard text within orthodox circles. Acceptance of this ecclesiastical authority would have involved adherence to the scriptures and revisions of scripture it authorized, and rejection or deviation therefore would have spelt expulsion.”⁸²

Think of the revulsion with which fundamentalists greeted the debut of the Revised Standard Version. Certainly none would be caught dead with anything but King James in church. Likewise sectarian heretics would not be eager to share their cherished scripture versions with their religious opponents, so neither side probably had much to fear in the way of textual infection. And when these sects expired, their scriptures were buried with them: witness, for example, the dearth of Bogomil or Catharist scriptures. Walker envisions a slightly later situation in which internalized authority might prove insufficient:

We only know that the surviving text of the Pauline letters is the text promoted by the historical winners in the theological and ecclesiastical struggles of the second and third centuries. Marcion’s text disappeared—another example, no doubt, of the well-documented practice of suppressing and even destroying what some Christians regarded as deficient, defective, deviant, or dangerous texts. In short, it appears likely that the emerging Catholic leadership in the Churches “standardized” the text of the Pauline corpus in the light of “orthodox” views and practices, suppressing and even destroying all deviant texts and manuscripts. Thus it is that we have no manuscripts dating from earlier than the third century; thus it is that all of the extant manuscripts are remarkably similar in most of their significant features.⁸³

One cannot help but wonder if text-critical theories like those of Aland, Gordon D. Fee, Gamble, Harnack, and Bruce M. Metzger are simply contemporary attempts to safeguard the officially sanitized textual tradition in the interests of the same ecclesiastical establishment that produced the text they so jealously guard.

Conclusion

In composing a survey like this one, it is scarcely possible to avoid reaching some tentative conclusions of one’s own. I will take the liberty of sharing them here. Most of them will by now come as no surprise. I can see some early use of Romans and 1 Corinthians, followed later by the sequel 2 Corinthians, all as encyclicals, as well as the local exchange and circulation of other letters. The question of authorship would have little bearing here one way or the other. No doubt, interpolations were made and gradually permeated the text of each letter until final canonization of the Pastoral edition and concurrent burning of its rivals.

The best candidate, if we want a name for the first collector of the Pauline epistles, remains Marcion. No one else we know of would be a good candidate, certainly not the essentially fictive Luke, Onesimus, or Timothy. Marcion, as Burkitt and Bauer show, fills the bill perfectly. Of the epistles themselves, he is probably the original author of Laodiceans, the Vorlage of Ephesians, and perhaps of at least part of Galatians, too. Like Muhammad in the Koran, he would have read his own struggles back into the careers of his biblical predecessors. Nonetheless, as our investigations proceed, we may find it more plausible to ascribe the formation of the Pauline corpus to a Marcionite successor than to Marcion himself.

Marcion, or Marcionites, adapted the now-lost Ur-Lukas and combined it with the ten-letter Pauline corpus to form the Apostolicon. As Knox perceived clearly, our canonical Luke tried to supplant the Marcionite Gospel, augmenting the pre-Marcionite Ur-Lukas with new, catholicizing, and anti-Marcionite material of various sorts. Canonical Luke succeeded in this effort (again, the longer displaces the shorter). And according to Knox, the Acts of the Apostles, which has Paul as a clone of Peter—someone who does not even write letters—replaced the dangerous corpus of “the apostle of the heretics.” Like Jacob, however, it only managed to usurp priority over Esau, not to destroy him, even today subtly governing the way historical critics read the Pauline epistles. The Pauline corpus survived alongside it.

One modification I would make in Knox’s reconstruction is to factor in Jerome D. Quinn’s proposal that the author of Luke-Acts was the author of the Pastoral Epistles and that he intended a tripartite work on the pattern of contemporary collections of documents about or by a famous figure, concluding with a letter or collection of letters by the great man. Luke-Acts-Pastorals would then be a tripartite tractate to counter Marcion’s scripture, the Pastor­als intended to supplant the earlier letters. I suspect the redacted Ephesians and Third Corinthians were originally similar Pauline diatessarons aiming but failing to replace Marcion’s Pauline corpus. I should note that Knox did, of course, regard the Pastoral Epistles as post-Marcion and anti-Marcion; he just didn’t group them with Luke-Acts.

Since the corpus could not be eliminated, Plan B was to reissue them in a sanitized edition, domesticated by means of the Pastoral stratum. From there on in, it became easier to destroy rival versions of the Pauline letters. The Gospels of Mark and Matthew were added and so was John once it had undergone ecclesiastical redaction (Bultmann), just like Laodiceans and Ur-Lukas. How interesting that, just as Acts has Paul chained to a Roman guard on either side, so are the most heretical of New Testament writings escorted by watchful Catholic sentinels on both sides: John is bracketed between Luke and Acts, Paul’s letters between Acts and the Pastorals. They shouldn’t offer any trouble.

Eventually, the nondescript Catholic or General Epistles were spuriously ascribed to the pillar apostles so as to dilute Paul’s voice yet further. There was even an attempt to fabricate an innocuous, one-page replacement for the Marcionite Laodiceans. It didn’t catch on, but it managed to fool Harnack.

Notes

1. The term was coined by Immanuel Kant. It “was the type of transcendental theology characteristic of Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, which believes it can know the existence of an Urwesen [original being] through mere concepts, without the help of any experience whatsoever” (Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 7).

2. French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was one of the most influential Deconstructionists of the twentieth century.

3. Walter Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, trans. John E. Steely (New York: Abingdon Press, 1972), 270.

4. R. L. Archer, “The Epistolary Form in the New Testament,” Expository Times 63 (1951-52), 296ff.

5. Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1970), 657.

6. Adolf Deissmann, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, 2nd ed., trans. William E. Wilson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 5-6.

7. Abraham J. Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).

8. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Rhetorical Situation and Historical Reconstruction in 1 Corinthians,” in eds. Edward Adams and David G. Horrell, Christianity at Corinth: The Quest for the Pauline Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 153-54.

9. David Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

10. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, 266.

11. Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection, 101.

12. The actual Tosefta was a subsequent collection of materials left out of the Mishna by its scribal compilers.

13. Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1957), 41: “If the Form-Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection.”

14. Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection, 97-98.

15. Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983). The Encratites were ascetics who, like the Shakers, rejected all sexuality as the price of salvation.

16. Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, 646.

17. Adolf Harnack, Die Briefsammlung des Apostels Paulus (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926).

18. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Barthes, Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 142-48.

19. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 145, 154, 157.

20. Max Müller, “Preface to The Sacred Books of the East,” in The Upan­isads, Part I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), ix-xxxix. He writes, for example, of “the wild confusion of sublime truth with vulgar stupidity that meets us in the pages of the Veda, the Avesta, and the Tripitaka” (xv-xvi).

21. Percy Neale Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 87-137.

22. Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, 655-57.

23. Charles Francis Digby Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 204; Moule, “The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles: A Reappraisal,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 47 (1965): 430-52.

24. Stephen G. Wilson, Luke and the Pastoral Epistles (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1979).

25. Jerome D. Quinn, “The Last Volume of Luke: The Relation of Luke-Acts to the Pastoral Epistles,” in Charles H. Talbert, ed., Perspectives on Luke-Acts (Danville, VA: Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, 1978), 62-75.

26. Hans Conzelmann, “Paulus und die Weisheit,” New Testament Studies 12 (1965): 321-44.

27. Eduard Lohse, Die Briefe an die Kolosser und an Philemon (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 14.

28. Hans-Martin Schenke, “Das Weiterwirken des Paulus und die Pflege seines Erbs durch die Paulusschule,” New Testament Studies 21, issue 4 (1975).

29. Harry Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 39.

30. Schenke, “Weiterwirken des Paulus,” 511.

31. Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 32-208.

32. Ernst Käsemann, “The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of the Church,” in Käsemann, Essays on New Testament Themes, trans. W. J. Montague (London: SCM Press, 1964), 95-107.

33. Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 127.

34. M. Eugene Boring, Sayings of the Risen Jesus: Christian Prophecy in the Synoptic Tradition. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 46 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

35. It is unfortunate that in English we have two separate words for story and history, whereas in German and French, the same word, though different in the two languages, covers both concepts.

36. Hermann Detering, Paulusbriefe ohne Paulus? Die Paulusbriefe in der holländischen radikalkritik Kontexte (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992).

37. Willem Christiaan van Manen, “Paul,” in T. K. Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black, eds., Encyclopaedia Biblica (New York: Macmillan, 1914).

38. Willem Christiaan van Manen, “Old-Christian Literature,” Encyclopaedia Biblica.

39. Moule, Birth of the New Testament, 203.

40. Kirsopp Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London: Rivingtons, 1911), cited in Leslie C. Mitton, The Formation of the Pauline Corpus of Letters (London: Epworth Press, 1955), 16: “Small and partial collections came into existence in various centers, before the Corpus in its completed form fully replaced them.”

41. Günther Zuntz, The Text of the Epistles: A Disquisition upon the Corpus Paulinum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 279.

42. Percy Neale Harrison, Polycarp’s Two Epistles to the Philippians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 239-40.

43. Lucetta Mowry, “The Early Circulation of Paul’s Letters,” Journal of Biblical Literature 63 (June 1944), 73-86.

44. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, 239-74.

45. Nils Dahl, “The Particularity of the Pauline Epistles as a Problem for the Ancient Church,” in Neotestamentica et Patristica: Eine Freundesgabe Herrn Professor Dr. Oscar Cullmann zu seinem 60 Geburtstag überreicht (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 269.

46. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, 259.

47. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, eds. Robert Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, trans. by a team from the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 219.

48. Mowry, “Early Circulation of Paul’s Letters,” 81.

49. Simone Petremont, A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism, trans. Carol Harrison (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 223.

50. Hans von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible, trans. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 144-45.

51. Andreas Lindemann, “Paul in the Writings of the Apostolic Fathers,” in William S. Babcock, ed., Paul and the Legacies of Paul (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990), 25-43. I shall deal with most of these supposed Pauline references in Chapter Four.

52. Johannes Weiss, Der erste Korintherbrief (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910); Weiss, Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period AD 30-150, 2 vols., trans. and ed. Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 2:684.

53. John Knox, Philemon among the Letters of Paul: A New View of Its Place and Importance (New York: Abingdon Press, 1935; rev. ed. 1959).

54. Ralph P. Martin, Mark: Evangelist and Theologian (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1972), 161-62.

55. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, 264.

56. The German scholar Lobegott Friedrich Konstantin von Tischendorf spent the mid-nineteenth century in the Middle East hunting for the oldest extant Bible manuscripts. In Palestine he discovered the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, which he presented to his benefactor, Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

57. Frederick F. Bruce, qtd. in Arthur G. Patzia, “Canon,” in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, eds. Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin, Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1993), 88.

58. Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy, 221.

59. Francis C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and Its Transmission (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1906, rpt. 1925), 318-19.

60. John Knox, Marcion and the New Testament: An Essay in the Early History of the Canon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 77-113.

61. R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay on the Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century. AAR Academy Series 46 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 274-80.

62. Van Manen, “Paul.”

63. John J. Clabeaux, A Lost Edition of the Letters of Paul: A Reassessment of the Text of the Pauline Corpus Attested by Marcion. Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series No. 21 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1989).

64. Frede, Altlateinische Paulus-Handschriften (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1964).

65. Nils Dahl, “The Origin of the Earliest Prologues to the Pauline Letters,” Semeia 12 (1978): 260.

66. Ibid., 259.

67. Ibid., 254.

68. Mowry, “Early Circulation of Paul’s Letters,” 80.

69. Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, 644.

70. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, 259.

71. Ibid., 261.

72. Harry Y. Gamble, “The Redaction of the Pauline Letters and the Formation of the Pauline Corpus,” Journal of Biblical Literature 94 (Sept. 1975).

73. Winsome Munro, Authority in Paul and Peter: The Identification of a Pastoral Stratum in the Pauline Corpus and I Peter. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 45 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2.

74. Ibid., 141-42.

75. MacDonald, Legend and the Apostle, 85-89.

76. Aland, qtd. in Patzia, “Canon,” 89.

77. Gamble, “Redaction of the Pauline Letters,” 418.

78. Mowry, “Early Circulation of Paul’s Letters,” 86.

79. Knox, Marcion, 131.

80. William O. Walker, Jr., “The Burden of Proof in Identifying Interpolations in the Pauline Letters,” New Testament Studies 33 (Oct. 1987), 612.

81. John C. O’Neill, The Recovery of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. (London: SPCK, 1972), 36.

82. Munro, Authority in Paul and Peter, 143.

83. Walker, “Burden of Proof,” 614.

Salt Lake City—Before tackling the historical question of the Apostle Paul, biblical scholar Robert M. Price engaged a colleague at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Bart D. Ehrman, in a national discussion about whether or not Jesus existed. Price is a church-going Episcopalian who questions Jesus’s place in history, while Ehrman is a lapsed Baptist who believes Jesus was real. Price is an oft-published Professor of Scriptural Studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary in Florida.

In Price’s new book, The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul, just published by Signature Books (Salt Lake City), Price suggests that Paul is a composite of several historical figures, including Marcion of Pontos, Stephen the Martyr, Simon the Sorcerer, and the iconoclastic evangelist who was named Paul. His letters were actually written and edited by other people, including Marcion and an early Church Father, Polycarp of Smyrna. This view, said New Testament scholar Hermann Detering from his office in Berlin, Germany, “represents a paradigm shift in the field of Pauline research.”

According to the Book of Acts, Paul entered the scene as a zealous persecutor of early Christians, then transformed the movement Jesus founded from a Jewish sect to anti-Jewish congregations that rejected Jewish law. A member of the Acts Seminar, Price has joined the ranks of scholars who conclude that Acts was a second-century historical novel based on the writings of ancient authors like Homer, Virgil, Euripides, and Josephus. The result, according to Price, was a collection of stories and myths that have “virtually no historical value,” especially in how they relate to a real Paul. Some scholars have even used word-print analysis and other techniques to show that Polycarp was Paul’s principal editor and sole author of the epistles to Timothy and Titus, a finding with which Price agrees.

Recently two separate reviewers questioned why I included the church trial of Sidney Rigdon in my book, The Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes, saying the excommunication was heard by the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, not the high council.¹ I’ve let this pass and dismissed these criticisms as inconsequential, but since the argument is gaining steam, I suppose I need to respond to it. In fact, the question carries some significance regarding early LDS governance.

For starters, the partial transcript of the trial, published in the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo on September 15, 1844, a week after the trial, quoted Brigham Young as saying: “It is written in the book of Doctrine and Covenants, that the president [of the church] can be tried before a bishop and twelve high priests, or the high council of the church. There [are many here] who were present at the organization of that quorum in Kirtland. We have here before us this morning the high council, and bishop Whitney at their head, and we will try Sidney Rigdon before this council and let them take an action on his case this morning; and then we will present it to the church, and let the church also take an action upon it.”²

Brigham Young added that “the Twelve are to be regarded as witnesses in this trial and not judges. We presented ourselves before the high Council as witnesses and we are prepared to bring other testimony forward if necessary.”³ Thus, in a sense, Brigham Young acted as prosecutor. He called various apostles to testify, so it looked to some like a meeting of the Twelve, but it was the high council that sat in judgment. At the time, the Quorum of the Twelve was known as the “traveling high council” and did not yet have jurisdiction within the established stakes of the church. Joseph Smith was technically president of the high council (also called the president of the high priesthood) and not yet univesally referred to as the president of the church, which indicates the prestige and authority the high council commanded at the time.⁴ The trial of Sidney Rigdon was one step in a process of defining how the church would be governed in the future, after the death of the founder of the church.

Some of the confusion stems from the fact that the September 8 minutes of the trial were excluded from the collection labeled “High council minutes, 1839 October-1845 October” (LR 3102 22) at the LDS Church History Library. There are actually two sets of minutes, both of which are contained, not in the high council collection, but in the “Historian’s Office General Church Minutes” (CR 100 318). The clerk who produced one set of minutes was William Clayton, whose version was used to prepare the transcript that appeared in the Times and Seasons, with some additions and deletions by John Taylor and notes by Willard Richards. The Clayton version is incomplete, as the extant copy cuts off abruptly part way through the trial. The second set of minutes was taken by John McEwan. It is not only complete but contains additional details not included in the Clayton version. Neither set of minutes was considered preliminary; neither was an early version of the other.⁵ They were created independently.

I reproduced the McEwan version in my book because it was more complete than the Times and Seasons account. Had I known there would be questions about the general nature of the venue, I would have included additional information from the Clayton minutes, but it did not occur to me that anyone would challenge the fact that this was a high council hearing. I might also comment here on the nature of the General Church Minutes collection, which is a catch-all category for all sorts of things. In September 1844, neither Clayton nor McEwan was writing for a general church meeting. Their minutes ended up in that collection because they had been written on loose sheets of paper and were not bound within a permanent volume.⁶ In support of the fact that it was a high council meeting, the Clayton minutes differentiate between the Twelve who were “present” and the high council, who appointed someone to serve as their head and appointed replacements for absent members in order to have a full quorum present to formally conduct business.

It should also be noted that, while the meeting was conducted under unusual circumstances, Brigham Young and William Marks made sure it was carried out according to high council rules.⁷  Brigham Young explained that Rigdon had been given notice of the trial and was given an opportunity to defend himself, stating that Rigdon “had plenty of time to send up & let us know if he wished us to defer this case until future & he has not, & I think he has had plenty of time for we gave him notice on tuesday evening last.”⁸ President Marks followed high council protocol by personally offering a defense of Rigdon. “I will take up the opposite side,” he said,⁹ both because he had “always been a friend to Elder Rigdon” and because, according to revelation, someone from the high council was to “stand up in behalf of the accused.”¹⁰  Marks’s defense of Rigdon, and Young’s advanced notice to Rigdon, ensured that the trial followed the rules by which the high council operated.

A clarification in the Times and Seasons added that after a brief introduction, President Young “submitted the case to Bishop Whitney and the High Council.” Whitney acted as president of the council. Nor did the Twelve vote on whether Rigdon should be “cut off.” For some reason, William W. Phelps made the motion, but the McEwan record states that when it was voted on, it “passed the high council unanimously.”¹¹

I thought the records were clear in stating that this was a high council hearing and that it was the high council that decided, on the recommendation of the apostles, to cut off Rigdon from the church, that my inclusion of these minutes in the collection was therefore appropriate.

1. Robin Scott Jensen, review of The Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes, ed. John S. Dinger, Journal of Mormon History 38, No. 3 (Summer 2012): 262-68; Ben Park, “Book Review,” The Juvenile Instructor, online blog, Nov. 20, 2012.

2. Times and Seasons, Sept. 15, 1844, 648. A full run of the publication is available online at the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, and through other sources such as the New Mormon Studies CD-ROM: A Comprehensive Library, 2d. ed. (Salt Lake City: Smith Research Associates, 2009).

3. Sept. 8, 1844, Historian’s Office General Church Minutes, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City.