The Letters Paul May Not Have Written

Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry Paul’s name. Scholars agree he wrote seven of them. The other six are a different matter, and understanding why that distinction exists is one of the more illuminating problems in New Testament scholarship.

Start with the bedrock. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are what scholars call the “undisputed” Paulines. The consensus cuts across the scholarly spectrum: evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and secular scholars all agree. These letters display consistent vocabulary, theological preoccupations, and rhetorical patterns. Paul’s voice in Romans and Galatians is identifiably the same voice working through related problems. If you want to understand what Paul actually thought, these seven letters are your primary source.

Then things get more complicated. Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians occupy an intermediate category: disputed, but not dismissed. The authorship questions aren’t settled. Ephesians shares large sections with Colossians, which would be unusual if Paul wrote both independently but makes sense if a later writer used Colossians as a template. The Greek in Ephesians is notably more elaborate than in Romans; sentences run longer, the style more liturgical. Colossians introduces a “cosmic Christ” framework that reads like a theological development beyond what appears in the undisputed letters. Textual analysis, including stylometric work that measures word frequency and syntactic patterns, has sharpened these questions, though it hasn’t resolved them.

The Pastoral Epistles present a different case. 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus present themselves as personal letters from Paul to his deputies, and for most of Christian history, that’s how they were read. Today, most scholars, including many conservative ones, treat them as post-Pauline compositions, probably written in the early second century. The vocabulary shifts substantially: words and phrases found nowhere else in Paul, a developed church hierarchy that fits the second century better than the first, and a tone more concerned with institutional stability than with the charged theological debates of the earlier letters.

This is where pseudepigraphy matters. The word sounds clinical, but the practice was common and understood in the ancient world. Writing under a respected teacher’s name wasn’t deception the way modern forgery is. It was extension — a way of saying that this is how our teacher’s thought applies to our situation now. Followers of Pythagoras, students in Aristotelian schools, communities carrying rabbinic traditions forward: pseudepigraphy was a recognized method of transmitting and developing a legacy. The Pastoral Epistles, on this reading, aren’t fakes. They represent the Pauline communities working out what Paul would have said to a generation he didn’t live to address.

None of this makes the letters worthless. Their canonical standing within Christianity doesn’t require that Paul held the pen. What they represent, whoever wrote them, is a community actively interpreting and extending what they understood their tradition to be. They are data about early Christianity’s formation as much as they are theology.

That formation is genuinely fascinating. Early Christian community formation was not a clean institutional handoff. It was contested, overlapping, full of voices that didn’t agree on what the tradition even was. The Pauline communities were one stream among several, and within that stream there were real arguments about what Paul’s letters meant and which letters were genuinely his. The canon we have is partly a record of which voices prevailed.

This is territory I find myself thinking about constantly while working on fiction set in this world. Nathan Hale Mercer, the scholar at the center of The Oldest Fragment, has spent years inside these debates — not as a casual reader but as someone who has worked through the Greek, tracked the literature, and formed real views. A person like that reads 1 Timothy with several layers of awareness at once: the received text, the historical questions underneath it, the community that produced it, and what that community needed to believe. That double awareness is something I tried to build into him from the beginning.

If the history behind these texts interests you, I write about it regularly here. New posts go out when they’re ready — you can subscribe to get them.