Nina E. Livesey. <i>The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship</i>

In this monograph, Nina E. Livesey challenges the current consensus among New Testament scholars that there are seven undisputed Pauline letters (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) dating from the mid-first-century AD. Livesey’s basic premise is that these letters are actually pseudonymous and most likely the product of the philosophical school of Marcion located in Rome; thus, they are a mid-second-century AD creation (pp. xii, 2, 28). A circle of well-educated Marcionite scholars made use of the letter genre to instruct some Christian “communities” while making their exhortation and message appear as if coming directly from “Paul.” As evidenced in Seneca’s letters to “Lucilius,” the letter genre (or epistolary genre) was a very flexible one that allowed authors to convey specific teachings and somehow guaranteed the positive reception of the letter(s) thanks to its fictitious or crafty nature.Livesey implements a multifaceted approach in the presentation of the evidence (p. 28). First (chapters 1 and 2), she presents a history of interpretation and explains the methods that proponents of the undisputed-letters hypothesis use to arrive at their conclusions, and she challenges this long-standing assumption using both internal and external evidence from the letters. Second (chapters 3 and 4), Livesey reinterprets the letters starting with the assumption that they are “letters-in-form-only” and pseudonymous, which were written to propagate particular theological views. Here, she provides evidence of why the letters fit better in a second-century social context.The history of the authentic letter perspective is briefly narrated by Livesey in chapter 1. Here she argues that this hypothesis finds its roots in the Enlightenment, a period when the letters were studied mainly because of their potential historical value to explain early Christian origins. An example of this type of approach is F. C. Baur in the nineteenth century. Baur deemed only four letters as historical: the Hauptbriefe (Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans). Livesey charges Baur with using circular reasoning to arrive at this conclusion, which for her is “a fatal methodological flaw” (p. 45): It is incorrect to use NT documents to reconstruct early Christian history and use such a reconstruction as the framework to determine which NT documents are historically reliable. Another important figure discussed by Livesey is Adolf Deissmann. Deissmann’s methodological step was to distinguish a “real” letter (Ger. Brief) from a “literary” letter (Ger. Epistel), the former was “artless, personal, genuine and historically reliable,” and the latter was “carefully crafted, a work of art, and destined for a public audience” (p. 57). In Deissmann’s view, there were thirteen “real” Pauline letters. Livesey defines Deissmann’s reconstruction as “ahistorical” and “mythical” (p. 64) and calls out Pauline scholarship not for projecting the same methodological moves but for maintaining his assessment of the Pauline correspondence as genuine.In chapter 2, Livesey tackles the assumptions that in the mid-first century AD there existed both a figure called Paul and real communities to which he wrote. She also discusses theoretical frameworks used by Pauline scholars to present these (Paul and his communities) as historical. In terms of methodological steps, Livesey’s central criticism is that internal evidence from “Pauline” letters and the book of Acts constitutes the sole evidence to prove the historicity of Paul and his communities. Arguments from external evidence are lacking; hence, Livesey blames Pauline epistolographic studies for falsely giving life to Paul (p. 73). In this section, she also repeats the idea that ancient authors “were taught to depict figures creatively for persuasion” (p. 76); so, a fictitious characterization is observed in which authors made their “presence” known (p. 82). Likewise, the absence of archeological records of Christian houses in the first and early second centuries AD and the strategic move of using prominent places in the seven “authentic” letters to give a sense of verisimilitude to the “Pauline” communities show that such communities play a symbolic role and therefore were not real.A comparison between the seven Pauline letters and Seneca’s Moral Epistles takes place in chapter 3. In this section, Livesey explains how Seneca implements the letter genre as a useful literary means to convey philosophical teachings. According to her, Christian authors likewise exploit the letter genre to promote philosophical and theological teachings. Seneca sends letters to the fictitious figure of Lucilius, who is the recipient of philosophical lessons. Livesey equates Lucilius to the supposed communities to which “Paul” writes (pp. 149–50). The second-century AD authors of Pauline letters crafted these communities and made them the repositories of distinctive teachings and moral advice.After this comparison of texts in which authors in an artistic manner fabricate various characters to make them the receivers of their message, Livesey proceeds to situate the Pauline letters in the second century AD. The main argument she provides is that the type of antagonism toward the Jewish law and toward punctual practices such as circumcision that is evidenced in letters like Galatians is not observed in primary texts from the first century but in later texts dated after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Thus, Liveseys states, “The assessment of Jewish law found in Galatians finds no parallels in primary sources dated up through Josephus (c. 100 CE)” (p. 208). Only Christian writings post Bar Kokhba contain this drastic shift in the view of the Jewish law and circumcision (e.g., The Epistle of Barnabas and Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho). At this point in history (mid-second century AD), Christian authors deviate the focus from circumcision to salvation and the importance of being in a state of righteousness (p. 218). For Livesey, the philosophical school of Marcion located in Rome is the most likely social setting of the Pauline letters. Marcion and his pupils composed these letters aiming at impacting the region of ancient Asia Minor and the Mediterranean world with a very unique message that was tailor-made for a religious group that lived in changing times.Throughout her work, Livesey repeats the argument that no noncanonical or nonextracanonical source refers to Paul, and therefore the historicity of such a figure should be doubted. Although the argument of external evidence needs to be taken into account, one questions why internal evidence (evidence from the letters themselves) plays no role in Livesey’s argument. Should not both types of evidence be equally weighed? What criteria should be considered to assess an author’s style other than the internal? Moreover, the argument that no noncanonical or non-extracanonical source mentioned Paul in the first century AD (p. 83) rests heavily on the assumption that Paul was an established literary author (see p. 83n36 where Livesey quotes Harry Hine [2017], who says that Paul is never named in “Pagan Latin literature”). As much as Livesey tries to justify this argument as not necessarily an argumentum e silentio, it seems to me that it is still that: an argument from silence. The same goes for Livesey’s argument that because there is no record of Christian houses in the first century AD, then the Pauline communities are nonexistent (p. 105).Secondly, Livesey presents 2 Peter (along with 1 Clement, the Ignatian letters, and The Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians) as external evidence for the Pauline letters dated toward the mid-second-century, which seems to imply, in her argument, that 2 Peter most likely refers to the collection of works crafted at the Marcionite school. This argument has a crucial flaw. Even if a mid-second century date is assumed for the writing of 2 Peter, the link between this work and the works from the Marcionite school has to be explained in terms of geographical or temporal proximity. Hence, the following question requires an answer: How likely is it that the Marcionite treatises were so rapidly disseminated to the point of getting the attention of Christian authors such as the author of 2 Peter?Third, in the comparison between the Seneca’s Moral Epistles and the Pauline epistles, Livesey points out some differences; for instance, (1) Seneca, unlike the authors of the Pauline letters, crafts a single individual as recipient of his message, not communities (p. 146), and (2) Seneca is a factual addressor, while the authors of the Pauline letters are fictitious ones (p. 185). The first difference is interesting and, in my view, does not affect Livesey’s hypothesis. However, the second difference is remarkable. I do think that for a comparative argument to be so decisive as to determine real authorship of a work, a one-to-one comparison is expected between all the elements of the comparison. In this case, if the point Livesey wants to convey is that the Pauline epistles were not written by a figure called Paul, then the figure of Seneca as a real/historical author creates some problems in Livesey’s argument. It is not enough to explain how Lucilius and the Pauline communities are fictitious recipients of philosophical or theological teachings; it should also be explained why the figure of Paul cannot be as real as the historical figure of Seneca. For Livesey’s comparison to be more compelling, an ancient text in which the author(s) and the recipient(s) are fictitious should be proposed as comparative elements. Livesey dismisses this point by saying that “both fictional and factual addressors operate by the same rhetorical principle,” which is deploying “creative character fashioning in the formation of inscribed letter senders” (p. 185). Still, the argument is wanting.Finally, I think that Livesey succeeds in disclosing the methodological flaws of some arguments in favor of the historicity of Paul and his communities. She does well in challenging proponents of Pauline authorship to continue investigating the epistles while searching for external evidence as well. Livesey’s monograph is a fresh and much-needed contribution to the ongoing debate about the historicity of Pauline letters. It is always important to welcome dissonant voices that stimulate the evaluation of long-established positions within Pauline scholarship. It is up to the reader or researcher to weigh the arguments and form his or her own opinion, but always be open to hearing new proposals, especially those that stir up our minds. To them, to inquisitive readers, students of the Pauline epistles, and researchers, I suggest this monograph.