How do the pseudonymous Pauline writings differ from the letters scholars are sure Paul actually wrote?

Answer 1

A:The Epistle to the Colossians is considered to have been written in the seventies of the first century. There is not a suggestion of the personal Paul in this letter The style is different, the vocabulary is.different, and the rhetoric is different from authentic Pauline letters. This relatively short letter contains gnostic concepts not mentioned in the Pauline epistles, and has around thirty words that do not appear in the Pauline letters. For Paul, Christian existence was understood as an imitation of the sufferings and sacrificial death of Christ, while full participation in the resurrection of Christ would have to wait until the eschaton. In Colossians, by contrast, Christians were those who had already been "raised with him [Christ] through faith ... when you were buried with him in baptism" (Col 2:12).

Apart from the opening address, which is thought to have been added even later, the Epistle to the Ephesians is not even an epistle, but an encyclical. Many passages in Ephesians seem to be directly copied from Colossians, whereas Paul wrote each of his own epistles with his actual audience in mind. Moreover, if Colossians was pseudepigraphical, then the copying of passages from it demonstrates that Ephesians was also pseudepigraphical. In contrast to Paul's own use of the term church ( ekklesia, congregation), which he used only to refer to a local congregation, the author of Ephesians used the term in the singular to refer to the universal Church.

The attribution to Paul of the three writings known as 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus is clearly fictional, for their language, style and thought are thoroughly un-Pauline. The 'personal' references to particular occasions in the lives of Timothy, Titus and Paul do not fit with reconstructions of that history taken from the authentic letters of Paul. The letters say that Titus and Timothy had been commissioned as overseers of congregations and that Paul was writing to remind them of his instructions to them. "Paul" spells out in detail what he expects, demands, allows and disallows regarding the behaviour of overseers, deacons, widows, women, elders, young men and the slaves in a congregation. These were church manuals of discipline from the mid-second century, written in Paul's name and in the very beginning of the apostolic tradition in order to pre-empt any opposition to the instructions contained.