Textual Criticism of Romans 16

[spin]

to spin,

But what exactly do you want to do with this quote? It has incidentally been wrongly translated. If Marcion removed the doxology and also everything after 14:23, did he remove the doxology twice? No, the verb rendered "deleted" here is actually "cut off". What do you think Origen meant? What distinction is he making?

If Marcion's Romans removed (or deleted or cut off) everything after 14:23, then there was no doxology and no chapters 15 and 16.
I think Origen was very clear on the matter. What happened to a natural reading?

You are not reading what was said, so I can't expect you to pick up the natural reading. Please read what I said above again completely, before ignoring it. There are two separate acts talked about by Origen and you have combined them.

This copy of the letter to the Romans was carried by Phoebe the deacon of the church of Cenchreae

And how do you know that, about the letter carried to the Romans by Phoebe? Another natural reading?
Also, the Greek does not have "the" before what you interpret as deacon. So now Phoebe did not have to occupy a unique position in the church of a small city. She was one among others as a servant.
It looks to me dear Phoebe was requiring help that the local church was not giving to her (probably because she suffered some rejection) and Paul tried to fix the problem in favour of a good friend who helped him, and others, before.
Romans 16:1-2

"I commend to you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the church in Cenchrea,
that you may receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and assist her in whatever business she has need of you; for indeed she has been a helper of many and of myself also."

That you may receive her.

The letter to the Romans is sent to a group that Paul has never met, but you want us to believe that he can pull all these names out of a hat, literally dozens. The cover letter has nothing to do with the Paul who has never proclaimed the gospel in Rome.

The names of the Christians then in Rome are probably about the ones that Paul met in Corinth or Ephesus. It looks they went (or came back) to Rome under the reign of Nero, after Claudius had expelled the Christians from Rome. A good example of that is Prisca & Aquila from Pontus (Ac 18:2), who went to Rome (Ac 18:2), then had to move to Corinth (Ac 18:2, 1 Cor 16:19), then went to Ephesus (Ac 18:19, 26) and finally back to Rome (Ro 16:3).

I bet that is convincing to you, Bernard. Inventing a scenario to help Paul remember these names of people living in Rome is very kind of you. Acts is such a good source. Who knows? Perhaps one can see where Tertius may have got some of his information.

[spin]

to spin,

The techniques for copying texts were far more sophisticated eight to 12 centuries later

And you think that alleged sophistication made these copyists put the doxology at the end of chapter 14?

You are still trying to talk about anything that can get you away from dealing with the evidence of P.46.

[Bernard Muller]

That you may receive her.

One of the definition, according to the URL you gave me, is "receive favourably, accept"
That works well for me. Thanks

I bet that is convincing to you, Bernard. Inventing a scenario to help Paul remember these names of people living in Rome is very kind of you. Acts is such a good source. Who knows? Perhaps one can see where Tertius may have got some of his information.

Actually, Paul did not remember the name of some women. Yes Acts is a source, not all the time true for sure. But I do not see why I should dismiss the rather mundane info about Prisca & Aquila, more so when there is some concordance between Paul's epistles and Acts about them.

Cordially, Bernard

[spin]

That you may receive her.

One of the definition, according to the URL you gave me, is "receive favourably, accept"
That works well for me. Thanks

The indication is that the people who receive the cover letter also receive Phoebe.

I bet that is convincing to you, Bernard. Inventing a scenario to help Paul remember these names of people living in Rome is very kind of you. Acts is such a good source. Who knows? Perhaps one can see where Tertius may have got some of his information.

Actually, Paul did not remember the name of some women. Yes Acts is a source, not all the time true for sure. But I do not see why I should dismiss the rather mundane info about Prisca & Aquila, more so when there is some concordance between Paul's epistles and Acts about them.

You are working from the assumption that the cover letter was written by Paul. Tertius disagrees with you.

[Bernard Muller]

Yes, I agree that Phoebe was the one to carry the letter to Rome. But that does not change a thing.

Just because Tertius did not say, yes I wrote the letter, the whole letter but everything was dictated to me by Paul, does not mean he wrote Romans 16 on his own. You expect too many details from a scribe who put his two cents (Ro 16:22) in a verse.
It's like, I would write, I flew to China. Then somebody like you would say: Imposssible, since he did not mentioned he boarded a plane for that, he pretended to have gone to China like Superman. Because Superman is fictional/mythical, that means Bernard told a lie: he never flew to China.

And besides 16:32, there is nothing in Romans 16 (except the doxology) to indicate the wording did not come from Paul. On the contrary. However the same wording looks very unlikely as coming from a so far unknown writer.
And Tertius wrote a letter. Would Ch. 16 counts as a letter? I do not think so. The letter in question has to be the whole of Romans which is coming from Paul's words.

Cordially, Bernard

[spin]

Yes, I agree that Phoebe was the one to carry the letter to Rome. But that does not change a thing.

Just because Tertius did not say, yes I wrote the letter, the whole letter but everything was dictated to me by Paul, does not mean he wrote Romans 16 on his own. You expect too many details from a scribe who put his two cents (Ro 16:22) in a verse.
It's like, I would write, I flew to China. Then somebody like you would say: Imposssible, since he did not mentioned he boarded a plane for that, he pretended to have gone to China like Superman. Because Superman is fictional/mythical, that means Bernard told a lie: he never flew to China.

And besides 16:32, there is nothing in Romans 16 (except the doxology) to indicate the wording did not come from Paul.

Or Ronald Reagan for that matter... oh, except for the fact that Tertius pipes up. "I wrote it."

On the contrary. However the same wording looks very unlikely as coming from a so far unknown writer.
And Tertius wrote a letter. Would Ch. 16 counts as a letter? I do not think so.

As a cover letter it would. And it is a cover letter written well after the time of Paul, with an organized church structure with deacons which dates the cover letter to the approximate time of the pastoral letters.

Of course, if you accept Acts as vaguely historical, then we have Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth by the time that Paul is well established as a proselytizer and that would mean that the cover letter may actually be destined for Corinth and not Rome. That would mean that this is just a copy of the epistle to the Romans.

The letter in question has to be the whole of Romans which is coming from Paul's words.

This doesn't follow from its antecedents.

[andrewcriddle]

The following is based on reading Gamble's Textual History of the Letter to the Romans but on many points I differ from Gamble. I am far from certain I'm right but I think the argument is interesting.

I'll present a number of claims briefly and try to expand on them in response to criticism.

a/ There were three very ancient versions of Romans:
i/ 1-16 without the doxology (doxology = 16:25-27)
ii/ 1-14 without the doxology
iii/ 1-15 with the doxology
all other versions can be easily derived from these three.
b/ One of these three must be original.
c/ Version iii/ is not original because the doxology is in language and ideas post=Pauline
d/ Version ii/ is not original because chapter 15 on internal evidence is clearly Pauline.
e/ Therefore Version i/ (1-16 without the doxology ) is authentic version ii/ is possibly Marcionite in origin. version iii/ is probably a version prepared for liturgical use.

Andrew Criddle

[stephan happy huller]

Andrew, you know what I am stuck on? The length of the letters and the two dimensional thinking of scholars. In a nutshell it comes down to this:

1. The letters are too long and
2. The only reason scholars accept the individual length of the Catholic epistles is because they come in a set of too long letters (i.e. the length of the set reinforces the individual length of each letter in the set)

I look at the Syriac epistles of Ignatius and say - that's the right length of a letter. Then the expansion of these short letters to monstrosities provides me with an example of what happened to the Marcionite letters of the apostle.

So let me ask - Are there any examples outside of Christianity of 16 chapter letters in antiquity?

If you can't find examples I say that the Marcionite letter was even less then 14 chapters. More like 5 or 7 at most. IMO it's all garbage added later and scholars mistake the garbage for being Pauline and so reinforce the lengths of the letters a second way.

[andrewcriddle]

Andrew, you know what I am stuck on? The length of the letters and the two dimensional thinking of scholars. In a nutshell it comes down to this:

1. The letters are too long and
2. The only reason scholars accept the individual length of the Catholic epistles is because they come in a set of too long letters (i.e. the length of the set reinforces the individual length of each letter in the set)

I look at the Syriac epistles of Ignatius and say - that's the right length of a letter. Then the expansion of these short letters to monstrosities provides me with an example of what happened to the Marcionite letters of the apostle.

So let me ask - Are there any examples outside of Christianity of 16 chapter letters in antiquity?

If you can't find examples I say that the Marcionite letter was even less then 14 chapters. More like 5 or 7 at most. IMO it's all garbage added later and scholars mistake the garbage for being Pauline and so reinforce the lengths of the letters a second way.

Hi Stephan

IIUC Romans and 1 Corinthians are both substantially longer than any ancient non-Christian Greek or Latin letters, However the range of length for Paul's letters is not unusual (Romans is about 22 times longer than Philemon.) The average length of Paul's letters is high by ancient world standards. Hence his longer letters are very long indeed by ancient world standards.

If Marcion's Romans was as short as you claim I would be surprised that no surviving writer says so. (One problem with Romans ending at the end of chapter 14 is that it would make a very abrupt end.)

Andrew Criddle

[Peter Kirby]

So let me ask - Are there any examples outside of Christianity of 16 chapter letters in antiquity?

The longest non-Christian letters (literary ones like those of Seneca) are roughly half the length of Paul to the Romans. [I could look this up more exactly...] The nonliterary papyri, of course, put both Seneca and Paul to shame, being closer to the letter 3 John than anything else in the New Testament and often less than that.

Paul to the Romans is the longest letter known from the first or second century AD. Paul to the Romans exceeds the standard length of a scroll (not that there wasn't technology for extending that length as necessary).

The letters of Ignatius in the middle recension aren't as long as Romans; they fall into the same category of length that we find in shorter Paulines and in one or two examples of non-Christian literary writers who adopted an epistolary form.

The literary epistles of such lengths all have one common feature. They are not one-off incidental writings. They are meant by the author to be collected and preserved; they are written with an eye to the future and not just the present. The whole idea that we are simply "reading someone else's mail" in Paul and Ignatius is a fallacy. They are obviously meant to be kept and re-read by later audiences, thus the length and literary form.