Forgers and Critics of the corpus Paulinum: Manuscripts and Critical Scholarship from Ancient Alexandria to the Republic of Letters and Beyond

Since the turn of the nineteenth century, scholarship on the writings of Paul insists that he did not write all letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Whereas this consensus represents a distinctly modern conclusion concerning the shape of the authentic corpus Paulinum, “Forgers and Critics of the corpus Paulinum” shows that people have constructed limits of various kinds on the corpus through critical practice, not just in the modern period but in antiquity as well. Criticism is frequently understood as an activity of reconstruction or discovery of an author’s textual output, undertaken to reverse intentional or unintentional changes to an author’s literary corpus. This dissertation argues, however, that the production of the authentic corpus Paulinum is the accomplishment of criticism, and not a function of authorship. This argument draws on two theoretical moorings. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of distinction to the practice of criticism, the dissertation treats authenticity as a distinction conferred upon the corpus Paulinum tied to critical techniques and the identity of the critic within a field of cultural production. The dissertation analyzes the politics of distinction with a special focus on the role of manuscripts within critical practice, informed by recent scholarship on the history of the book that takes a materialist approach to the study of texts and textuality. Two chapters document the emergence of Pauline criticism in antiquity, including the struggle for the Pauline writings to occupy the socio-economic spheres of Roman Egypt in which criticism was typically conducted (Ch 2) and the convergence of criticism and heresiology in the third and fourth centuries as a response to the perceived textual threat of the Marcionite scriptural corpus (Ch 3). Two other chapters investigate how modern critics have responded to the (re)discovery of manuscripts, from two new manuscripts of an unknown Pauline correspondence (Ch 4) to the considerable wealth of manuscripts of Pauline corpus that contain numerous variant readings (Ch 5). The dissertation concludes with a reflection upon the variable significance of Paul within the critical production of an authentic corpus Paulinum.

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