Did Paul write all thirteen letters attributed to him?

Question 1155

Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry the name of Paul, from Romans through to the short personal note to Philemon. For most of church history these were received without question as the work of the apostle, read in the churches and treasured as Scripture. Modern scholarship has challenged several of them, suggesting that some were written by followers in Paul’s name after his death, a practice that supposedly carried no dishonesty in the ancient world.

The believer who treasures these letters will want to weigh the question honestly and know why the church has held them all to be genuinely Paul’s. The challenge is not as weighty as it is often made to sound, and the reasons for confidence are strong. Let us see where the doubts fall, why the differences need not surprise us, and what the letters and the early church actually say.

Where the Doubts Fall

Few scholars dispute that Paul wrote the major letters such as Romans, the two letters to Corinth, and Galatians. These are so universally received that they are sometimes called the undisputed letters. The questions cluster instead around two groups. The letters to Timothy and Titus, often called the Pastoral Epistles, are doubted because their vocabulary differs at points from the earlier letters and because their concern with the ordering of the church and the appointing of elders is thought to reflect a later age. Ephesians and Colossians are questioned on similar grounds of style and theology, and some add Second Thessalonians to the list of those whose authorship is debated.

The argument is essentially that these letters do not sound enough like the Paul of Romans and Galatians to have come from the same hand. It is worth seeing at once how thin a foundation this is. A judgement about whether a writer sounds like himself is a matter of impression, and impressions are easily mistaken, especially across a gap of two thousand years and a translation from another tongue.

Why the Differences Need Not Surprise Us

Differences of style prove far less than the theory supposes. Any writer of range varies his vocabulary according to subject, audience, and season of life. A man writing to settle a doctrinal crisis in a young and quarrelsome church will write differently from the same man penning a warm personal note to a trusted younger colleague about how to care for a congregation. The Pastoral letters deal with different matters from Romans, so naturally they use different words, and to count the unusual terms and conclude that a different author wrote them is to mistake the subject for the man.

The concern with elders, deacons, and sound teaching, far from betraying a later age, fits exactly the stage of Paul’s ministry when he was handing on his work to a younger generation and preparing the churches to stand after he was gone. A man near the end of his life, thinking of those who would come after him, would naturally turn to questions of order and succession. The difference of emphasis is what we should expect rather than a problem to be explained away.

There is also the matter of how these letters were composed. Paul often used a secretary, an amanuensis, to write down his words, and he tells us so plainly, for Tertius adds his own greeting at the end of Romans as the one who wrote the letter. A trusted secretary given some freedom in wording would naturally leave traces of his own style in the finished work, which accounts for variations without any need to imagine a forger. Paul could dictate closely on one occasion and more loosely on another, and the letter would still be fully and truly his.

The Witness of the Letters Themselves

Each of the thirteen letters claims Paul as its author in its opening words. To treat these claims as a polite fiction runs hard against the apostle’s own fierce concern for truthfulness. Paul warned the Thessalonians not to be deceived by any letter falsely claiming to come from him, which shows that he regarded a forged letter in his name as a serious deception to be guarded against, not an accepted custom. He even drew attention to his own handwriting at the close of a letter as the mark of its genuineness, a safeguard against imitation.

A church that prized honesty as Paul did, and that he himself had warned against false letters, would not calmly have welcomed writings it knew to be composed under a borrowed name. The idea that pious forgery was harmless in the early church does not fit the evidence, for the church fathers are on record rejecting writings they judged to be falsely attributed, even when their content was edifying. Authorship mattered to them, and so should it to us.

The Witness of the Early Church

The early church received all thirteen letters as Paul’s. The earliest collections of his writings gathered them together, and the Christian writers of the second century cite them as his without hesitation. This testimony reaches back towards the time when the memory of the apostle was still fresh and the churches he founded still knew their own history. An unbroken witness of this kind, stretching from the apostolic age forward, carries great weight against a theory built mainly on counting unusual words and weighing matters of style.

We should also remember what is at stake in calling a letter inspired Scripture. If these letters are the Word of God, as the church has always held, then they came from the man whose name they bear, for to receive a deliberate forgery as the inspired voice of an apostle would undermine the very honesty on which the trustworthiness of Scripture rests.

So, now what?

You may read all thirteen letters as the genuine voice of the apostle Paul, given through him by the Spirit of God for the building up of the church in every age. When you meet the claim that some are later imitations, remember that the case rests largely on impressions of style, that a writer of Paul’s range and his habit of using secretaries account for the differences, and that the church which knew him best received them all without doubt.

Let these letters do their appointed work in you. They teach the riches of God’s grace, they set the believer’s feet on the path of holiness, and they order the life of the congregation so that the household of God may be built up. From the towering argument of Romans to the tender appeal of Philemon, they are the gift of the risen Lord to His people through His chosen apostle, and they are worthy of your trust and your obedience.

“I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign of genuineness in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.” 2 Thessalonians 3:17

For Further Study

Donald Guthrie devoted careful attention to the authorship of the Pauline letters in his New Testament introduction, answering the objections to the Pastorals and to Ephesians at length, and the introduction of D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo covers the same ground with balance. On the use of secretaries in the ancient world, the studies of E. Randolph Richards shed helpful light on how Paul’s letters were actually composed.