Motif-Semantic Differences In Paul? A Question To Advocates Of The Pastorals’ Plural Authorship In Dialogue With Michaela Engelmann -- By: Jermo van Nes

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 68:1 (NA 2017)
Article: Motif-Semantic Differences In Paul? A Question To Advocates Of The Pastorals’ Plural Authorship In Dialogue With Michaela Engelmann
Author: Jermo van Nes


Motif-Semantic Differences In Paul?
A Question To Advocates Of The Pastorals’ Plural Authorship In Dialogue With Michaela Engelmann

Jermo van Nes1

and

Harro Koning

([email protected] and [email protected])

Summary

New Testament scholarship is witnessing a growing number of studies advocating the plural authorship of the Pastoral Epistles (PE) on the basis of their mutual differences. Among them is the recent study by Michaela Engelmann highlighting ‘motif-semantic’ differences between the PE in terms of their Christology/soteriology, ecclesiology, heresiology, and image of Paul. While Engelmann and others challenging the common authorship of the PE offer significant contributions to the study of the PE’s origins, their overall approach also raises methodological questions. By way of illustration, 1 Thessalonians and Philippians are studied in a way similar to that of Engelmann. Both letters are shown to exhibit a good number of motif-semantic differences, which might bring into question their explanatory power.

1. Introduction

Contemporary study of the New Testament letters addressed to Timothy and Titus, collectively known as the Pastoral Epistles (PE), is anything but dull. Over the past two decades or so these once-labelled ‘neglected’2 letters have re-attracted a good deal of scholarly attention,

putting a new set of research questions on the agenda.3 One of these concerns the common authorship of the PE, which has been debated ever since the end of the eighteenth century,4 but continues to be the majority position among contemporary scholars mainly due to the work of Heinrich Julius Holtzmann.5 In what is still referred to as a ‘magisterial study’,6 Holtzmann marshalled the case that the PE were intentionally designed as a tripartite Pauline letter corpus by one and the same pseudonymous author.7

In the last three decades, however, a small but vocal group of scholars have started to question Holtzmann’s classic thesis.8 One of

these scholars is Michaela Engelmann, whose recent doctoral dissertati...

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