Abstract
One of the principal interests of the canonical approach to biblical interpretation is the canonical process that resulted in a discrete literary product, the Christian Bible. Whether the particular interest in this literary history is hermeneutical1 or theological,2 whether its taxonomy is understood in terms of forming a community’s identity or transmitting a textual (and fixed) word about God, the methodological presumption in every case is that certain writings were picked up and preserved by their faithful readers/auditors and ultimately canonized by the early catholic church because as bits and pieces of an entire canonical collection each was found useful in forming a Christian theological understanding of life and faith.3
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References
J.A. Sanders, ‚The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism‘, in J.P. Rosenblatt and J.C. Sitterson, Jr. (eds.), ‚Not In Heaven‘: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991 ), 154–69.
B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture ( Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979 ), 46–106.
This is the point I have attempted to score in a series of essays. See most recently, for example, R.W. Wall, ‚Canonical Context and Canonical Conversations‘, in J.B. Green and M. Turner (eds.), Between Two Horizons: Spanning Biblical Studies and Systematic Theology ( Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000 ), 16582.
On the idea that Scripture’s interpretation is regulated by the church’s Rule of Faith, see R.W. Wall, ‚Reading the Bible from within Our Traditions: The “Rule of Faith” in Theological Hermeneutics‘, in Green and Turner (eds.), Between Two Horizons,88–107.
For a canonical approach to Pauline ecclesiology, see R.W. Wall and E.E. Lemcio, New Testament as Canon ( JSNTSup 76; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992 ), 184–207.
For this same reason, the present study will not deal with the historicalcritical problem of the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals, which I—in conversation with Stanley Porter—have considered elsewhere; R.W. Wall, ‚Pauline Authorship and the Pastoral Epistles: A Response to S.E. Porter‘, BBR 5 (1995), 125–28.
H.Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon ( GBS; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985 ), 36.
R.W. Funk, ‚The Apostolic Parousia: Form and Significance‘, in W.R. Farmer, C.F.D. Moule, and R.R. Niebuhr (eds.), Christian History and Interpretation: Essays in Honor of J. Knox ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967 ), 249–68.
F.F. Bruce, ‚Some Thoughts on the Beginning of the New Testament Canon‘, BJRL 65. 2 (1983), 38–39.
D. Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection ( Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994 ), 55–96.
J. Barton, Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity ( Louisville: Westminster Press, 1997 ), 14–24.
Gamble, New Testament Canon,41.
I find James A. Sanders’s comment highly suggestive that the rich theological diversity found within the final form of the New Testament may well point back to the early church’s legitimate concern with Marcion’s exclusivist and hegemonic use of Paul; Canon and Community (GBS; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 37. I suspect Marcionism (or some species of Protestantism!) is what Christianity looks like when using the Pauline letters as its ‚canon within the Canon‘.
In distinguishing between a text’s canonical and scriptural authority, I follow the lead of C. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 82–105. On the one hand, the community’s ‚scripture‘ transmits formative traditions, important in learning the faith; on the other hand, a biblical ‚canon‘ more narrowly norms the community’s beliefs and practices. During the canonical process, many sacred texts used as (and even called) ‚scripture‘ by the church catholic (including many Christian and Jewish apocryphal texts) were not finally included in the biblical canon because they did perform well in assessing and delimiting an emergent catholic faith and witness. The stakes are much higher for the performance of canonical texts.
As John Knox famously speculates in his Marcion and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).
J.D. Quinn, 1346—The Pauline Canon’, CBQ 36 (1974), 381–84.
The list’s date and provenance are notoriously contested, especially since Albert C. Sundberg’s case for a fourth-century date and a provenance in the Eastern (not Roman) church; ‚Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List‘, HTR 66 (1973), 1–41, and more recently defended by G.M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ).
C.M. Nielson, ‚Scripture in the Pastoral Epistles‘, PRSt 7 (1980), 4–23.
C.L. Mitton, The Formation of the Pauline Corpus of Letters ( London: Epworth Press, 1955 ).
Of course, some early Pauline lists include Hebrews along with the thirteen letters—a fourteen-letter Pauline canon—and in still other cases the language of a relevant list is either vague or indeterminate. However, I take it that the present thirteen-letter Pauline corpus was fixed from the early fourth century. See ‚Appendix IV: Early Lists of the Books of the New Testament‘, in B.M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987 ), 30515.
One might argue that the ‚implied author‘ of the Pastorals is the canonical (although not necessarily the historical) Paul; and on this basis, these are sacred texts approached by faithful interpreters as ‚authored‘ by divine appointment. In any case, the interpreter makes a category mistake by linking historical constructions of a text’s author with the text’s canonical authority. Even the connection between inspired author and sacred text during the canonical process was never vested with historical-critical analysis and served theological purposes—so that the ‚inspired author‘ represented an apostolic tradition authorized to carry the word of God by the church of Christ.
This list of Pastoral thematics could be extended to include Christology, since most agree that the notion of ‚Christ as Savior‘, found exclusively in the Pastorals, is an idiom for a conceptually different and more ‚mature‘ idea of Christ’s work than is found in Paul’s ‚authentic‘ letters; see now H. Stettler, Die Christologie der Pastoralbriefe (WUNT 2.105, Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), esp. 328–44. In my opinion, most differences or lack of well-known Pauline themes in the Pastorals, noted by scholars (e.g., eschatology, role of the Spirit, providence of God, freedom from the law) are really matters more of occasion (i.e., personal letters to inexperienced missionary colleagues), literary style (i.e., theology restated as creed or ‚Pauline tradition‘), and cultural ethos (i.e., church as ‚social institution‘) than of theological substance. In any case, I view these differences found in the Pastorals to be complementary and in continuity with the ‚real‘ Paul. From the perspective of the New Testament, the teaching of the Pastorals (and every other part of the Pauline corpus) comes in some fashion from the ‚canonical Paul‘ and makes an authorized contribution of the faithful reader’s understanding of the Pauline gospel.
H. von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power ( Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997 ), 106–23.
Philip Towner’s conjecture that the catchphrases ‚people of God‘ or ‚church of God‘ used in the Pastorals echo Old Testament teaching that asserts Israel belongs to God, central to the social identity of the diaspora synagogue, seems relevant here; see his The Goal of Our Instruction (JSNTSup 34; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989 ). That is, the distinctive idiom for the church in the Pastorals reflects a synagogal social identity, and by implication also its social structure.
L.T. Johnson, Letters to Paul’s Delegates ( NTC; Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996 ), 14–16.
See F. Young, The Theology of the Pastoral Epistles ( NTT; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), 79–85.
Consideration of the entire semantic subdomain for teaching (see Louw & Nida 33:224–50) would extend and deepen this impression enormously: there is a keener emphasis in the Pastorals on the activities and substance of Christian teaching, along with the moral character of the ‚apt teacher‘, than anywhere else in Scripture.
For an excellent summary of this point, see I.H. Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles ( ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999 ), 518–21.
I take it this is what Jouette M. Bassler means when she calls the Pastorals’ theological argot ‚mundane‘; 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus (ANTC; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996 ), 31–34.
This is the essential point Brevard S. Childs makes in his programmatic discussion of the Pastorals’ ‚canonical shape‘ in The New Testament as Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984 ), 387–95. Although my thesis does not require it, Norbert Brox makes a strong, although hardly definitive, historical case for their pseudonymity and post-Pauline provenance in his Die Pastoralbriefe (RNT, Regensburg: Pustet, 1963 ).
Ecclesiastical Authority,116; although von Campenhausen remains true to his larger polemic and thinks this move back towards a genuinely Pauline idea is fictional.
Marshall, Pastoral Epistles,521.
M. Dibelius, Die Pastoralbriefe (4th edition as revised by H. Conzelmann; HKNT 13; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1955 ).
Among several important studies on this topic, see especially his Paul and the Popular Philosophers ( Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989 ).
Bassler, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus,34.
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Wall, R.W. (2004). The Function of the Pastoral Letters Within the Pauline Canon of the New Testament: A Canonical Approach. In: Porter, S.E. (eds) The Pauline Canon. Pauline Studies, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-41228-2_3
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