by Phillip Smyer

Created on: October 06, 2008

For centuries now people have disputed the authorship of the Bible, nearly from cover to cover, from Old Testament to New Testament, from Moses to Paul. Concerning the authorship of the New Testament, a few of the Pauline Epistles are undisputed; among these are Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. There have been a few scholars who have disputed these but the majority of scholars accept that Paul of Tarsus was the author of these letters. In dispute however are the letters of Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles to Timothy and Titus. When examining authorship, scholars use a variety of criteria to establish whether or not it is likely that an author wrote a given book, such as internal and external evidence, historical setting, literary style, and content; each of these must be considered in turn when looking at authorship.

Beginning with Ephesians, the internal evidence in favor of Pauline authorship is a little shaky. The opening address is near identical to both 1 and 2 Corinthians, two of the undisputed Epistles; however Ephesians contains 50 sentences, of which 9 are over 50 words; the closest to this is Romans which has 3 out of 581 sentences of that length. E.J. Goodspeed[1] and C. L. Mitton[2] argued that the style was substantially different from Paul's other works but van Roon[3] contends that the style is consistent with Paul and calls the entire linguistic analysis "dubious". Other critics say that Ephesians lacks the personal greetings contained in many of Paul's undisputed works, which is damaging to the traditional view since Paul founded that church himself (Acts 18) and would have undoubtedly known many people there. One possible reason for this is that Ephesians may have been written as a circular letter to several churches and not simply the church at Ephesus, indeed, Luke Johnson states this: "If read in this lightEphesians as a circular letter written under the authorization of the captive Paul to gentile communitiesthen the lack of personal references, the distinctive stylistic traits, the use of tradition and the perspective on the church are not only all intelligible, but virtually necessary as well."[4] Some of the external evidence is as inconsistent as the internal evidence, one such case is the extreme similarity between Ephesians and Colossians, another of the disputed texts. E.F. Scott suggests that Paul used one letter as a model for the other[5]

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