Christian Texts and History • Re: 'The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship'

Pauline letters can be viewed alongside a well-known, popular, and contemporaneous literary genre. As Owen Hodkinson remarks, pseudonymous letters attributed to a known figure were by far “the most frequent type of Greek letter from all periods”.⁸ ... Epistolographers of the Second Sophistic provide the earliest freestanding epistolary collections.¹⁰ Attributed to known public figures (real or imaginary) for the purpose of authenticating them, these collections inscribe as letter-senders philosophers (Socrates, Heraclitus, Plato, and the Cynics), wise men (Anacharsis, Apollonius of Tyana, Democritus, and Hippocrates), orators (Demosthenes and Isocrates), literary figures (Euripides, and Xenophon), and politicians or tyrants (Themistocles, Phalaris, Artaxerxes, and Periander).¹¹

The collections rely on prior knowledge of the character in whose name the letters are written, and are often the product of more than one writer.¹² Epistolographers supplemented what was known of the figure [real or not], all the while remaining within the realm of the credible.¹³ The letters likewise often function as an apology for the featured figure. This aspect very likely pertains to the genre’s use as a substitute for ancient autobiography.¹⁴

Nina E. Livesey, The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship, Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp. 5-6.

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8 See Owen Hodkinson, “Epistolography,” in The Oxford Handbook of The Second Sophistic, eds. Daniel S. Richter and William A. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 514.

10 See Hodkinson, “Epistolography,” 518; Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, 194. At this time, too, the rhetorical syllabus began to contain exercises in the creative composition of letters to and from well-known men. See Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, 197.

11 See Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, 203. There are letter collections attributed to Aeschines, Anacharsis, Apollonius of Tyana, Aristotle, Artaxerxes, Brutus, Chion of Heraclea, Crates, Demosthenes, Dio, Diogenes, Euripides, Heraclitus, Hippocrates, Isocrates, Periander, Phalaris, Plato, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, Socrates and the Socratics, Solon, Thales, Themistocles, and Xenophon. See Trapp, Greek and Latin Letters, 27.

12 See Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, 198–99.

13 Rosenmeyer notes, their goal was to “work the bare bones of a biography into a compelling life story” (ibid., 198-99).

14 See Owen Hodkinson and Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, “Introduction,” in Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, eds. Owen Hodkinson, Patricia A. Rosenmeyer and Evelien Bracke (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 16.
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