Often in the form of “personal” addressee engagement, both Seneca and the authors of the Pauline letters exploit the genre's ready accommodation of occasional or ordinary discourse to advance their teachings. Both letter collections also indicate degrees in the use of occasional discourse. A relative lack of this feature betrays a letter as fictional, as it provides the sense in which the author simply wishes to get on with the lesson at hand, the primary underlying and hidden reason for the writing.
(p. 158, my bold)
Pauline letters also contain lexical units that regard specific incidents in which the Apostle turns ot the community with seemingly live issues of concern. Like the letter-body openings of the Moral Epistles, situational development is often in the form of short statements aimed to capture reader attention and to trigger (and justify) teachings. Yet, unlike Moral Epistles, these units are modest in size and formulaic in style. Otherwise put, they are less convincing as occasional discourse than the units within the Moral Epistles.
(p. 178-179, my bold)
In short the argument from comparison with Seneca is the following, as I understand it:
- 1) The Seneca's Letters to Lucilius are proved to be fictional letters (Lucilius being invented ex nihilo by Seneca);
- 2) The Pauline letters show the same features that prove the fictional character of the Seneca's Letters and in a measure even more high than the latter's.
- 3) Therefore the Pauline letters are proved to be less credible, as letters, than the same Senecan letters. Said otherwise: if you believe that Lucilius is a fictional character, then even more you have to believe that the Pauline communities addressed by Paul never existed.
- Seneca could exist (and existed) without Lucilius.
- Paul couldn't and can't exist without the Pauline communities addressed by the epistles.
Statistics: Posted by Giuseppe — Thu Dec 26, 2024 5:33 am