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The results of the poll are in...although it's still up and collecting votes. Hit "previous" to see the question and vote! Anyhow, the results to date... Suppose a previously undiscovered epistle, indisputably from Paul to an ancient church, was found today - what ought we to do with it?
There you have it. If a new Pauline letter is uncovered, and my readers are asked to decide its fate, it'll go into the canon and lectionary. It's an interesting question. There are letters in the canon which purport to be from Paul but which many scholars, citing style and theology, consider the work of someone else - a disciple of Paul, at best. I, personally, have the inkling of a notion that 2 Thessalonians is actually an attempt to "sheep steal" from Paul and/or to discredit his ministry. (The theology is just so entirely different from 1 Thessalonians, and there's none of the personal connection found in the first.) But even with disagreements over authorship, we still consider these letters scripture. So why not a new letter that everyone agrees is from Paul? Is it Paul's authority to which we apply, or the tradition of the church? But if the church had access to this hypothetical letter, wouldn't they have included it? Wouldn't we just be doing what the church fathers would have done? They included everything else that they had from Paul. Would we be departing from the long line of Christian tradition by including something our ancestors didn't consider scripture? How would it impact Biblical understanding? How might it affect our view of all the theology done between the close of the canon and now? Would Aquinas and Luther (or, God forbid, Calvin) have come out with different theologies if they'd had this letter? It makes one's head spin just to think of the ramifications. |
