3. Romans and the Pauline corpus
3. Romans and the Pauline corpus
‘St. Paul’s letter to the Romans—and others’ was a title suggested for this letter by T. W. Manson.15 He believed (not without good reason) that, in addition to the copy of the letter which was taken to Rome, further copies were made and sent to other churches. One pointer to this is the textual evidence at the end of chapter 15 (see pp. 35, 266), which might indicate that there was in circulation in antiquity an edition of the letter which lacked chapter 16—a chapter which, with its personal greetings, would have been relevant only to one church.16
This one church, as is argued below (pp. 268–271), was the Roman church. It was for the Roman church that the letter was specifically designed. The copy received by that church was certainly treasured, copied and recopied. About AD 96 Clement, ‘foreign secretary’ of the Roman church, shows himself well acquainted with the letter to the Romans; he echoes its language time and again in the letter which he himself sent in that year on behalf of the Roman church to the church of Corinth. The way in which he echoes its language suggests that he knew it by heart; it could well be that it was read regularly at meetings of the Roman church from the time of its reception onwards.
It is clear from Clement’s letter that by AD 96 some of Paul’s letters had begun to circulate in other quarters than those to which they were sent in the first instance;17 Clement, for example, knows and quotes from 1 Corinthians. And not many years after, an unknown benefactor of all succeeding ages copied at least ten Pauline letters into a codex from which copies were made for use in many parts of the Christian world.18 From the beginning of the second century Paul’s letters circulated as a collection—the corpus Paulinum—and not singly. The second-century writers, both ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’, who refer to the Pauline letters knew them in the form of a corpus.
One of these writers, of the ‘heterodox’ variety, was Marcion, a native of Pontus in Asia Minor, who came to Rome about AD 140 and a few years later published an edition of Holy Scripture. Marcion repudiated the authority of the Old Testament and held that Paul was the only faithful apostle of Jesus, the earlier apostles having corrupted his teaching with judaizing admixtures. Marcion’s canon reflected his distinctive views. It consisted of two parts: the Euangelion, an edition of the Gospel of Luke which began with the words, ‘In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar Jesus came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee’ (cf. Luke 3:1; 4:31), and the Apostolikon, comprising ten Pauline letters (excluding those to Timothy and Titus).
Galatians, for which Marcion had a natural predilection on account of its anti-judaizing emphasis, stood first in his Apostolikon. The other letters followed in descending order of length, the ‘double’ letters (i.e. the two to the Corinthians and the two to the Thessalonians) being reckoned for this purpose as one for each pair. Romans thus came after ‘Corinthians’. To each of the letters a Marcionite preface was attached in due course.19 The Marcionite preface to Romans runs thus:
The Romans are in the region of Italy. These had been visited already by false apostles and seduced into recognizing the authority of the law and the prophets, under pretext of the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The apostle calls them back to the true faith of the gospel, writing to them from Athens.
This is not the inference which a reader would naturally draw from Paul’s argument in this letter, but Marcion and his followers approached the apostolic writings with firmly held presuppositions. Where they found statements in Paul’s letters running counter to these presuppositions, they concluded that the text had been tampered with by judaizing scribes, and emended it accordingly (see pp. 34–37). But such was the influence of Marcion’s edition, well beyond the limits of his own following, that many ‘orthodox’ MSS of the Pauline letters contain the Marcionite prefaces.
Our oldest surviving MS of the Pauline letters, dating from the end of the second century, contains the shorter corpus of ten letters together with the letter to the Hebrews. This MS (Papyrus 46, one of the Chester Beatty biblical papyri) comes from Egypt, and in Egypt (unlike Rome) Hebrews was regarded as Pauline as early as AD 180. In P46 (as this MS will henceforth be called) Romans comes first.
Romans comes last among the Pauline letters sent to churches in another document from the closing years of the second century, the ‘Muratorian Canon’ or fragmentary list of New Testament books recognized at Rome. This list includes the longer Pauline corpus of thirteen letters, for after the letters to churches it adds those addressed to individuals—not only Philemon but also Timothy and Titus.
In the order which ultimately became established Romans takes pride of place among the Pauline letters. Historically, this is because it is the longest letter, but there is an innate fitness in the accordance of this position of primacy to a letter which, above all others, deserves to be called ‘The Gospel according to Paul’.