How would we know if Paul’s
letters had been significantly modified? The manuscript witnesses to the letters
only start appearing after 200 CE. And the earliest manuscripts are almost all
fragmentary and few in number. “More than 85 percent of Greek manuscripts of
the New Testament were produced in the eleventh century or later”—that’s over a
thousand years after Paul! (Trobisch 1994: 4)
But even in late manuscripts,
there remain hints of earlier seismic shifts. The manuscripts show some
disagreement in the order of the letters. Romans is not always first, and the
position of Hebrews varied a lot. Sometimes passages (like 1 Corinthians
14:34-35 and Romans 16:25-27) appear in different places in the same chapter.
The letter to the Romans sometimes appears without the final section (chapters
15 and 16, or just 16). (Gamble 1977) Sometimes whole letters were added, such
as the three-letter collection of the Pastorals. Most scholars today agree that
these letters were not written by Paul. (Ehrman 2012: 192-222) They aren’t
included in the earliest manuscript of Paul’s letters (P46) or even
in Codex Vaticanus (fourth century). Mid-second century writers (Valentinus,
Justin Martyr) don’t refer to them. They aren’t cited until Irenaeus (about 180
CE). Thus the Pastorals were probably written between 150 and 180 CE. But if
the ancients could invent whole letters, they could adjust, add to, and
rearrange parts of preexisting letters. (M. David Litwa, The Orthodox Corruption
of Paul: An Argument for the Priority of the Marcionite Apostolis [Melbourne,
Australia: Gnosis, 2026], 3-4)
