A Bluffer's Guide to Pauline Pseudonymy (3)

Continues. [Personal note to Mr Bellord: the first paragraph is just as I wrote it before you made your appeal!! Truly!]
You may have been wondering about Hebrews. Kenny does not analyse Hebrews as part of the Pauline corpus because it does not claim to be by S Paul. But in his Table 13.2 he compares it with various NT writings and finds ... wait for it ... that it achieves a correlation with 'Paul' higher than any other correlations in the NT except that between the three Synoptic Gospels. Draw your own conclusions!

In conclusion, a few minor observations of my own ~ ~ ~ ~

~ Poor old I Corinthians! But might its lowly status be due to the participation of its joint author Sosthenes? Indeed, the "unusual versatility" which Kenny discerns within the Pauline authorship may owe a lot to the presence of scribes (like the Tertius who scribed Romans), and coauthors such as Timothy and Silvanus.

~ Does a Catholic need to be worried about the 'authenticity' of Titus? Well, it doesn't worry me. One can think of any number of hypotheses ... like a busy Paul saying to somebody with whom he has been discussing Titus "Go and write it all down for me ... I'll leave the details to you". In any case, what matters is that it is canonical. That is, in the last resort, all that matters about the entire Biblia.

~ Some earlier thinkers had already entertained doubts about NTE orthodoxy. G D Caird, Dean Ireland Professor in this University, had pointed out that the almost lyrical constructions in Ephesians (often with accumulations of genitives), which led some writers to say "How unlike the style of Romans, etc.", do appear in the other Pauline writings, even if only in patches here and there.

~ The Pastoral Epistles, we have seen, were the most despised by NTEs. But within these letters there are paragraphs, often about little practical and personal things like "Don't forget the parchments and please bring my chasuble", which seem to have such a raw immediacy that even the most rigid and bigoted NTEs found their hearts being touched and softened: so there grew up the now widespread theory that these are 'Genuine Pauline Notes' which the pseudonymous writer cunningly incorporated! ... talk about having cake and eating it! 

Dixi.

 

A Bluffer's Guide to Pauline Pseudonymy (2)

Continues
 In the decades following Morton's work, doubts fell upon both his methodology and his conclusions. It was demonstrated that the logic by which he discerned such a plurality of authors in the 'Pauline Corpus' had a similarly fissiparous effect upon James Joyce. (Some of you will remember the earlier and hilarious satirical papers in which Ronnie Knox exposed to ridicule the fissiparous NTEs of his own time.) Morton had actually appeared in court as an expert witness for prosecutions: I wonder how many unfortunate people did time ... 'porridge', as we call it this side of the water ... as a result of his 'scientific' evidence. He was a Scottish Presbyterian minister.

Moreover, things developed in the field of computer science. And, in New Testament studies, new methodologies; accumulations of data made by other workers in the field; enabled Kenny to publish, in 1986, A Stylometric Study of the New Testament. (We will concentrate on his conclusions with regard to 'S Paul'.) Unlike the Protestant writers who had dominated the scene, Kenny declined to begin from a doctrinaire assumption that Romans and Galatians are self-evidently Pauline simply because Martin Luther thought he had discovered in them the Essence of the Gospel, the 'Canon within the Canon'; instead, "the better method is surely to start with the corpus of Pauline writings handed on by tradition, and ask whether within that corpus there is any Epistle, or group of Epistles, which is marked out as different from the body as a whole". His work is intricate and I will not attempt to reproduce it all. Suffice it to give his conclusion that "on the basis of the evidence in this chapter for my part I see no reason to reject the hypothesis that twelve of the Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually versatile author". The only letter which on stylometric grounds Kenny regards as suspicious is Titus.

Kenny, you observe, has moved a fair distance from the certainties of the NTEs. But yet more revolutionary is a list he presents to us. "We can take a rough measure of how well each Epistle is at home in the Pauline corpus ... [t]hose which fit snugly ...". If you are a NTE, take a deep breath before you read on.
Romans
Philippians
II Timothy
II Corinthians
Galatians
II Thessalonians
I Thessalonians
Colossians
Ephesians
I Timothy
Philemon
I Corinthians
Titus. 
You will observe with amusement that the concept of the Tuebingen Four, as including Galatians and I Corinthians with Romans and Galatians and holding all the rest at arm's length, has been comprehensively torpedoed below the waterline. Even less survives, bobbing around on the surface, of the traditional Protestant NTE contempt for II Timothy as one of the 'Pastoral Epistles'.

Let us now concentrate on Ephesians, a letter much disliked by Protestant writers, and, if I remember aright, by Walter Kasper, because of its Catholic ecclesiology. In Kenny's Table 14.27 (yes, I'm afraid it's that kind of book), Ephesians correlates better with Romans than does any other letter except for II Corinthians, Galatians, and II Thessalonians.

To be concluded. No comments yet.

A Bluffer's Guide to Pauline Pseudonymy (1)

Every Traddy knows that S Paul wrote all the letters assigned to him in the New Testament. Even the one that he didn't put his name to, Hebrews. But every New Testament Expert (NTE) knows that he wrote Romans and Galatians, I and II Corinthians, and probably not much else. Those four are sometimes called the Tuebingen Four, because F C Baur of that University demonstrated that they alone are Pauline in the early nineteenth century. This conclusion (surprise surprise) fits snugly into the Lutheran assumption that, since Justification by Faith Alone is manifestly the heart of S Paul's Gospel, Romans and Galatians are clearly his most important writings. I think I remember that the dear old New English Bible of the 1960s actually had "The Gospel according to Paul" as the page heading above much of Romans.

At the other extreme from the Tuebingen Four are the Pastoral Epistles, I Timothy, II Timothy, and Titus, about which the kindest thing a NTE can say is that they are "Deutero-Pauline"; the work of an admirer (admirers?) of S Paul well into the next generation. They clearly breathe a quite different atmosphere from the Four. In between the Four and the Pastorals lie the other 'Pauline' letters; NTEs differ in their judgements about these. But if you were to refer, in the hearing of a NTE, to "S Paul's Letter to the Ephesians", you would see passing across his sophisticated face that tolerant, amusedly superior smile which we save for simple if earnest folk who do not know all the complexities of which we cognoscenti are aware.

In 1966, A Q Morton brought the science of 'Stylometry' to bear on the New Testament. This involves constructing a computer print out of the minutiae of style of a Greek writer. Things like sentence length, use of passive verbs, anacolouthon, use of the articles ... I could fill a page with it all. Establish a writer's 'stylistic fingerprint', and then you can test any other writing to see whether it bears that 'fingerprint'. Scrupulous in his scholarship, Morton demonstrated that the NTE community was right: the Tuebingen Four form "a group"; "between the group and the other Epistles exist a large number of significant differences ... It is not possible to explain these differences without assuming a difference of authorship". This is a very satisfactory conclusion, is it not?

Let me now hare off at a tangent and introduce to you ... I'll explain why in the next part of this treatise ... a very able scholar, who is a Catholic priest who, sadly, lost his Faith. Sir Anthony Kenny left the Church and worked as a teacher of philosophy. An academic of immense distinction, he became Master of the intellectually prestigious Balliol College in this University (where he still was when our Middle Daughter was an undergraduate there). Many of the Catholic-haters in the Media grew up Catholic, then lost their Faith (sometimes because it conflicted with their genital urges) and turned violently against the Church. Not so Sir Anthony. As a sympathetic agnostic, he attended the Anglican Divine Office in Balliol Chapel (but did not join in the Creed). Such was his reputation for laid-back impartiality that he was the agreed chairman for the Debate beteen Professor Richard Dawkins, and Archbishop Rowan Williams, in the Sheldonian Theatre. It was a fascinating encounter; Dawkins' peasant illiteracy held up very poorly in the face of the high culture of both Kenny and Williams. Dawkins: I've never heard of Wittgenstein. Kenny: Oh. The Archbishop and I both find him very interesting ... or words to that effect. I think you can still find that Debate on the Internet.

I shall delete unread comments sent in before I have published the next two parts of this piece. I apologise in advance to those of you who think I should not write disdainfully about peasants.

We are a touchy nation.

So, in today's news, we have, pretty high up, the information that some North American journal called Time Magazine is under the impression that Evelyn Waugh was a woman novelist!!

Is this faux 'mistake' intended as some sort of cheap retaliation for his The Loved One, which must be just about the funniest satirical demolition of North American culture, language, art, architecture, politics, literature, sentimentality, gullibility, sexuality, loquacity and self-importance since (Sir) Max Beerbohm created the character of Oover in Zuleika Dobson?

OK, we are a sadly pathetic little country, full of whinging has-beens. Quis ausit negare? But North Americans should realise that the truth of this analysis makes us resent it all the more when in their frank and open generosity they point it out to us. So I will toss back at them just one single offensive word, heavy with ridicule:

OBAMA!!

LENT IS DIFFERENT

Lent, I suppose, shouldn't be fun, but liturgically it can provide novelties, and, to the still childlike parts of our minds, change is always fun. And Lent does provide us with novelties, or rather, with whatever the opposite is of novelty ... antiquelties, perhaps. Take the Prayer over the People which concludes the Lenten Masses ... the postconciliar 'reform' abolished them. The Editio Tertia Missalis Romani of 2002 brought them back, and so you again find them in the current ICEL translation.

Before the final blessing of the Mass was introduced into the text of the Ordo Missae, first by Dr Cranmer and then by his imitator Pope S Pius V, there had been no sacerdotal dismissal of the people for centuries in the texts of the Roman Liturgy. But, anciently, the Pontiff dismissed the people with a prayer said 'over' them. When, in 538, Pope Vigilius was arrested just before the end of Mass by the Imperial Byzantine Special Branch and dragged off to the East (have the Orthodox apologised yet for all those Popes who were arrested and dragged off to Constantinople to be tortured, imprisoned, or starved to death?), the pious Roman mob followed him to the boat yelling that they wanted 'the prayer'. He chanted it; the mob yelled Amen; and the boat moved off. The Prayer over the People was a blessing, in the sense that blessing means the priest prays a group from which he implicitly excludes himself by praying, not for 'us', but for 'you' or 'them' (that is how it differs from the post communionem prayer). In the Extraordinary Form, it is preceded by Let us Pray; and a diaconal Humble your heads before God; in the Ordinariate Missal Bow down before the Lord. 

Archaisms tend to survive in seasons like Lent. One reason why this is particularly true of the Roman Rite is that only in Lent was there an unbroken sequence of daily masses, stational masses presided over by the pontiff himself rather than by parish priests. Daily through the streets of the City there were the busy processions of the Pontifical plate and of the curial clergy and the pope himself journeying first to the Church of Meeting for the Collecta and thence to the church appointed for the Statio. The entire Christian people of Rome witnessed this great annual exercise and the deeply sanctified memories thus created tended to make Lent a time more than usually resistant to innovation.

And of course, there may be different vestments in Lent. We must remember that the chasuble was not always exclusively worn by bishops and priests. It was the normal out-of-home garment of middle-class citizens of the Empire (like S Paul - see II Timothy 4:13 "ton phelonen"; the toga being by then every bit as universally worn as top hat and tails are among us), and so it was worn, if not by everybody, at least by the clergy of all ranks. (The practice of tarting up deacons and subdeacons in dalmatics or tunicles invaded Rome rather later; in the period of the classical sacramentaries they wore just chasubles.) In the archaising season of Lent, Mass began with the deacon and subdeacon wearing chasubles folded up in front (or chasubles made to look as if they were folded up in front); when it got to the parts of the Mass where deacons and subdeacons have to be physically quite busily active, they took them off and rolled them lengthways, slung them over the left shoulder and tied a knot in them under the right armpit ... a rather jolly example of the down-to-earth matter-of-fact-ness of classical Roman liturgy. At least, that's the origin of it all; in recent centuries those rolled-and-knotted garments evolved into bands of cloth which became popularly known as 'broad stoles' because they do rather look like stoles worn deacon-wise, but, er, broader.

I dragged our 'folded chasubles' and our 'broad stoles' out into the light of day when we were at S Thomas's; I rather miss them now! In places where they still lurk in corners of sacristies ... er ... well ... if you were to bring them back into use, who am I to judge?

My answer to a query

A reader would like an explanation of why I regard the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer 1, as the Genuine Article, the authentic Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Rite expressing the early Roman theology of Oblation and Consecration; and why I therefore dislike the other three (and, in particular, regard the Pseudo-Hippolytan Dewfall at a Trattoria in the Trastevere shall we order another bottle Prayer as the absolute antithesis of the Roman Tradition). The answer is that those other three Prayers implicitly repudiate that Roman tradition by orientalising and importing a contrary doctrine of Oblation and Consecration; a contrary doctrine which is later than, and (of course, in my view) far less satisfactory than, the older Roman tradition.

A good starting point would be a series that I did in March last year: six parts, on March 9; 10, 12, 13, 16, 18; 2015.

I admit that I do sometimes tend to write as if every poor reader has been reading me for years and knows the basic motivations of my liturgical judgements, so that I don't need to keep repeating it all. Honestly: new and occasional readers are very welcome! And I hope all this doesn't sound too self-important, as if I think it is crucially important for all the world to fall down in adoration before my wonderful views. But somebody did ask!!

King Ethelbert of Kent

Continues ...
 I should add that Jesse Billett gives critical editions of three unregarded liturgical fragments, relegated to 'Appendix' status but all of them important and with each detail treated with scrupulous attention. I have not checked through the tables which are a prominent feature of the book and which make it easier to follow his discussion, but, in what I have looked at, I have not noticed errors.

This is an age in which Anglicanism, for reasons detailed as long ago as 1987 by Gary Bennett in his Crockford's Preface, has lost all the varied sustaining and combining features which, as recently as my youth, still gave it mutual coherence. I think Professor Billett has proved that the ecclesial community which produced fine Patristic scholarship in the nineteenth century and superb liturgical scholarship in the twentieth is still capable of producing scholars who provoke our admiration and enlighten our understanding.

The Roman liturgical Tradition does lie at the heart of our common Western experience, and to understand it, in depth and with clarity, is to understand what B Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey combined to call "the common ancient traditions"; and is thus, in the deepest possible way, to Do Ecumenism. That is why I characterise a book crammed with detailed footnotes and painstaking references and illuminating the daily and hourly life of prayer of the secular and religious English clergy of the period from 597-c1000 as a work of profoundly ecumenical significance. And I feel that we in the Ordinariates, in particular, should take this sort of scholarship immensely seriously. Such books; such studies; such interests; such writers; are part of the Bridge which the Ordinariates are meant, in God's Providence, to be. We shall be less than we should be if we do not ourselves sustain this Bridge.

I think there is a particular question which may in judgement be put to those of us who belong to Benedict XVI's Ordinariates: And what did you do to keep the Bridge open for those still on the other side?
Concluded.

King Ethelbert of Kent

Continues ...
 Professor Billett establishes with a high degree of probability that the form of the Office brought to England by the Augustinian Mission was not the form which was later to be thought of as 'Benedictine'. It was 'Roman' in the sense of replicating what was done in the great Roman basilicas ... the dedications of which (Christ; Ss Peter and Paul; S Mary) S Augustine was recreating in his See city. What happened in Rome was itself, of course, not static; and evidence can be complicated by this fact, as well as by the probability that local religious Superiors exercised a degree of liberty. But the main outlines are clear and, needless to say, evolution, both in Rome and in England, was 'organic'. It was not until the middle of the tenth century that a monastic 'reform' in England resulted in a 'strict observance' of the Benedictine liturgical rules in a group of monasteries, leaving other monasteries, and the secular clergy, to continue the old Roman basilican liturgical tradition.

There is something very distinctively 'Anglican' in Professor Billett's thesis. The Romanitas of the English Church received much emphasis from an earlier generation of Anglican liturgists, not least Geoffrey Willis. Many readers will remember the conclusion of a particular 'purple passage' by Gregory Dix: "This very morning I 'did this' with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed". And Billett, in a book which I suspect will not be superseded for a very long time, draws into his conclusions a vast amount of secondary literature, some of it largely ignored today because of the lack of interest displayed, since the 1960s, in anything which did not point towards the targets desired by the dominant fashionistas of that decade. One example is Camille Callewaert: not a name to conjure with among the Diocesan Directors of Liturgy of our generation ... but his little finger was thicker than their thighs. (Even the biggest names are now little known ... Bishop ... the Benedictine liturgical school of the Interwar Period ... Eizenhoeffer ... Christine Mohrmann ... are these names that crawl all over the notebooks of modern seminarians or even DPhil students?) Billett also summarises and utilises the work of scholars currently active, such as our own very popular Professor Regia of Ecclesiastical History here at Oxford, Sarah Foot.

Repeatedly, I found myself reading some single lapidary sentence in this book, perhaps especially one including a negative, and suddenly pulling up short with the reflection: It must have taken him a couple of days to check through that, not only verifying the references but, particularly, looking into every conceivable nook and cranny to assure himself that he hadn't failed to notice a piece of contrary evidence which would subvert his negative.
To be continued.

 

Saint Ethelbert of Kent: 1400 years.

Today is the 1400th anniversary of the death of S Ethelbert, Confessor, first Christian King of Kent. The Holy King was baptised, together with many of his people, by S Augustine, sent by Pope S Gregory the Great.

It is not often realised, either by Anglicans or by Catholics, what a remarkable phenomenon it was, that little mission which S Ethelbert received and established in Canterbury in 597. It happened a couple of centuries before the Carolingian Renaissance, before an imperious Frankish dynast embarked upon his project of replacing 'Gallican' liturgy with books copied directly from exemplars of the City. S Augustine's 'Church Plant' in Kent resulted in a little island of Romanitas being set up in the furthest North; and was, in political terms, magnificently timely.

King Ethelbert of Kent was clearly aware that Christianity was the cult of the Big World; he so valued his links with that world that he had accepted a Christian Frankish princess as his queen, with a Frankish bishop as her chaplain. Yet, to adopt her religion ... his Father-in-law's religion ... would have made him appear an appendage of her apron-strings, if not a vassal of her father. But the offer of a direct relationship with the Papa Romanus; to have a dialect of Christianity more august than theirs parachuted in; enabled him to trump the dignities of his in-laws. To be addressed as Rex Anglorum and as gloriosissimus, praecellentissimus by a Pope who compared him to Constantinus piissimus imperator ... to be instructed that the dedications and the liturgical dispositions and the choral arrangements of the churches being constructed in Canterbury precisely paralleled those of the great City itself, making Canterbury a new, Northern Rome, so miraculously far beyond the Alps ...

If there was one single over-riding characteristic of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, it was its Romanitas. Professor Jesse Billett of Toronto has recently devoted much erudition to this subject in his The Divine Office in Anglo-Saxon England 597-c.1000. His concern is to examine the surviving evidence for how the Divine Office, the round of daily prayer, was performed in the monasteria, 'minsters', of Anglo-Saxon England; and to demonstrate that it is inaccurate and anachronistic to speak of this as 'Benedictine'. Although there is plenty of evidence for the respectful study of the Benedictine Regula in the English Church, an assumption that this must have included a careful replication of S Benedict's directions with regard to worship contradicts the hints given in the evidence of the period concerned. I say 'hints' because writers naturally fail to describe in detail what they assume their readers will take for granted (throughout my blog posts you will not find any evidence that I use a knife and a fork while eating ... because we all do that ... and the remarkable thing would be if I did not do so ... and in that case I would explain to you my aberrant behaviour). Nevertheless the evidence is sufficient to fill some 500 pages and to build up a formidable case.
So how did they worship? I will repost two more posts on this subject in the course of today.

Cynerastia?

A 'flyer' has just popped though our door offering "Dog Walking Services", and assuring us that the operative is "CRB checked".

This suggests to me quite a new sense of the term "Dog-lover".

Agony Aunt

People sometimes do me the honour of asking for solutions to problems ... which is one reason why I endlessly reprint my old articles on how the Novus Ordo may be (as it is commonly done) an unpleasant experience but no way is it invalid. Abuses do not make a Mass invalid. (I imagine these articles can easily be found via the search engine attached to the blog.) But I don't think I've ever tried to offer an answer to what a devout Catholic might do if he/she has no choice but to fulfil the Sunday Obligation by his/her presence at a Mass which in important repects is contra mentem Ecclesiae (perhaps, for example, because of its disobedience to the rubrics and the GIRM).

I do have some experience of this unpleasant dilemma: I had to spend fifteen months 'in lay communion' after we joined the incipient Ordinariate. And in so many churches, the problems are considerable. I do know.

Even Bishop Richard Williamson is prepared to discern patches of sunshine in what he calls the newchurch. I would advise everybody whose local church does the Novus Ordo decently to join their fellow-Catholics in praying that Mass devoutly. But there are very many churches in which (to give an important example) the First Eucharistic Prayer is never used; and, even worse, hundreds of churches in which, at Sunday Mass, the second Prayer is invariably used, despite the very clear language of the General Instruction on the Roman Missal. This latter I would regard as a very serious abuse. In such circumstances, what is one to do?

It is, I think, advisable to consider the possibility of reverting to habits which sanctified Christians in many earlier centuries. If you foresee that, by Communion time, your mind is going to be full of irritated thoughts about the illegalities and irreverences you have experienced, it is probably best not to receive Holy Communion. Most people, through most of the Church's history, have 'received' very rarely. This abstinence can have the effect of making your much rarer communions more significant. Old-fashioned books of devotion used to suggest forms of devotion on preparation for Communion to be said on the Friday and Saturday evenings beforehand.

Does the church have a quiet corner near the back, or behind a pillar, where you might be able, without being too conspicuous, to kneel quietly down and to pray the Rosary throughout Mass? Millions, over the years, have done that for centuries. But DON'T make a show of it.

Or might you prefer to take your Missal along and prayerfully go through the propers of the Day's Mass? If you do that, I would recommend that you 'labiate'; i.e. gently and inconspicuously move your lips silently as you read the words. (Clergy do this with regard to the Divine Office.) Otherwise, the risk is that your eye will just slide down the page without your really 'inwardly digesting' anything. Remember that the celebrant will probably be using the ultra-short pseudo-Hippolytan dewfall-in-the-Trattoria-in-the-Trastevere shall-we-order-another-bottle Eucharistic Prayer (or else something even iffier), so it might be best to start the Secret, Preface, and Canon in good time. Do not fail to break off and to worship most devoutly when the celebrant gets to the Consecrations. At Communion time, remember that the people moving around you have God Incarnate within them. Try not to feel superior to them, because there are rumours that God rather dislikes that sort of thing. And, in any case, you aren't. Considering the graces that have been lavished on you, why are so much less holy than your fellow-worshippers to whom God has not given nearly as much?

Indeed, all through the Mass remember that (even if you are the only person there, possibly, who understands this) you are present at the Most Holy and Adorable Sacrifice, the Oblation of the Incarnate Word, the Immolation of the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

This is what the Church means by Actuosa Participatio.

ON NO ACCOUNT start persuading yourself that, for some reason, you might be exempt from your Sunday Duty. You aren't. Don't go there.

I'm sure some readers will have other, far better, ideas.

Et in Anglia Simonia?

In the Patristic passage offered in the (old) Breviary for the Tuesday after Lent I, we found S Bede doing his best to explain why the Lord expelled all those commercial people from the Temple, when all the poor chaps were doing was to enable the Temple Worship as laid down by God to be duly performed. Eventually, after a bit of a struggle, he comes up with this: they were selling doves; the dove is a Biblical symbol of the Spirit; so the Lord is condemning those who, in the Church, confer the Holy Spirit by the imposition of hands pretio; "for a fee".

My instinct is that he isn't talking about the imposition of hands in Absolution or Confirmation ... so, presumably, he has in mind bishops acepting fees for conferring Ordination. I recall that one possibility suggested by historians for S Theodore's view that S Chad was invalidly ordained to the Episcopate was that Chad's Consecrator, Bishop Wine, had been guilty of Simony. We have to remember that, at different times and in different places, very different impediments have been considered sufficient to render Ordinations invalid. Basically, it seems often to have boiled down to a sense that, if one disapproves of someone enough to want their Ordination to be invalid, one can usually find something. Rather like American Marriage Tribunals in the 1970s.

An antidote here, perhaps, to any naive picture of the newly-founded Anglo-Saxon Church as invariably shining brightly with evangelical fervour and untarnished sanctity!

Let us hope that the custom of neoconsecrati offering their Consecrator loaves of bread and barrels of wine does not constitute Simony. And how about neopresbyteri handing over candles?