Pauline texts not by Paul. Is this tradition acceptable in non-biblical texts?

Factual Questions
1

Several of the letters/epistles of Paul are widely accepted as not written by him. (Let’s not debate the point, just accept it for the purpose of my question)

This was explained to me by several seminary grads that it was common for students or disciples of a notable person to produce works in the person’s name. Since they were using the knowledge gleaned at the foot of the master, this pseudo-authorship was not controversial.

My question is: Was there a tradition by which this was acceptable in a non-biblical context?

2

There’s a huge body of non-biblical Classical works that are thought to not be written by the person they claim to be. Most of the Letters of Plato, for example.

You seem to be asking if there was a tradition of writing such false works by someone who knew the person they were attributing authorship to? I’m not sure if that’s true or not, or even if we would know it if it would. Its a lot easier to show that a text wasn’t written by someone in particular then to figure out who wrote it and what their relationship was to the claimed author.

3

I think the OP might mean, if I studied under Aristotle and then wrote something which I attributed to him, would it then have an air of authority similar to the genuine works of Aristotle by virtue of my having been his acolyte.

4

In a university where I once worked, it was not uncommon for the big-name researcher who secures the grants to have his name on the research papers which were actually researched and written by graduate students and lower-ranking professors.

In industry, I understand that Thomas Edison received credit for all sorts of inventions that were discovered by his underlings.

5

Yes. If we found a work of Plato was actually authored by one of his students, let’s say Carl, would people still say it was written by Plato and keep it in collections attributed to Plato?

Many letters attributed to Paul are pretty roundly accepted as NOT actually written by him, but in his tradition by people who knew him. I am trying to see if this was an acceptable practice in non-biblical circles.

6

I have heard of cases of various paintings, once attributed to a particular famous medieval or Renaissance artist, no longer having that attribution since it was shown that they didn’t paint them. Because the painting can still be shown to come from approximately that painter’s time and place, they are sometimes said to come from “the school of X,” where X is the painter’s name. Presumably this means that X had various painters studying or working with him.

7

I think that the term “Pauline epistle” nowdays is just used as a short way to refer to a group of books of the Bible without asserting anything about their authorship:

8

Research the Pseudepigraph

It was a widely used style in ancient and neoclassical times where an author put his words in the mouth of a famed antecedent with the idea that what they were writing would honestly be the sort of thing that historical figure would have said.

In Biblical circles the word has a jargon use to mean works attributed to a biblical figure but clearly not actually written by them. This is often pejorative as in the case of the non-canonical gospels that claim authorship by one of the disciples but contain heretical teachings.

9

When a non-biblical historical document which was once attributed or self-attributed to an author “X” is then discovered to be most certainly not by “X” (e.g., the ink used didn’t exist during X’s lifetime), it is usually then credited to “Pseudo-X” if the actual author is still unknown.

10

Some of Aristotle’s works, notably the Nicomachean Ethics, one of the most important, are thought to be based upon notes taken on his lectures by his students, in this case, his son Nichomachus. That might fit the OP’s criterion.

On the other hand, in the middle ages (and presumably also in later antiquity) there were all sorts of works floating around purporting to be by Aristotle that are now though to have noting to do with Aristotle at all. For a while, some of them were quite influential. We like to think that most of these have been eliminated from the canon by now, but if you buy a complete Aristotle these days it is likely to contain a few works that some scholars are dubious about (and, probably, omit a few minor works that a few scholars think may be genuine). It will contain the Nicomachean Ethics, though. No-one has any question that that belongs there.

The work of so called Pseudo-Dionysius is an example of a Christian work that was, at one time, accorded a lot of authority due to a misattribution of its authorship to a person connected to Paul. The book of Acts in the NT mentions that Paul personally converted a certain Dionysius in Athens, and the work in question was attributed to him. In this case, the author may not have intended to deceive, he may just have happened to have the same name as the person mentioned in Acts. Nevertheless it was the misattribution, and the fact that it was assumed that it contained teachings deriving directly from Paul, that caused many Christian thinkers to take it very seriously for a long time (until it was eventually realized that it could not possibly be by that Dionysius). It was never attributed to Paul directly, though.

11

Are you talking about current or past practices? Your first paragraph talks about how things are done now, but you use the past tense in your second paragraph.

12

It’s also hard to tell where Plato stopped reporting on what Socrates said and what Plato made up entirely and put in the mouth of the character Socrates.

13

In the days before NYTimes Review of Books, especially in medieval times, it was not unusual for people to attribute something hey wrote to a historical figure so it would become more popular. We see an inkling of this today, in quotes (i.e. “Never attribute to malice what can best be explained by incompetence” - Napoleon; or “The trouble with the French economy is they don’t evn hav a word for entrepreneur” - GW Bush) Sometimes it is done to make a point or joke, but often it is done so that the attribution helps the item become more popular.

In the days before copyright and royalties, especially, unless you were already a prominent public figure, there was no advantage in claiming authorship. Your work was more likely to become famous if it was “A work by Charlemagne himself!” than “A rant on morality by Guido Nobody in a little town south of Padua”.

the same mentality that misattributes stuff on the internet today also was at work back then.

Of course, with religious works, there’s a bigger motivation - a fanatical religious type simply wants their view of their religion to be accepted. “Finding” works by Paul that back you up probably did not hurt. In a world where everything was murky and attributions were more a tradition than an established record to be looked up - probably misattribution was not seen as the horror we see it as today.

14

Is this tradition acceptable in non-biblical texts?

If you consider ghostwriting to be pseudo-authorship, then it’s not only acceptable, it’s done on a daily basis. The main difference being that in ghostwriting, the named author has control over who’s doing the writing and what’s being written.

15

Ooooh, let me trot out my favorite modern cite, let me!

Anybody who’s worked in protein chemistry is familiar with Levinthal’s Paradox - it’s a compulsory cite. When I needed to cite it for a seminar, I checked the article everybody cited and it didn’t mention proteins at all, it was about sugar chemistry :confused: Some research for papers by Levinthal around the date of the article dug up the notes on a round table discussion held during an ACS meeting: Levinthal opened the round table by proposing as the theme what we now call his paradox. I got down-graded for “not citing the right paper” and for “giving my seminar a joke-y name” (the name of my seminar was the name of the “real” paper), but a few months later in an interview in C&EN, Levinthal answered “how does it feel to be the most-cited author in Chemistry?” with “It would feel better if people cited the right paper!”

Now the cites are split between the roundtable notes and the sugars article.

Q: does anybody remember the name of the graduate student who took the minutes on the roundtable?

A: uh… well, “How to Fold Graciously” is linked from the Wikipedia article, let me look up the student’s name…

We call it Levinthal’s Paradox because the student didn’t originate the idea, he “merely” wrote it down. Calling it Rawitch’s Paradox is what most people would consider inappropriate. So long as those “attributed” or “school of” documents were from the big wig’s mouth and/or supervised by him, it’s been perfectly cromulent since the first time someone put finger to rock wall.

16

It’s done all the time. See Alley Dweller’s post. It says what I wanted to say, but more clearly than I could have.

17

Well, it may happen today, and it may even have happened back then that teachers would sometimes take credit for their student’s ideas, but no, if scholars today knew that a certain work traditionally attributed to Plato was really written by his student Carl, and if they did not have good reason to think it was really Plato’s ideas, and mostly his own words, as taken down by Carl, but really Carl’s own thoughts, then they would attribute it to Carl, not Plato. (Although they might, nevertheless, judge that it provided some additional insight into Plato’s thinking, on the assumption that Carl’s thinking would have been strongly influenced by his master.)

Incidentally, it should be said that there is really very little doubt, today, that the major works now attributed to Plato, the Dialogues, were indeed actually written by him, either by his own hand or dictated, so that the versions we now have are (allowing for errors that may have been introduced by copyists, over the ages) his actual words as he intended later generations to have them. (As has been mentioned, there are some doubts about the genuineness of some of the letters, but most of the letters are quite short anyway, and only a few contain anything of real philosophical significance.)

The situation with Aristotle is really quite different. Almost everything of his that we have was not intended for publication, but was originally lecture notes: either his own notes from which he lectured, or detailed notes as taken down by his students. When it is the latter, it does seem possible that some of the actual words and phrasing, and maybe even some of the examples, may not have been Aristotle’s own, even if we are reasonably confident that the actual ideas are his. Also, some of the works of Aristotle, especially the more factual ones, may have been collaborative efforts undertaken within his school, the Lyceum, compiling facts under his direction. (There are scholars who have argued that pretty much all of the works we attribute to Aristotle were really collaborative efforts, but I do not think this is a very commonly accepted view.)

We do, have some works (and evidence of the former existence of others) by Aristotle’s foremost student (and, probably, research collaborator), Theophrastus, who also became head of the Lyceum, after Aristotle died. Theophrastus did not pretend to be Aristotle, however, and wrote his own works under his own name.

18

A modern example of an important book that was put together by the students of a teacher rather than the teacher himself is Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics:

19

There’s an interesting passage in the wiki article on Pseudo-Dionysus, cited upthread by njtt, quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

(my emphasis)

So, in answer to the OP, it looks like the early Christians were simply following the traditions of Classical scholarship and philosophy in this area.