Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (46 page)

As with every instance of forgery, the case of Colossians is cumulative, involving multiple factors. None has proved more decisive over the past thirty years than the question of writing style. The case was made most effectively in 1973 by
Walter Bujard, in a study both exhaustive and exhausting, widely thought to be unanswerable.
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Bujard compares the writing style of Colossians to the other Pauline letters, focusing especially on those of comparable length (Galatians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians), and looking at an inordinately wide range of stylistic features: the use of conjunctions (of all kinds), infinitives, participles, relative clauses, repetitions of words and word groups, use of antithetical statements, parallel constructions, use of the preposition
, the piling up of genitives, and on and on. In case after case, Colossians stands apart from Paul’s letters.

Here I can mention a slim selection of his findings. How often does a book of Paul’s use adversative conjunctions? Galatians 84 times; Philippians 52; 1 Thessalonians 29; but Colossians only 9. Causal conjunctions? Galatians 45 times; Philippians 20; 1 Thessalonians 31; but Colossians only 9. Consecutive conjunctions? Galatians 16 times; Philippians 10; 1 Thessalonians 12; but Colossians only 6. How often does the letter use a conjunction to introduce a statement (
etc.)? Galatians 20 times; Philippians 19; 1 Thessalonians 11; but Colossians only 3.

As a Fazit to part one, Bujard adds up conjunctions of all kind and indicates the percentage of their occurrence in relation to all words used: Galatians 239 (10.7 percent), Philippians 138 (8.5 percent), 1 Thessalonians 126 (8.5 percent), Philemon 28 (8.4 percent), but Colossians only 63 (4 percent). The average in all the undisputed letters is 10.4 percent; in Colossians it is 4 percent.

Bujard then uses another metric, adding up all the different conjunctions used in the Pauline letters: Galatians 33; Philippians 31; 1 Thessalonians 31; but Colossians only 21. But he goes further, subtracting from these totals the conjunctions that occur in all the letters in question (the shorter epistles: Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians), since these are simply common words, not words necessarily distinctive of Paul. One is then left with the following numbers: Galatians 24; Philippians 22; 1 Thessalonians 22; but Colossians only 12. He then goes a step farther, subtracting those that occur in all but one of the letters in question (these are distinctive of Paul, not just common words). And the results remain consistent, if not more graphic: Galatians 20; Philippians 18; 1 Thessalonians 18; but Colossians only 8.

The findings involving conjunctions match those using other parts of speech. Bujard looks, for example, at the use of the infinitive. In Galatians the infinitive occurs 32 times (1.4 percent of all words), Philippians 39 (2.4 percent), 1 Thessalonians 48 (3.3 percent), but in Colossians only 11 (0.7 percent). The articular infinitive is used in Galatians 5 times, Philippians 16, 1 Thessalonians 13, but in Colossians never.

The same (or rather the inverse) results obtain with reference to the use of relative clauses. In Romans they make up 1.4 percent of all the words of the book,
1 Corinthians 0.9 percent, 2 Corinthians 1.0 percent, Galatians 1.5 percent, Philippians 1.5 percent, 1 Thessalonians 0.3 percent, Philemon 1.4 percent, but Colossians 2.6 percent.

Bujard goes on like this for a very long time, page after page, statistic after statistic. What is striking is that all these features point the same way. When one adds to these the other commonly noted (though related) features of the style of Colossians—the long complex sentences, the piling up of genitives, the sequences of similar sounding words, and so on—the conclusion can scarcely be denied. This book is not written in Paul’s style.
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Arguments based on style are strongly supported by considerations of content. In several striking and significant ways the teaching of Colossians differs from the undisputed letters. Most commonly noted is the eschatological view, to which we will return later in our discussion. In 1:13 the author insists that God (already) “has delivered us from the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son.” Already? An aorist tense? Is this Paul? More striking still is 2:12–13, and 3:1, which insist that believers have already experienced a kind of spiritual resurrection after having died with Christ: “you were also raised [aorist] in him through faith”; God “made you alive with him”; “if then you have been raised up with Christ”—statements in clear tension with Paul’s emphatic statements elsewhere, such as Rom. 6:1–6, where it is quite clear that, whereas those who have been baptized “have died” with Christ, they decidedly have not been “raised up” with him yet. This is an important point in Paul’s theology, not a subsidiary matter. The resurrection is something future, something that is yet to happen. So too Phil. 3:11—“if somehow I
might
obtain to the resurrection from the dead.” And yet more emphatically in 1 Cor. 15—“in Christ all
shall be
made alive … we
shall
all be changed … the dead
will be
raised.” It can easily be argued that this is a key—if not the single key—to understanding Paul’s opposition to the Corinthian enthusiasts. They believed they were leading some kind of spiritual, resurrected existence, and Paul insisted that it had not yet happened. They may have died with Christ, but they had not yet been raised with him. That will come only at the end.

And what does the author of Colossians think? Believers have not only died with Christ but they have also been raised with him. They are already leading a kind of glorious existence in the present. This is the view Paul argues against in Corinth. Maybe he changed his mind. But given the stylistic differences—and the other matters of content to be discussed—it seems unlikely. Colossians is written
by someone who has provided a twist on a Pauline theme, moving it precisely in the direction Paul refused to go.
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There are other theological differences from Paul, frequently noted, all of them pointing in the same direction. A later author has taken up Pauline themes and shifted them in decidedly non-Pauline ways. Unlike Paul, this author understands redemption as the “forgiveness of sins” (1:14; as does Eph. 1:7). The phrase occurs nowhere else in the Pauline corpus; indeed, the term
itself, in the sense of “forgive sins,” is absent from Paul, except in the quotation of Ps. 32:1 in Rom. 4:7 (“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven”). So too, analogously, with a different term, 2:13 speaks of trespasses being forgiven:
is never used this way in the undisputed Paulines.
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So too 3:13 speaks of “forgiving one another just as the Lord has forgiven you,” using
again.

This author speaks famously of “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” for the sake of the church (1:24), a shocking image for Paul; were Christ’s sufferings in some way inadequate and needed to be completed? At the same time the author offers an exalted Christology (1:15–20), far beyond anything in the undisputed letters, even the Philippians hymn: Christ is the “image of the invisible God,” the “first born of creation,” “in him all things were created … and in him all things hold together,” “in him all the fullness was well pleased to dwell.” This is far closer to the Johannine prologue than Paul. As a result, in comparison with Paul, the author of Colossians seems to have a much higher view of Christ (1:15–20) and a much lower view of the efficacy of his death (1:24).

Other differences from Paul may not be as striking but bear noting as contributing to the overall sense of the letter. It seems very odd indeed to have “Paul” attack issues of Jewish legalism (sabbaths and festivals 2:16; “regulations” involving purity and kosher 2:20–21) without using Pauline vocabulary either to describe or attack it (“law,” “commandment,” “justification”). This is not a case of simply expecting Paul always to speak the language of
and its equivalents in all of his letters; in this case the author is dealing precisely with the issues of relevance to the terminology, but he does not use it. When the “law” does make an appearance—without being named—it is said to be a “shadow of things to come” (2:17), a teaching that resonates with the views of Hebrews, but not with Paul.