PROBLEMS OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDY 599 



up on the basis of it a pseudonymous letter which he represented 

 as addressed to the Ephesians? The trend of judgment seems to 

 be toward the former view, but the question is still treated by New 

 Testament scholarship as a fairly open one, and must be classed 

 among the problems. 



The objection to the acceptance of Second Thessalonians as 

 Paul's on the ground that the eschatological views embodied in its 

 apocalyptic section are inconsistent with those expressed in First 

 Thessalonians is accorded less weight than formerly, and there are 

 probably few who would favor the solution of the problem, advocated, 

 for example, by Schmidt, which treats the apocalyptic section as an 

 interpolation. The similarity of the epistle in much of its content to 

 First Thessalonians, though there must of necessity have been a con- 

 siderable interval between them, is a phenomenon that doubtless 

 requires explanation; but it must be doubted whether it is not easier 

 to account for this than for the creation, with no clearly evident mo- 

 tive, of an epistle so closely resembling Paul's in general tone and style, 

 yet proceeding in fact from another and considerably later hand. 

 Further investigation of the thought of the apostolic and post- 

 apostolic age, or the discovery of more delicate psychological tests 

 by which to weigh the probability of an author repeating himself 

 after an interval of some weeks, may be necessary before the question 

 can be transferred from the class of the open to that of the closed. 



The problem of the pastoral epistles attracted serious attention 

 some years before the criticism of Baur dealt with the Pauline epistles 

 as a whole. As early as Schleiermacher, the Pauline authorship of 

 First Timothy was disputed, and others soon extended the doubt to 

 Titus and Second Timothy. Nor could this have failed to be the 

 case as soon as the New Testament was dealt with in the critical 

 spirit. The differences between these letters and the letters gener- 

 ally accepted as Paul's, in vocabulary, style, and the reflected con- 

 dition of the churches, as well as the difficulty of rinding a place for 

 them in the life of Paul, as this is known to us from the Acts or from 

 the accepted letters, combine to present a problem which could not 

 but raise the question whether these letters really belong to the 

 lifetime of the apostle, or are not rather to be assigned to a consider- 

 ably later period. The question formerly argued as a simple alter- 

 native, genuine or not genuine, has of late taken the form of a 

 choice among these possibilities: wholly Pauline, partly Pauline, 

 wholly post-Pauline. To many scholars it has become almost an 

 axiom that these letters are, at any rate, not wholly Pauline. But 

 it is recognized with greater clearness than formerly that to point 

 out difficulties, even serious or seemingly insuperable difficulties, 

 in the way of ascribing the letters to the apostle, is not to solve the 

 whole problem; the task of the historian is to say, not only when 



