Luke Timothy Johnson's Four Views On The Apostle Paul

Luke Timothy Johnson provides the Catholic perspective for the book “Four Views on the Apostle Paul.” What he has to say is that Acts, despite being indispensable for our understanding Paul’s life, was written by Luke, and therefore any search for Paul’s thought cannot be done in Acts. (Location 1034) Johnson then goes on to say that the reasons for rejecting six of Paul’s letters are “formally and materially flawed.” (Location 1062) Johnson provides many arguments for his theory that Paul did, at the very least, commission all of the letters to be written according to his theology, rather than the disputed letters being Pseudepigraphical, as is the common belief. (Location 1071) Johnson’s first argument is that, partially because Paul’s least favorite form of communication is through letter and partially because letters may have been lost to time, there are not enough samples of Paul’s writings and theologies to determine whether Paul was a systematic thinker, or what his writing style was like. (Location 1090) On top of this, Johnson

She believes that Paul’s disputed letters are more than likely pseudepigraphical. (Polaski, 95) Her main argument for this is that, in the time that the letters were written, letters were judged on the merit of the content, rather than the authorship. This means that it was a common practice to take a piece of work with either an unknown, or not very well known author, and attribute it to a well known author. This was only done if the letter matched the author’s ideals and represented the author well, but since it was a common practice, it is very likely that letters were attributed to Paul. (Polaski, 96) Johnson’s essay does not offer any rebuttal for this argument, except to say that all of the letters we have that are attributed to Paul were, although not all written by Paul’s own hand, at least commissioned by Paul. (Johnson,