Really-Paul, Probably-not-Paul, and not-Paul: The Differences

We met for the first time this past Sunday to talk about our summer book, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon, by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. There is so much scholarship on the Bible--who wrote it, and when, and for whom--they take just a sliver of work on the apostle and tease out some important theological strands in how the Epistles have been used by the Church, and how they came to be in the earliest communities.
Roughly, the letters attributed to Paul divide up into three categories: letters conclusively understood to be authentically written by him, letters on which consensus is less strong (but that Borg and Crossam believe not to be authentic), and letters which are pretty certainly not written by Paul. How do they know? They look at the manuscripts available, examine the writing style and language (Paul has a pretty distinctive style, and was well-educated), the historical context implicit in each text, and are able to puzzle out what is and isn't genuine.
If all of these letters have been part of our tradition in some form or another for 2000 years, what does it really matter whether Paul himself really wrote them? was a literary convention in the Jewish world at that time to write something and attribute it to someone else--it wasn't viewed as deceptive in the same way we assume today. What's at stake in the matter is that there are some pretty startling similarities in the letters that Paul did write, as well as some pretty clear commonalities in those that he didn't. (the ones that we aren't entirely sure about are kind of a middle ground). And those later "pseudo Paul" texts in some instances say nearly the opposite as the authentic Paul. They are still important, and they're still Scripture, but when we interpret them we look at them differently. It doesn't mean that there's no value to the non-Paul texts, but that we look at the whole picture of the Epistles. If Paul appears to say one thing in a letter we know he wrote, and then the opposite thing in a letter he didn't, we'll apply our knowledge to trying to follow the instruction of the genuine Paul.
So what's the difference between really-Paul, probably-not-Paul, and not-Paul? A lot! Borg and Crossan talk about how the real Paul was, as the title says, a "radical visionary." The first few chapters (which is as far as we've gotten) talk about social issues like slavery and gender (bottom line: equality and freedom), but later we'll learn about grace, life in community, and what it really means to "preach Christ Crucified" and take Jesus seriously as our Lord. I have a hunch it's going to turn out pretty different from being a good Roman citizen, as some of the writings attributed to Paul seem to imply. Since the book does get a little technical in parts, we'll spend some time reviewing each chapter as we meet for our group. Please don't hesitate to join in at any time--it won't be hard to catch up, and I still have 3 copies of the book left!
Blessings,
Sara+