Schnelle, "The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings"

a brief review

Valuable insights

Weaknesses

1. Schnelle argues that 2 Corinthians and Philippians were each originally single letters, but the multiple letter solutions as advocated by Bornkamm ^[1] or more recently by Duling & Perrin ^[2] are closer to the truth. My analysis of the relationship between structure and papyrus pages suggests that when Paul's letters were assembled, some of the sheets (probably written on one side only) seem to have been accidentally displaced. After examining many options, this eventually led me to conclude that 2 Corinthians (less 6:14-7:1 which is widely recognized as an interpolation) and Philippians each originally consisted of three letters. They are set out below in chronological order.
   • 2 Corinthians
     1. The defensive letter (2:14-6:13 plus 7:2-4 plus 7:13b-8:24) on 11 pages
     2. The severe letter (10-13) on 9 pages
     3. The letter of reconciliation (1:1-2:13 plus 7:5-13a plus 9:1-15) on 7 pages
   • Philippians
     1. The thankful letter (4:1-20) on 1 page
     2. The joyful letter (1:1-3:1a plus 4:21-23) on 6 pages
     3. The farewell letter (3:1b-4:9) on 3 pages
2. Schnelle claims that there were two pre-synoptic written sources, namely Q and Deutero-Mark. Both of these are hypothetical and historically unattested.
   • Schnelle rightly argues that Matthew and Luke both contain several doublets in each of which one member is in a Markan context and the other is not. He implies that the members not in a Markan context provide evidence for Q. But he fails to observe that one of them to which he refers, Mt 5:29-30, (// Mt 18:8-9) is not actually assigned to Q! He also assumes that the material common only to Matthew and Luke derives from a single source. But its variety of outlook and literary style make it virtually indistinguishable from Matthew as a whole, so it has no real character of its own. Indeed its narratives and lengthy parables look more like a random selection of Matthean pericopes. They are best explained as the non-Markan pericopes which Luke chose to copy from Matthew - see
     Pericopes wrongly assigned to Q.
   • His posited Deutero-Mark is highly dubious. Firstly no motivation is given for this "stratum of editorial revision", which he admits has no clear theological distinction from canonical Mark. Secondly it assumes that a modern scholar would be able in every case to work out why Matthew and/or Luke omitted a passage in Mark. Such confidence is unjustifiable for such ancient documents, especially as space constraints may have played a part after the writer had decided (as argued elsewhere on this site) how many pages of the codex were to be allocated to each logical section of the archetype.

Overall Assessment

References