Paul and Seneca I
Paul and Seneca I
Paul and Seneca I
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli
Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy
and Durham University, Durham, UK
In the present contribution I set out to show how new, remarkable discov-
eries, especially in the linguistic and intertextual fields, which stem from
intensive research I have been conducting for over two decades into this
Pauline pseudepigraphon, lead to a profound reassessment of this docu-
ment and its composite nature. Let me begin from the linguistic point
of view. Here, the most interesting discoveries concern the nature and
distribution of Graecisms in this pseudepigraphon and its bilingualism.
The pseudepigraphical correspondence between the Stoic philosopher
Seneca—the preceptor and counsellor of emperor Nero, later forced by
Nero himself to commit suicide—and St. Paul has been handed down
in Latin, in many manuscripts of Seneca. The two purported authors are
Seneca, whose mother tongue was Latin, but also knew Greek very well,
and the apostle Paul, who normally spoke Greek and whose surviving lit-
erary production, all of which is collected in the New Testament, is in
Greek. Paul likely knew Latin to some extent, given at least his perma-
nence in Rome and his preaching there (for two whole years according
to Acts 28:30–31).
In the pseudepigraphon at stake, Paul is supposed to have been in Rome
for a few years by the time of the correspondence.1 It is Paul’s weakness in
Latin that induces Seneca to send him a handbook de copia verborum, in
hopes that it will help him to express his thoughts, in order, not to adorn
them with rhetorical embellishments, but to endow them with some lin-
guistic dignity.2 Erasmus from Rotterdam, who devoted specific reflections
to this pseudepigraphon, already asked the following question, against the
backdrop of his objections to the authenticity of the correspondence: why
should Seneca and Paul have written to one another in Latin, given that
1 See Ilaria Ramelli, “Le procuratele di Felice e di Festo e la venuta di Paolo a Roma,”
RIL 138 (2004): 91–97.
2 Vellem itaque, cum res eximias proferas, ut maiestati earum cultus sermonis non desit
[. . .] rerum tanta vis et muneris tibi tributa non ornamento verborum, sed cultu quodam
decoranda est (Epp. VII; XIII).
both of them were very well conversant with Greek?3 Indeed, in that
period, Roman philosophers such as Musonius Rufus and Annaeus
Cornutus, and Marcus Aurelius shortly afterwards, wrote in Greek.4
Paul probably endeavoured to preach in Latin at least when he was in
Rome, where he spread the Christian message within the Praetorian guard
and while he was awaiting his trial. Likewise, Peter in Rome used Mark
as an interpreter, very probably to translate his own preaching into Latin
(more likely than to render it into Greek). Christian preaching adapted
itself to the language of its public from the very outset of the preach-
ing of the Jesus movement; the so-called miracle of the tongues in Acts
2:4–11 reflects this. Among those who are reported here to have heard the
apostles speak in their own language are also Jews and proselytes who
came from Rome to Jerusalem on the occasion of the Passover of 30 ce.
The Epistle to the Hebrews, traditionally ascribed to Paul, was believed by
Eusebius to have been necessarily written in Aramaic, because it would
have been the language of its addressees.5 Similarly, according to tradition,
the first redaction of what became the Gospel of Matthew was in Aramaic
or Hebrew, since it was written for the Jews. The same pastoral concern
is still shown by Athanasius of Alexandria, who preached in Coptic in
the fourth century ce. Besides this pastoral motive, our Pauline pseude-
pigraphon may also intimate an alternative linguistic reason: like anybody
3 For Erasmus’s questions, see Ilaria Ramelli, “Note sull’epistolario tra Seneca e s. Paolo
alla luce delle osservazioni di Erasmo,” InvLuc 26 (2004): 225–37.
4 See, e.g., Ilaria Ramelli, Musonio Rufo (Milan: Bompiani, 2001); Ilaria Ramelli, Anneo
Cornuto: Compendio di Teologia Greca (Milan: Bompiani, 2003) with the reviews by Roberto
Radice, Aevum 79 (2005): 220; Franco Ferrari, Athenaeum 95 (2007): 550–51; Jean-Baptiste
Gourinat, Philosophie Antique 8 (2008) 286–89; László Takács, Antik tanulmányok 50 (2006):
113–14; and Ilaria Ramelli, Stoici romani minori (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), with the review by
Gretchen Reydams-Schils, BMCR 2009 [http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-10-10.html].
On Greek-Latin bilingualism in Rome in the first century bce–ce, see Simon Swain, “Bilin-
gualism in Cicero? The Evidence of Code-Switching,” in J. N. Adams, M. Janse, and S. Swain
(eds.), Bilingualism in Ancient Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 128–67, who
analyzes Cicero, a good parallel to Seneca in his bilingualism, but not to Paul in the pres-
ent letters (Cicero’s letters are “not testimony of his bilingualism: it is first and foremost
a discourse strategy within his Latin” [164]); J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Lan-
guage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). F. Biville describes the notion of
“Graeco-Latin” as “one culture, two languages” drawing inspiration from Suetonius, Claud.
42.1: utroque [. . .] sermone nostro (“Graeco-Romans and Graeco-Latin: A Terminological
Framework for Cases of Bilingualism,” in Adams, Janse, and Swain [eds.], Bilingualism in
Ancient Society, 92). On the knowledge of Latin among the Jews in the apostolic age, see
J. J. Price, “The Jews and the Latin Language in the Roman Empire,” in M. Mor, A. Oppen-
heimer, J. Pastor, and D. R. Schwartz (eds.), Jews and Gentiles in the Holy Land in the Days
of the Second Temple, the Mishna and the Talmud (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2003), 164–80.
5 See Hist. eccl. 3.38.2.
Linguistic Considerations
However, scholars at the beginning of the past century, such as Pascal and
Harnack, maintained that this correspondence was originally composed
in Greek.6 The former supposed that Jerome—one of the most impor-
tant ancient sources concerning our pseudepigraphon—read a Greek ver-
sion of it that was richer than that which has reached us. What we read
today, according to Pascal, is a mere abridgment of the original Greek
correspondence in bad Latin. According to this scholar, it was the original
Greek, and not the Latin translation, that induced Jerome to list Seneca
in catalogo sanctorum.7 Pascal, in fact, interpreted sancti as “saints” and
thought that Jerome simply could not include Seneca among the Chris-
tians only on the basis of the preserved letters, which indeed do not imply
Seneca’s conversion to Christianity. This tale of Seneca’s conversion is a
proto-humanistic legend,8 unknown to the original correspondence as
well as to the Patristic authors. Letter XIV is the only letter in the pseude-
pigraphon that suggests that Seneca “converted” to Christianity. How-
ever, as I shall mention, it is not part of the original correspondence and
was added much later. The legend of Seneca’s conversion was probably
inspired by this very letter, which depicts him as auctor Christi Iesu at
court. The first documented traces of that legend are to be found in the
late Middle Ages,9 in Giovanni Colonna around 1332, Rolando da Piazzola,
nunc in Italia primum (Padua: Antenore, 1994): 213–32, esp. 229–30; Ramelli, “Note
sull’epistolario,” 225–37.
10 Agostino Sottili, Albertino Mussato, Erasmo, l’epistolario di Seneca con San Paolo,
in A. Bihrer and E. Stein (ed.), Nova de veteribus: Mittel- und neulateinische Studien für
P. G. Schmidt (Munich/Leipzig: Saur, 2004), 647–78, esp. 667–78.
11 Letizia A. Panizza, “Biography in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: Sen-
eca, Pagan or Christian?” Nouvelles de la république des lettres 2 (1984): 47–98, esp. 74–75.
12 P. Faider, Études sur Sénèque (Ghent: van Rysselberghe & Rombaut, 1921), 89–104
(91–92). That Jerome deemed the correspondence authentic is maintained by Corsaro and
Gamberale (Francesco Corsaro, “Seneca nel Catalogo di Santi di Gerolamo [Vir. Ill. 12],”
Orpheus 8 [1987]: 264–82; Lepoldo Gamberale, “Seneca in catalogo sanctorum. Consider-
azioni su Hier. Vir. Ill. 12,” InvLuc 11 [1989]: 211–15).
13 This is, for instance, the translation in Mario Erbetta, Gli apocrifi del Nuovo Testa-
mento (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 3:86; and Luigi Moraldi, Apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento (Turin:
Einaudi, 1971), 2:1730.
authors who have dealt with religious or moral themes and were sup-
posed to have some relation to Christianity. These would include Seneca
himself,14 or Philo, a Jew, but who was believed to have witnessed the
first Christian community in Alexandria in De vita contemplativa,15 and
Josephus, also a Jew, who witnessed to Jesus in his Testimonium Flavianum
and includes information about James, “the brother of Jesus called Christ.”
Seneca is the third non-Christian in Jerome’s De viris illustribus (the cata-
logue of sancti), and the only “pagan,” but he criticized traditional cults
and beliefs, and for this reason, in addition to convergences between his
thought and Christianity, was already called by Tertullian saepe noster (De
an. 20). Jerome included him in catalogo sanctorum mainly on account
of his correspondence with Paul, since this, according to him, attested
to a historical contact with Christianity at its very beginning, like that of
Josephus and—supposedly—Philo. Jerome knew Seneca’s moral works
and letters, including his letters to Paul in their original collection, and
on this basis he included him in his catalogue. To this end there is no need
to suppose that he read a different redaction of the correspondence from
that which is known to us.
Another argument adduced by Pascal is the question of Letters X and
XII (XI Barlow), which are consequential, but separated by the later inser-
tion of Letter XI (XII Barlow), which is clearly false and concerns the fire
of Rome in 64 ce.16 In Letter X, Paul affirms that he is wrong to place his
own name immediately after that of Seneca in his letters. Seneca replies
(XII) that he is rather happy to see his own name close to that of Paul,
and invites Paul not to provoke him, since he knows that Paul is a Roman
citizen, and concludes with the following statement: nam qui meus tuus
apud te locus, qui tuus velim ut meus. Jerome interprets: [Seneca] optare
se dicit eius esse loci apud suos, cuius sit Paulus apud Christianos (Vir. Ill.
12). According to Pascal, Jerome understood the purported original Greek
and rendered it well into Latin, whereas the “Medieval barbarian”—the
purported translator of the correspondence in Greek into Latin—blurred
everything.17 But Jerome probably read exactly what we also read now,
and paraphrased the second colon of Seneca’s sentence (qui tuus [est
locus], velim ut meus). What Seneca means is in fact clear: “I would like
that my place were yours among your people, and that yours were mine.”
Moreover, Seneca, in his certainly authentic works, notoriously presents
concise and elliptic sentences built on strong verbal parallels and similar
to the sentence at stake here.
The argument of the “bad style” of these letters, used by Pascal and von
Harnack to postulate an original Greek, and by Erasmus to demonstrate
the pseudepigraphic nature of this document, is rather weak and even
liable to being overturned, since the “bad style” only concerns the letters
of Paul and Graecisms do not necessarily point to a now lost Greek origi-
nal. It is precisely the conviction that these letters are “badly written”—
and therefore it is unthinkable that they may have been composed by
Seneca—that induced Harnack as well to postulate, not only their spu-
riousness, but also their original redaction in Greek.18 Indeed, traces of
Greek do appear in these letters, but this does not seem to imply a Greek
original redaction, subsequently translated. For, first of all, it is striking
that all Graecisms, both lexical and syntactical, emerge only in Paul’s let-
ters, which is all the more significant in that his letters are by far fewer
and shorter than those of Seneca. As for lexical Graecisms, for example,
in Letter II Paul calls Seneca censor, sophista, magister tanti principis, thus
inserting among the Latin words censor, magister, and princeps a clearly
Greek term, sophista—it was not entirely unknown in Latin, but it had a
different meaning19—instead of sapiens.
letter, on the contrary, sophista has no negative or despising meaning, but quite the oppo-
site. Thus, there was no reason to prefer sophista to sapiens.
20 Sapientia est quam Graeci σοφίαν vocant. Hoc verbo quoque Romani utuntur, quod et
togatae tibi antiquae probabunt et inscriptus Dossenni monumento titulus: ‘hospes resiste et
sophiam Dossenni lege.’ Cf. Forcellini, Lexicon, 420–21.
21 V. Wilckens and V. Former, “Sophia,” in G. Kittel and G. Friedrich (eds.), Grande Les-
sico del Nuovo Testamento (Italian ed. by F. Montagnini, G. Scarpat, O. Soffritti; Brescia: Pai-
deia, 1979), 7:829–43; Ilaria Ramelli, “Philosophen und Prediger: Dion und Paulus—pagane
und christliche weise Männer,” in Dion von Prusa, Der Philosoph und sein Bild (SAPERE 18;
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 183–210.
22 ThlL II, 251: Vulg. Sir 27:5; Itala, cod. Bezae Cantabrigiensis Lev. 26:16; Luke 21:35;
2 Cor. 4:8; Isidorus, Orig. 2.21.27.
23 See Ilaria Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul,”
in Tobias Nicklas and Jean Michel Roessli (eds.), Novum Testamentum Patristicum—
Apokryphensonderband (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013).
24 K. Versteegh, “Dead or Alive? The Status of the Standard Language,” in Adams, Janse,
and Swain (eds.), Bilingualism in Ancient Society, 53, rightly warns that we have no idea
about the development of non-literary language; our records are written and “always
affected by the norm of a written standard.”
25 Fürst, Der apokryphe Briefwechsel, 39 n.58. Of the whole, very good volume see my
review in Gnomon 80 (2008): 307–11.
26 See Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence.”
noun in Paul’s letters in the New Testament present this syntactical form,
the same that is transposed into Latin in Paul’s letters in the correspond-
ence with Seneca. A forger must be supposed to have adopted a really
extraordinary mimetic subtlety.
Let me just adduce two more examples of syntactical Graecisms in
the correspondence at stake. In Letter VI, this too by Paul, the expres-
sion quibus si patientiam demus is generally considered to be strange and
late.27 However, this is a precise syntactical Graecism: ὑπομονὴν (also:
ἀνοχὴν and μακροθυμίαν) δίδωμι is very well attested, often precisely with
the dative case, exactly from the first imperial age onwards.28 The Latin
here is, again, a transposition of a typical Greek construct. In Letter II, also
ascribed to the apostle, Paul shows delight for Seneca’s appreciation of his
own literary letters: Litteras tuas hilaris heri accepi [. . .] quod litteris meis
vos bene acceptos alicubi scribes, felicem me arbitror tanti viri iudicio. Non
enim hoc diceres, censor, sophista, magister tanti principis, etiam omnium,
nisi qua vere dicis. Paul here uses the verb accipere, which is an active verb
in Latin, first as an active (litteras tuas accepi) and then as though it were a
so-called deponent verb (litteris meis vos bene acceptos). In order to mean,
“that you have well received my letters,” instead of writing litteras meas
vos bene accepisse, he uses a middle-passive form: litteris meis vos bene
acceptos. This is the same syntactical construct as Seneca uses in Letter VII
(bene me acceptum lectione litterarum tuarum), but in Seneca’s phrase the
meaning is passive: “I was well received (by Nero) with the reading of
your letters.” Paul, instead, uses the passive form of accipere in an active
meaning, as though accipere were a so-called deponent. Now this is very
probably again a syntactical Graecism: Paul is attaching the grammati-
cal form of Greek δέχομαι (a middle-passive verb with active meaning,
“to receive” or “to accept”) to the Latin verb accipere, which is a regular
active verb. Therefore, this seems to be a further syntactical Graecism in
Paul’s letters.
These amazing coincidences, which are found only in the letters ascribed
to Paul, due to their extreme subtlety, were very difficult to reconstruct for
a forger, who moreover did not have at his disposal digital databanks such
as the TLG nowadays. Lexical Graecisms and, even more, syntactical Grae-
cisms do not seem to prove that the correspondence was originally writ-
ten in Greek and then translated into faulty Latin, because they are only
27 See for instance Fürst, Der apokryphe Briefwechsel, 46 n.70, “Patientiam dare ist eine
singuläre Junktur.”
28 All instances are collected in Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence.”
found in Paul’s letters. They are not the result of a maladroit translation
of a “Medieval barbarian,” but rather seem to be traces left in Latin letters
by a person who thought in Greek. Among the different lexical options
that such a person had at his disposal to render a concept into Latin, he
would have clearly chosen the one closest to the Greek. Likewise, who-
ever speaks or writes in a language that he does not master perfectly well
will naturally reproduce syntactical constructs of his or her own mother
tongue, or the tongue that he best knows and in which he thinks, and will
transpose them into the language in which he must speak or write. This
seems to have happened in the letters of the Seneca-Paul correspondence
ascribed to Paul. It is noteworthy that some syntactical Graecisms have
been discovered in non-literary, “substandard” Latin letters by a contem-
porary of Paul and Seneca: some sentence connections in the letters of
Rustius Barbarus, who lived in eastern Egypt in the first century ce, may
reflect an influence from his first language, i.e., Greek.29
A further observation strengthens this impression and contradicts
Pascal’s and Harnack’s hypothesis of an original composition of the whole
correspondence in Greek: the really obscure and awkward sentences,
which have perplexed translators and commentators, making some think
of a late and inept Latin translation, are all found, again, in Paul’s letters—
although these are much fewer and much shorter than Seneca’s—just as
the lexical and syntactical Graecisms are.
Let me offer at least some examples. In Letter VIII Paul writes: licet
non ignorem Caesarem nostrum rerum admirandarum, si quando deficiet,
amatorem esse, permittit tamen se non laedi, sed admoneri. In this short
passage, there are two obscure and controversial points. The first is the
meaning of si quando deficiet, which has been translated in a variety of
ways, for instance “nei momenti di rilassatezza” (Franceschini), “quando
è abbattuto” (Erbetta), “quando manca” (Moraldi), “se prima o poi non
ci verrà meno” (Bocciolini Palagi, who proposes the textual integration
<ni>si quando deficiet), “wenn er <nicht> ab und zu davon genug hat”
(Fürst, who follows Bocciolini Palagi’s emendation).30 In this case, a very
29 Hilla Halla-aho, The Non-literary Latin Letters: A Study of Their Syntax and Pragmat-
ics (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 124; Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica,
2009), 64–89.
30 Ezio Franceschini, “È veramente apocrifo l’epistolario Seneca-s. Paolo?” in Lettera-
ture comparate: Problemi e metodo. Studî in onore di E. Paratore (Bologna: Pàtron, 1981),
827–41; Erbetta, Gli apocrifi, 89; Moraldi, Apocrifi, 2: 1752; Laura Bocciolini Palagi, Il carteg-
gio apocrifo di Seneca e san Paolo (Florence: Nardini, 1978), 144; Laura Bocciolini Palagi,
Epistolario apocrifo di Seneca e san Paolo (Florence: Nardini, 1985), 113; Fürst, Der apokryphe
Briefwechsel, 29.
instance in 2 Cor 5:11 (cf. Rom 3:18; 11:21; φοβοῦ, sc. God). A Christian would
have easily spoken, not of horror, but of timor Dei or Domini.
According to Pascal, the forger of this pseudepigraphon read Seneca’s
literary works and possible resemblances between the letters ascribed to
Seneca in the correspondence with Paul and his authentic works should
be attributed to the forger’s knowledge of Seneca’s authentic letters. In
order to prove this, Pascal compared Seneca’s Epistulae ad Lucilium with
Letter XI (XII Barlow) of our correspondence. Pascal’s examination thus
suggests that a forger composed Letter XI basing himself on authentic
texts of Seneca. The parallels indicated by this scholar seem to be con-
vincing, but Letter XI does not belong to the original correspondence, as
recent research has definitely confirmed;36 it must be eliminated from the
rest of the correspondence in that it is certainly false and was added after-
wards (albeit not so late as Letter XIV was).37
Intertextual Considerations
of Paul’s authentic letters, among those which were later included in the
New Testament.
In particular, in Letter VII of the Seneca-Paul correspondence, Seneca
is writing to Paul and Theophilus. The latter bears the same name as the
κράτιστος Theophilus, dedicatee of the Gospel of Luke and of the Acts of
the Apostles, which present themselves as composed by the same author
as the Gospel (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1).41 According to tradition, the Gospel of
Luke was composed on the basis of the preaching of St. Paul.42 Seneca, in
Letter VII, relates that he has read, and has partially read to Nero as well,
Paul’s letters “to the Galatians, to the Corinthians, and to the Christians
of Achaia” (Profiteor bene me acceptum lectione litterarum tuarum quas
Galatis Corinthiis Achaeis misisti). These three letters are Galatians, 1 Cor-
inthians, and 2 Corinthians.43 Second Corinthians, indeed, addresses not
only the Corinthians, but also “all the saints—that is, the Christians—of
the whole Achaia” (2 Cor 1:1). Incidentally, Achaia was the province gov-
erned by Annaeus Gallio, Seneca’s brother, who defended Paul when he
was accused by the Jews according to Acts 18:12–17.44
Now, this group of letters, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and 2 Corinthi-
ans, seems to be part and parcel of the first collection of Paul’s letters,
the first nucleus of the later corpus Paulinum. There is no evidence in
ancient Christianity of individual letters, such as Galatians, circulating
beyond their recipient communities in published form outside of some
collection of the corpus Paulinum.45 The most ancient collection within
this corpus surely included Galatians and 1 Corinthians, both composed
41 It is improbable that Theophilus was Seneca; cf. G. M. Lee, “Was Seneca the Theo-
philus of St. Luke?” in J. Bibaw (ed.), Hommages à M. Renard (Brussels: Latomus, 1969),
515–32.
42 See Ilaria Ramelli, “Fonti note e meno note sulle origini dei Vangeli: Osservazioni per
una valutazione dei dati della tradizione,” Aevum 81 (2007): 171–85.
43 Documentation in Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence.”
44 See Lucio Troiani, “L. Giunio Gallione e le comunità giudaiche,” in I. Gualandri and
G. Mazzoli (eds.), Gli Annei: Una famiglia nella storia e nella cultura di Roma imperiale
(Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Milano-Pavia, 2–6 maggio 2000; Como: New Press,
2003), 115–24.
45 Cf. Margaret M. Mitchell, “The Letter of James as a Document of Paulinism?” in
Robert L. Webb and John S. Kloppenborg (eds.), Reading James with New Eyes: Method-
ological Reassessments of the Letter of James (LNTS 342; London: T&T Clark, 2007), 79. Fur-
ther documentation can be found in Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence.” For a
survey of the different theories on the composition of the corpus Paulinum see Stanley E.
Porter, “Paul and the Process of Canonization,” in Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov (eds.),
Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological
Perspective (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996),
173–202.
in the 50s of the first century—as Hans Dieter Betz still thinks, long after
the appearance of his Hermeneia commentary on Galatians—and before
the chronological setting of the Seneca-Paul correspondence (58–62 ce).46
There is no reconstruction of the earliest corpus Paulinum that does not
include them; especially 1 Corinthians had a wide and early diffusion.47 It
is striking that Letter VII cites exactly those letters which constituted the
first core of the corpus Paulinum, and that all New Testament echoes in
this Pauline pseudepigraphon refer to authentic letters of Paul, and the
earliest ones. In the years 58–62 ce, the setting of his correspondence with
Seneca, Paul had already written these letters, which were beginning to
circulate in a small collection. A fourth-century Christian forger would
have very easily cited Paul’s epistle to the Romans, which Paul wrote well
before going to Rome. But in our correspondence, very interestingly, there
is no trace of it. What is most remarkable, such a forger would have been
unable to separate out Paul’s authentic letters, and the earliest.
What Seneca is made say in Letter I, Libello tuo lecto, id est de plurimis
aliquas litteras quas ad aliquam civitatem seu caput provinciae direxisti,
mira exhortatione vitam moralem continentes, usque refecti sumus, confirms
what I have suggested: the Seneca-Paul correspondence presupposes that
in the years of its setting, some letters by Paul were already circulating, in
a small collection. Seneca indeed describes as libello tuo some letters by
Paul—those belonging to the collection and forming a booklet—among
the many which he had written: aliquas litteras de plurimis.
Conclusion
46 Our Pauline pseudepigraphon is only partially dated: only some of the letters have a
consular date at the end. The whole claims to be dated—or, in the case of letters without
dating, is set—to the years 58–62 ce, apart from Letter XI (XII Barlow), which purports
a date of 64 ce. The last five of the fourteen letters are dated to 58–59 ce by ordinary
consuls (Letter XII) or suffecti (Letters X, XIII, and XIV). Letters I through IX are not dated,
but internal allusions set them to 59–62 ce. In Italy, the last document dated by consules
suffecti stems from 289 ce, which suggests that these letters were composed before the
end of the third century.
47 Full documentation can be found in Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence.”
namely, that Letters XI and XIV are later additions to the original corpus
of the correspondence, a corpus which, theoretically, can be dated from
the years of its setting in the late 50s and early 60s of the first century to
the end of the third, when the use of suffecti in dates is last documented
in Italy. The original corpus, excluding the two later letters, includes both
explicit references and implicit allusions to New Testament books and
passages, but all of these allusions are limited to Pauline letters that crit-
ics recognize as written by Paul himself. What is more, among these, the
letters referred to in our pseudepigraphon arguably belong to the earliest
collection of Paul’s epistles. There seems to be no allusions to the Gospels,
the disputed Paulines, the Pastoral Epistles, the Catholic Epistles, or Rev-
elation. A possible reference to Acts is doubtful: it concerns Paul’s Roman
citizenship, which could have been known from other sources too. On
the contrary, allusions to the New Testament in Letters XI and XIV are
very different, and are accompanied—as I have mentioned—by echoes
from later Latin historians and Christian authors. This confirms what I
had already suggested many years ago on the basis of historical, philo-
logical, and linguistic arguments; namely, that they do not stem from the
original corpus, but have different authors and were added later, probably
at some point between the time of Jerome, who did not know Letter XI
at the end of the fourth century,48 and the eleventh century, when Let-
ter XIV seems to have begun to spread the legend of Seneca’s conversion
to Christianity.
But the original correspondence is much earlier, from the second half
of the first to the end of the third century. Is it possible to indicate a more
precise date within this chronological span? Only very tentatively. One
can consider that the canonical Pauline corpus, including the so-called
Pastoral Epistles, was quoted as authentic from around 180 ce onwards,
at least in Greek. Since the original redaction of our pseudepigraphon, as
48 Jerome, Vir. Ill. 12, remarks that, in the years in which the Seneca-Paul correspon-
dence was composed, Seneca was the most powerful man of his time and Nero’s instruc-
tor and counsellor: continentissimae vitae fuit, quem non ponerem in catalogo sanctorum,
nisi me epistulae illae provocarent quae leguntur a plurimis, Pauli ad Senecam et Senecae
ad Paulum, in quibus, cum esset Neronis magister et illius temporis potentissimus, optare
se dicit eius esse loci apud suos, cuius sit Paulus apud Christianos. Jerome clearly refers to
the original correspondence, but not to Letter XI, which purports to have been written in
64 ce. For Seneca was Nero’s “prime minister” from 54 to early 62, but in 64 Seneca was
neither Nero’s “teacher/counsellor” (magister) nor was he any longer “the most powerful”
(potentissimus), but was disgraced and forced to commit suicide in 65, under suspicion
of having participated in the Pisonian plot. Letter XI had not yet been added to the cor-
respondence in 392 ce, when Jerome wrote his De viris illustribus.
I have mentioned, only quotes Paul’s authentic letters, and the earliest
among these, one might be tempted to conclude that, as a consequence,
it was composed before 180 ce. However, it is not extant in Greek, but
in Latin, and was probably composed in Latin in the Western Roman
empire, albeit with both syntactical and lexical Graecisms concentrated
in Paul’s letters, as I have pointed out. The Latin of Paul’s letters in this
pseudepigraphon somehow reminds one of the language of the Muratori
Fragment, which is traditionally dated toward 170–80 ce49 and is probably
a translation from the Greek. On the other hand, the Latin of the Muratori
Fragment seems much worse, and it is rather homogeneous throughout
the fragment itself, whereas in our Pauline pseudepigraphon, both syn-
tactical and lexical Graecisms concentrate in Paul’s letters. Moreover, the
Seneca-Paul correspondence would seem to be earlier than the Muratori
Fragment, because the latter includes all the Pauline letters that entered
the Canon—the authentic letters, the “disputed Paulines,” and the “Pasto-
rals Epistles”—whereas the Seneca-Paul correspondence, as I have pointed
out, knows neither the “disputed Paulines” nor the “Pastoral Epistles,” but
only refers to Paul’s authentic and early letters. This would point, again, to
a possible date between the late first and the second century.
If the correspondence was composed in Latin, with all its Graecisms,
during the second century or at any rate within the third century ce,
this would locate it among the earliest Latin Christian documents. In
this case, our pseudepigraphon might be contemporary with the earliest
Latin translations of the Bible, about which little is known, but which cer-
tainly go back to the second century ce. The Scillitan martyrs were put to
death in 180 ce in Latin Africa; their names reveal indigenous origins. At
that time they had a collection of Paul’s letters, which they kept as their
sacred books and in which the proconsul of Africa showed interest during
their trial.50 Their collection of Pauline letters anterior to 180 ce is likely
to be a very early Latin version of Paul’s letters or some of them. The
record of their trial unfortunately does not detail the contents of this Latin
49 Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987),
191–201, advocates the traditional dating; a fourth-century dating has been advocated by
A. C. Sundberg (“Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List,” HTR 66 [1973]: 1–41), refuted by
Everett Ferguson (“Canon Muratori: Date and Provenance,” Studia Patristica 17.2 [1982]:
677–83); by G. M. Hahneman (The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon
[Oxford: Clarendon, 1992]), refuted by Everett Ferguson (“The Muratorian Fragment and
the Development of the Canon,” JTS 44 [1993]: 696); and J. J. Armstrong (“Victorinus of
Pettau as the Author of the Canon Muratori,” Vigiliae Christianae 62 [2008]: 1–34).
50 See Acta martyrum Scillitanorum, in A. A. R. Bastiaensen (ed.), Atti e Passiono dei
Martiri (Milan: Mondarori, 1987), 97–105.