The PseudepigraphicAL Correspondence between

Seneca and Paul: A Reassessment

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).

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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.

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who intends to learn a language, Paul—who wished to learn Latin—could

have sought out available occasions to practice the language. Thus, he
endeavoured to write in Latin to Seneca, who, according to the pseudepi-
graphic correspondence, helped him with a handbook.

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,

6 See Ilaria Ramelli, “Aspetti linguistici dell’epistolario Seneca-San Paolo,” in Antonio P.

Martina (ed.), Seneca e i Cristiani (Aevum antiquum 13; Milan: Vita e Pensiero 2000),
123–27; 2005.
7 “In conclusione presentiamo l’ipotesi che queste lettere così scarne e misere, che noi
possediamo, non sieno [sic] che traduzioni dal greco, fatte in secoli barbarici, di alcuni
estratti della raccolta che era dinnanzi a Gerolamo”: so Carlo Pascal, “La falsa corrispon-
denza fra Seneca e Paolo,” in his Letteratura latina medioevale (Catania: Battiato, 1909),
123–40; Adolf Harnack, Geschichte des altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius (Leipzig: Hin-
richs, 1958), 1.2:763–65.
8 See Ramelli, “Note sull’epistolario,” 225–37.
9 See Arnaldo Momigliano, “Note sulla leggenda del cristianesimo di Seneca,” in his
Contributo alla storia degli studî classici (Storia e Letteratura Raccolta di Studi e Testi 47;
Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1955), 13–32; Ezio Franceschini, “Un giudizio del Gar-
zoni sul presunto cristianesimo di Seneca,” Aevum 26 (1952): 78–79; Giuseppe Billanovich,
“Il Seneca tragico di Pomposa,” in Giuseppe Billanovich (ed.), Pomposia monasterium

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and Albertino Mussato, of the Padua pre-humanistic circle.10 Toward the

end of the fourteenth century Domenico de’ Peccioli, in the introduction
to his commentary on Seneca’s Epistulae ad Lucilium, claimed that Seneca
learned Paul’s divine teaching. Gasparino Barzizza, also from Padua,
before 1408 in his Vita Senecae 16 described Seneca as an occultus discipu-
lus of Christ, like Nicodemus.11 Giovanni Boccaccio in his Commentary on
Dante’s Commedia, 403, characterized Seneca as a Christian believer as a
result of Paul’s preaching. These pre-humanistic and humanistic authors
very probably knew a redaction of the Seneca-Paul correspondence that
included Letter XIV. And there are some earlier attestations of this tra-
dition. An eleventh-century Bernese accessus to Seneca, discovered by
the Milanese philologist Marco Petoletti, regards Seneca as a Christian
on the basis of our correspondence, which by then included Letter XIV.
An anonymous poem preserved in the eleventh-century codex Metz 300
fol. 124v declares Seneca a believer ( fidelis), albeit one who was unworthy
of baptism. Johannes von Hildesheim in his poem Laus Pauli et Senecae
depicted Seneca and Paul as having “one and the same mind” (l. 5), and
associated them as martyrs under Nero and as teachers of “many doc-
trines of salvation” (l. 24). He was surely acquainted with a version of the
correspondence that included Letter XIV. But in the Patristic era, this let-
ter was not yet included in our pseudepigraphon, and no Father of the
Church believed that Seneca had become a Christian. Jerome, who read
the original pseudepigraphon (i.e., the correspondence without Letters XIV
and XI; see below), was no exception.
Pascal interpreted Jerome’s sancti as “saints,” and this is why he had to
suppose that Jerome read something different from what we read now,
which induced him to deem Seneca a “saint.” But sancti, in Jerome’s
expression, does not mean “saints,”12 nor even “Christian authors,”13 but

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.

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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

14 For Patristic testimonies on Seneca, see W. Trillitsch, Seneca im literarischen Urteil

der Antike: Darstellung und Sammlung der Zeugnisse (vols. 1–2; Amsterdam: Hakkert,
1971), praes. 143–71, on Jerome; Ilaria Ramelli, “Seneca in Plinio, Dione, s. Agostino,” in
Jean Michel Croisille and Yves Perrin (eds.), Neronia VI. Rome à l’époque néronienne: Actes
du VIème Colloque International de la Société Internationale des Études Néroniennes (SIEN),
Rome 19–23 mai 1999 (Brussels: Latomus, 2002), 503–13, especially on Augustine; Alfons
Fürst, Der apokryphe Briefwechsel zwischen Seneca und Paulus: Zusammen mit dem Brief
des Mordechai an Alexander und dem Brief des Annaeus Seneca über Hochmut und Götter-
bilder (Eingeleitet, übersetzt, und mit interpretierenden Essays versehen von A. Fürst, Th.
Fuhrer, F. Siegert, and P. Walter; SAPERE 11; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); James Ker,
The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
15 See Ilaria Ramelli, “The Birth of the Rome-Alexandria Connection: The Early Sources
on Mark and Philo, and the Petrine Tradition,” The Studia Philonica Annual 23 (2011):
69–95.
16 A full argument (philological, linguistic, and historical) for the expunction of this
letter is in Ilaria Ramelli, “L’epistolario apocrifo Seneca-san Paolo: alcune osservazioni,”
VetChr 34 (1997): 1–12. I have noted Barlow’s edition of the correspondence (C. W. Bar-
low, Epistolae Senecae ad Paulum et Pauli ad Senecam <quae vocantur> [Rome: American
Academy, 1938]).

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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.

17 Pascal, “La falsa corrispondenza,” 129.

18 “Es ist nicht wohl denkbar, daß Briefe, in denen auf den guten Stil ein so hoher Werth
[sic] gelegt wird, selbst so schlecht stilisiert gewesen sind, wie sie hier vorliegen. Auch
von hier aus wird ein griechisches Original wahrscheinlich, welches in den uns erhaltenen
Briefen einer lateinischer Bearbeitung vorliegt.”
19 A few attestations of sophista do exist in Latin, but these either have a negative con-
notation (e.g., in Cicero), unlike here in Paul’s letter, or mean eloquentiae doctor, dicendi
peritus (Cicero, Or. 19; Juvenal 7.167; Gellius 7.15). A negative meaning is also conveyed by
sophistice, sophisticus, etc.: see Egidio Forcellini, Lexicon totius Latinitatis (Patavii: Typis
Eminarii, 1940 reprint), 421, and the CD-Rom of the Packard Humanities Institute. In Paul’s

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Sophia is another manifest loanword from Greek, or rather a translitera-

tion, which is rarely found in Latin and was always felt as Greek. It is rarely
used in poetry (Ennius, Martial, ancient theatre) and philosophy (Seneca
himself), and has a Latin parallel in sapientia, according to Ennius’s trans-
lation: sophiam, quae sapientia perhibetur. Cicero always cites this term in
Greek characters; Afranius (ap. Gell. XIII 8) declares it to be Greek: Usus
me genuit, mater peperit Memoria, Sophiam vocant me Graii, vos [Romani]
Sapientiam. In Ennius it is a proper name; it is Greek and it is also used
by Seneca, Ep. 89, in Greek.20 In our pseudepigraphon it is employed in
Letter XIV instead of Latin sapientia: Novum te auctorem feceris Christi
Iesu, praeconiis ostendendo rhetoricis inreprehensibilem sophiam, quam
propemodum adeptus regi temporali eiusque domesticis atque fidis amicis
insinuabis. Σοφία is pivotal in Paul’s thought, especially in the Epistles to
the Romans and the Corinthians.21 Letter XIV, as I mentioned, was very
probably added later to the rest of the correspondence. Therefore, the use
of sophia in it must be considered to be an imitation of Paul’s Graecism
sophista in Letter II and his other Graecisms in the correspondence.
Another example is aporia. In our pseudepigraphon Paul uses a Greek
noun, aporia, which is also used in the Vulgate22 with the meaning, “doubt.”
In Letter X to Seneca, Paul writes as follows: debeo enim [. . .] id observare
in tuam personam quod lex Romana honori senatus concessit, perlecta epis-
tola ultimum locum eligere, ne cum aporia et dedecore cupiam efficere quod
mei arbitrii fuerit. Very interestingly, the semantic value of aporia here
is the typical Greek meaning of ἀπορία, that is, “difficulty, incoherence,
inconsistency,” not “doubt,” which is the meaning that aporia assumes in
its few occurrences in Latin.
However, not only are lexical Graecisms and their distribution in their
correspondence highly remarkable, but also syntactical Graecisms. The
latter are even more noteworthy, in that a forger needed significantly

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.

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more competence and subtlety to reproduce such details.23 If one takes

these details into account, those that appear to be odd and incorrect syn-
tactical constructs, typical of late Latin,24 in fact prove to be Greek con-
structs, which seem to have been transposed into Latin by a person who
thought in Greek. Again, it is striking that these are all concentrated in
Paul’s letters.
Let me offer some examples. In Letter II, which claims to have been
authored by Paul, in addition to the lexical Graecism sophista, which I
have already mentioned, there is the following problematic expression: si
praesentiam iuvenis [. . .] habuissem. One would expect, in Latin, a clause
such as si iuvenis adfuisset; therefore, commentators are uncomfortable
and speak of a post-classical or late construction. For instance, Alfons
Fürst, in one of the most excellent contributions available on the corre-
spondence, observes with perplexity: “Die unbeholfene Formulierung si
praesentiam iuvenis [. . .] habuissem statt klassisch etwa si iuvenis adfuis-
set ist nachklassisch und singular.”25 However, praesentiam habere is in
fact nothing but a syntactical Graecism: it reproduces in Latin the typical
Greek construct παρουσίαν ἔχειν, which is very well attested in classical
and Hellenistic Greek, including Hellenistic Judaism. In addition, it was
almost always followed by a genitive.26
Moreover, Paul himself, in his New Testament letters, clearly prefers
the formula παρουσία + genitive of a person, for example in Phil 2:12 ἐν τῇ
παρουσίᾳ μου, “during my presence,” instead of “when I am there” or “when
I am with you.” The Vulgate renders precisely in praesentia mei. Now, in
Letter IV of our correspondence, too, Paul uses this identical construct:
praesentiam tui. The very use of the genitive of the personal pronoun
instead of the possessive adjective is itself a syntactical Graecism. What
is more, it appears also in Letter VI of our correspondence, with paeniten-
tiam sui. This is another syntactical Graecism, this too in a letter by Paul.
In Paul’s certainly authentic letters in the New Testament, there are many
examples of παρουσία + genitive of person; indeed, all occurrences of this

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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common Greek construct might be underlying, such as εἴ ποτε ἀπολείψει.

The meaning of permittit [. . .] se non laedi, sed admoneri is likewise
obscure, especially in relation to the context. As a result, the manuscript
tradition also is divided, and partially has permittes [. . .] te non laedi, sed
admoneri.31
Another unclear expression is found toward the end of the same Let-
ter VIII, and therefore falls again within Paul’s letters: cuius [dominae]
quidem offensa neque oberit, si perseveraverit, neque, si non sit, proderit.
Fürst defines this passage “sinnlos”;32 James described it as “nonsense”;33
some scholars even supposed that it indicates Poppaea’s conversion to
Christianity.34 This also hints at a person who does not think in Latin and
therefore writes obscure sentences.
Another case that has been often adduced as an example of the “bad
style” and clumsiness of the correspondence is the famous lex Romana
honori senatus mentioned in Letter X—another letter by Paul. There
existed no formal law such as that mentioned here, but in this passage lex
surely means “custom, tradition, norm, convention.” Now, this is certainly
a possible meaning of Latin lex, but it is above all the primary meaning of
Greek νόμος. This use would be typical of a person who thinks in Greek, in
which the main meaning of νόμος is precisely “custom, tradition, conven-
tion, norm.”35
On the contrary, in the letters of the correspondence that are ascribed
to Seneca there appear neither clear borrowings from Greek, syntactical
or lexical, nor obscure and involute expressions. Rather, some misun-
derstandings of Paul’s thought as expressed in his New Testament let-
ters would seem to surface in Seneca’s letters. For instance, in Letter VII,
Seneca, referring to Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Corinthians,
says: profiteor bene me acceptum lectione litterarum tuarum quas Galatis
Corinthiis Achaeis misisti, et ita invicem vivamus, ut etiam cum horrore
divino eas exhibes. Paul, in his letters to the Corinthians, which Seneca
declares to have read, speaks of divine fear as φόβος θεοῦ οr τοῦ Κυρίου, for

31 Reading favoured by Palagi, Il carteggio apocrifo, 145.

32 Fürst, Der apokryphe Briefwechsel, 49 n.104.
33 M. R. James, “The Correspondence of Paul and Seneca,” in James (ed.), The Apocry-
phal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 482.
34 Vouaux, Kreyher, and Westerburg formulated this hypothesis.
35 This obscure expression by Paul was adduced by Momigliano (“Note sulla leggenda,”
13–32) as a proof against the authenticity of the correspondence, in that no law in honour
of the Senate is documented that prescribed putting the name of the sender at the end of
the letter and the name of the senator at the beginning. However, as I explain in the text,
lex here means custom.

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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

Besides the research into bilingualism, a different, intertextual investiga-

tion has also been conducted in recent years and has brought to light
surprising elements, which call for an explanation, and which, at the
same time, confirm that Letters XI and XIV do not belong to the origi-
nal correspondence, but were added subsequently.38 Indeed, philologi-
cal, linguistic, historical, and literary reasons already suggested that these
two letters had to be separated from the original corpus as later forger-
ies, very probably added at different times.39 More recently, a systematic
investigation into the allusions to the New Testament to be found in the
whole of our pseudepigraphon has definitely confirmed that Letters XI
and XIV are a subsequent addition to the original correspondence. These
two letters refer to later New Testament books, while the correspond-
ence in its original form only echoes letters that modern critics recognize
as written by Paul himself. Moreover, among these, the letters that are

36 Ramelli, “L’epistolario apocrifo,” 1–12; and (with further arguments of intertextual

nature) Ilaria Ramelli, “A Pseudepigraphon inside a Pseudepigraphon? The Seneca-Paul
Correspondence and the Letters Added Afterwards,” JSP 22 (2013): forthcoming.
37 Pascal, “La falsa corrispondenza,” 137–38 points to parallels with Ep. ad Luc. 91 on the
fire of Lyons; the examples of persecutors that Letter XI lists are indeed among Seneca’s
preferred.
38 Ramelli, “The Apocryphal Correspondence,” and Ramelli, “A Pseudepigraphon inside
a Pseudepigraphon?”
39 Ramelli, “L’epistolario apocrifo,” 1–12.

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explicitly referred to in the correspondence arguably belong to the earliest

collection of Paul’s letters. What emerges from this recent research and
demands to be accounted for is that the references to the New Testament
that are found in our correspondence—apart from the later Letter XI and
Letter XIV—are all references to letters of Paul, and only authentic letters
by Paul, not letters that critics nowadays consider to be deutero-Pauline or
even pseudo-Pauline (such as the so-called Pastoral Epistles). Furthermore,
all are references to letters that seem to belong to the most ancient collec-
tion of Paul’s letters. However, a Christian forger from the fourth century—
as is usually taken to be the author of this Pauline pseudepigraphon—
or even from the third, would have been unable to distinguish between
authentic Pauline epistles and deutero- or pseudo-Pauline letters, and
moreover to isolate the oldest ones. Yet, a careful analysis of the refer-
ences to the New Testament in the correspondence at stake shows that
this correspondence reflects knowledge of the first letters of Paul, and not
the last, nor the deutero- or pseudo-Pauline, nor even, as it seems, the rest
of the New Testament. Only Letter XIV of our correspondence, which was
added later, includes echoes from 1 Pet 1:23–25 and from deutero-Pauline
letters, which the forger was unable to distinguish from Paul’s authentic
letters (Col 3:9–10; Eph 4:22, 24). Likewise Letter XI (XII Barlow), which
is surely false and much later than the rest of the correspondence, and is
the only letter therein that suggests Seneca’s conversion to Christianity,
echoes 1 Pet 2:12, Mark 5:11, and perhaps 2 Thess 2:6, 9, 11. In sum, the two
letters added afterwards refer not only to Paul’s authentic letters, but also
to later New Testament writings, such as 1 Peter and “deutero-Pauline”
epistles, and even later literary sources that are equally absent from the
original correspondence, such as Tacitus, Tertullian, and fourth-century
Proba, the Christian lady who composed a Vergilian cento.
In the original redaction of our pseudepigraphon, the most frequent and
significant echoes of Pauline ideas and expressions—as they are found in
Paul’s authentic letters in the New Testament—are concentrated in the
letters ascribed to Paul himself.40 Those attributed to Seneca, on the con-
trary, interestingly betray some misunderstandings of Paul’s concepts, as I
have briefly exemplified. It is notable that some New Testament letters by
Paul—again, letters that contemporary critics recognize as authentic—
are not only echoed, but also explicitly mentioned in the pseudepigra-
phon at stake. And again these letters coincide with the first collection

40 See Ramelli, “A Pseudepigraphon inside a Pseudepigraphon?”

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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.

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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

The striking results yielded by this recent intertextual and linguistic

research, which I have summarized above, need to be accounted for and
call for a scholarly reassessment of this intriguing Pauline pseudepigra-
phon. The nature and distribution of New Testament allusions in the
pseudepigraphon confirms what I had hypothesized sixteen years ago,

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.”

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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.

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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.

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collection, but this may be chronologically close to the original corpus of

our pseudepigraphon.
In the second century, the absence of the Pastorals from the Pauline
letters referred to in the Seneca-Paul correspondence might have some
relation to Marcionism, given that Marcion excluded these letters from
his Canon. However, he seems to have received both Colossians and Eph-
esians, the so-called deutero-Paulines, which, in the original Seneca-Paul
correspondence, are not referred to. It is unclear whether this detail may
point to a date even earlier than Marcion, or earlier than the composition
of the deutero-Paulines and pseudo-Paulines, or earlier than their transla-
tion into Latin. If Paul’s authentic letters—those referred to in the original
Seneca-Paul correspondence—were not yet translated into Latin by the
time of the composition of the correspondence, its author, far from being
a clumsy “Mediaeval barbarian,” was very well acquainted with Greek, all
the more so given the lexical and syntactical Graecisms which reveal a
habit of “thinking in Greek.” This striking mimetic subtlety points to the
same conclusion even in case the original corpus was composed in a time
when—as in the case of the Scillitan martyrs’ Pauline collection—Paul’s
letters were available in an old Latin translation.
What would be interesting to know is whether the Pauline corpus avail-
able to the author of our pseudepigraphon included the disputed Pau-
lines, the pseudo-Paulines, and even Paul’s own but more recent letters. If
it included them, why did the author of the Seneca-Paul correspondence
exclude them? How could he or she know the paternity and chronology of
the Pauline letters (unless one should hypothesize that the original nugget
of our pseudepigraphon is not pseudepigraphic)? And in case the Pauline
corpus available to the author of our pseudepigraphon did not include
the disputed Paulines, the pseudo-Paulines, and Paul’s recent letters, this
corpus would simply be one of the earliest collections of Paul’s letters that
circulated, arguably in the second half of the first century.

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