Through a broad history of the interpretation of Pauline letters, the chapter highlights a difference between their earliest understanding as authoritative and scripture-like, and Enlightenment readings when they became valued for their historical worth. Both during and following the Enlightenment, issues surrounding the letters became relevant, such as authorship, provenance, language style, and social-political context. In addition, scholars like F.C. Baur and others mined the letters they deemed authentic for what they might reveal about Early Christianity. Yet the methodologies adopted to assess a letter’s authenticity (authorship) and historical reliability were variously flawed and very often circular, with the result that the scholarship reified a subjective an and unsubstantiated history. Criteria of authenticity reveal Pauline favoritism. The interpretation of Pauline letters as genuine correspondence can be attributed in large part to the flawed interpretation of the nineteenth-century scholar Adolf Deissmann. While rejecting Deissmann’s underlying and determinative rationale, NT scholars nonetheless carried forward his overall assessment of the letters as genuine correspondence.

This chapter brings together the major themes and conclusions of the study.

This chapter treats the state of the question of historical Jesus methodology before laying out the approach used in this study. Special attention is given to critiques of the conventional use of the so-called criteria of authenticity as well as to the implications of memory research (e.g., social memory theory) for historiography. Building on the work of Dale C. Allison, Jr. this chapter offers a fresh methodological approach.