Month: October 2006

Music Scruples: The Opus Continues

A reader writes:

I majoring in music and I oftentimes get sheet music in my
classes and private lessons.  Many of these are of a full song and sometimes
copied straight out of a book.  Some are modern songs that aren’t in public
domain.  I fear the teachers may not have gotten permission to use these but
I don’t know the law well enough to say whether it is fair use.  I know you
probably aren’t an expert on copyright, but being somewhat scrupulous, I’m
not sure how to go about doing my work while fearing that I could be
violating copyright.  I certainly don’t want to commit mortal sin just to do
my homework.  Should I bring it up whenever I feel it is a problem, or
should I just let the teachers worry about it?  May I just ignore it and
give extra to charity?  Any advice would be helpful.

I don’t have the background in civil law needed to answer the question of what civil law would say about this situation, so I’ll answer it primarily in terms of moral law, with the caveat that the moral law answer may clash with the civil law answer. If it does then it would be a matter of prudence as to whether you should follow the moral law answer in violation of civil law. As long as you’re doing what’s moral then, by definition, you’re morally safe, and it’s a question of whether you’re willing to take the risks associated with not following the civil law answer. (In this case–that of a student being given fishy sheet music by his teacher–I would say that the risks are small.)

Let’s start with whose responsibility it is to secure rights to the sheet music in question: It’s your teachers’. If they are violating copyright in their production of this material then that is fundamentally their responsibility, not yours. You are only involved to the extent that you are cooperating with the situation, and your cooperation looks to be remote and material only. Remote material cooperation can be morally legitimate when there is a proportionate reason, and your need to get an education is certainly a proportionate reason to go head and play what’s on some shady sheet music that your teacher puts before you (or sends home with you).

The situation of teacher and student is analogous to the situation of employer and employee. If, once you’re out in the workplace, your employer (let’s say it’s a symphony orchestra) puts fishy sheet music in front of you then your need to make a living is a proportionate reason to play what’s on it.

The same goes for people in other fields of employment whose bosses require them–as part of their work–to use things that they haven’t secured the rights to. For example, if you work in an office and your employer hasn’t gotten a software license for the copy of Microsoft Word that is on your computer then you go ahead and use the word processor. It’s your boss’s moral responsibility to get the license, not yours. Your need to earn a living is proportionate to the individual act of piracy that you are (at best) remotely cooperating with.

Of course, to the extent that prudence allows we should encourage our employers (or teachers) to obtain the needed rights or permissions, but our ability to do this prudently is often very limited. People can be denied pay raises or promotions or good grades if they come off as scrupulous troublemakers to their superiors. In extreme cases, they can even end up fired or failed. As a result, significant caution should be exercised in making the decision whether and how to address such matters.

In the case of courses taken at an academic institution, the professor (as opposed to the student) is very much in charge of the classroom, and I generally advise students to keep their heads down, not make trouble, get good grades, and then deal with the situation (if it’s worth dealing with) once one is an alumnus and can no longer be hurt by the institution. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but erring on the side of caution is my general advice.

In the case of the private lessons you are taking, though, you may have more leeway. The student in such a setting may be in a better position to say, "Hey, why don’t we study this (non-problematic) material?"

One last bit of info, which pertains specifically to educational situations: U.S. copyright law includes fair use provision that allow for academic/educational use of limited amounts of copyrighted material. This is one reason, for example, that professors of various disciplines may make photocopies of individual journal articles or individual chapters of books and distribute them to their students via professor publishing.

At least in some settings this is allowed.

Whether it is allowed in the case of the sheet music you are being given, I couldn’t say–I don’t know enough about the provisions of civil law on this point or your own situation. Whatever the case might be, however, I would seek to avoid scrupling over this issue, and you would not have a moral obligation to give extra to charity, as revealing as that thought is about the good intentions you clearly have.

Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Camera: Part Two

BillmoyersBill Moyers (left–and leftist) has long been regarded as one of the worst journalistic shills for the Democratic Party, pretending neutrality but in reality viciously slanting his coverage in favor of liberal causes.

And with good reason. As his Wikipedia entry notes:

Moyers’ frequent criticism of conservative policy has led conservative commentators like Brent Bozell to label him a liberal commentator rather than an objective journalist.

Moyers has drawn further allegations of bias in his role as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. In 2003 the center gave money to a variety of establishments which have been described as "left leaning," such as Sojourners magazine ($500,000), Salon.com ($277,785) and The Nation magazine ($115,000). After reviewing these donations David Horowitz’s conservative Discover the Network website has asserted that "Bill Moyers has dropped any pretense of objectivity". He has also been involved with the group Take Back America, an organization that seeks to help elect liberal political candidates.

I was interested, therefore, when E. Calvin Beisner of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance told me that he would be on a recent episode of Moyers’ program "Moyers on America" that was devoted to environmentalism and titled "Is God Green?"

I was not surprised that he tried to smear Cal by selectively disclosing facts and selectively editing the interview he did with him. That’s par for the course with the MSM. What did surprise me was just how open Moyers was about his use of his journalism as a political tool to benefit liberal causes. In a recent ISA newsletter (not yet online, unfortunately), Cal writes (EXCERPTS):

The bias of Moyers’s program is not
surprising. He forthrightly told me before our interviews that he, as a
liberal Democrat, hoped to use this program to divide the evangelical
vote and return control of Congress to the Democrats in November’s
elections. The timing of the program’s release, therefore, is not
surprising.

The PBS program aired Wednesday, October 11. The full program, which included excerpts from an interview Moyers did with yours truly, can be viewed on PBS’s web site; the transcript is also available, as is the full transcript of his interview with me. Comparing the full transcript of his interview with me with what actually got into the program is an education in how to misrepresent someone by editing his on-camera comments.

 

What kind of selective presentation of information did Moyers make?

While Moyers mentioned that some think tanks that oppose the popular view receive some funding from fossil fuel industry sources (and, by the way, he did not mention that I received no compensation for my association with the Acton Institute or any other think tank–he just let the association of ideas do its job of making viewers think my views are bought off), he did not mention that the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s initial funding was a $475,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation, which is a major supporter of abortion as a method of population control around the world, or the reasons why Hewlett links those concerns with global warming concerns.

[H]e left the appearance that this lonely little professor of historical theology and social ethics [Beisner] holds this view, along with a handful of contrarian scientists, all bought off by industry money, when in fact, as we document in our “Call to Truth,” the scientific community is quite divided on the issue.

You will also have noticed that Moyers very carefully avoided all discussion of the actual scientific evidence, asserting instead simply that a 2004 study of 928 scientific articles found unanimous consensus in favor of the manmade catastrophic warming hypothesis. What he didn’t tell viewers was that an attempt to replicate that study discovered very significant methodological errors in it that improperly excluded over 90 percent of the relevant literature and that even within the articles the study did survey,

* only 1 percent explicitly endorsed what study author Naomi Oreskes called the “consensus view”;

* 29 percent implicitly accepted it “but mainly focus[ed] on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change”;

* 8 percent focused on “mitigation”;

* 6 percent focused on methodological questions;

* 8 percent dealt “exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change”;

* 3 percent “reject[ed] or doubt[ed] the view that human activities are the main drivers of the ‘the [sic] observed warming over the last 50 years’”;

* 4 percent focused “on natural factors of global climate change”; and

* 42 percent did “not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.” {Benny J. Peiser, Letter to Science, January 4, 2005, submission ID: 56001.Science Associate Letters Editor Etta Kavanagh eventually decided against publishing the letter, or the shortened version of it provided at her request by Peiser, not because it was flawed but because “the basic points of your letter have already been widely dispersed over the internet” (e-mail from Etta Kavanagh to Benny Peiser, April 13, 2005). Peiser, a scientist at Liverpool John Moores University, replied: “As far as I am aware, neither the details nor the results of my analysis have been cited anywhere. In any case, don’t you feel that SCIENCE has an obligation to your readers to correct manifest errors? After all, these errors continue to be employed by activists, journalists and science organizations . . . . Are you not aware that most observers know only too well that there is absolutely *no* consensus within the scientific community about global warming science?” He went on to cite a survey of “some 500 climatologists [that] found that ‘a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes,” and other evidence. Peiser, e-mail to Kavanagh, April 14, 2005. The whole correspondence, including much more evidence of the lack of scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and refutation of some attempts to debunk Peiser’s critique of Oreskes’s study, is online at www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm.}

When you think the data are on your side, you argue the data. When you don’t, you attack the person. That is what Moyers did, and that is what the supporters of the Evangelical Climate Initiative have done, consistently.

UPDATE: Mr. Moyers disputes Dr. Beisner’s account; PLEASE SEE THIS LINK.

Mr. Moyers sent an e-mail to Dr. Beisner stating the following:

From: Moyers, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:47 PM
To: [Dr. E. Calvin Beisner]
Subject: What has come over you?

You are not telling the truth. In fact, what you wrote in the ISA
newsletter is an outright lie. You claim that "When Moyers interviewed
me for the documentary last spring, he very candidly told me that he is
a liberal Democrat and intended for the documentary to influence the
November elections to bring control of Congress back to the Democrats."
I said nothing of the sort — nothing. To the contrary, I told you that
I am an independent – members of the crew remember my saying that to
you specifically (there were, remember, three other people in the
room.) You yourself taped the entire session with your own recorder;
show me where in the transcript such a conversation occurred. I also
told you, as I told everyone interviewed, that we of course could not
usethe entire interview but that I would post it on our Website when
the broadcast aired, as was done. If I had said anything approaching
what you claim I said, if you perceived any bias on my part. you could
have — and should have refused to participate. But you did participate
freely, you were treated fairly and honestly, and for you now to bear
false witness is not only unChristian but astonishing. What am I to
make of the many friendly emails you have sent over these months,
signed: "In Christ, Cal"? Or our exchange on how much I have enjoyed
your daughter’s CD that you sent? Your conservative evangelical
brothers who were also interviewed in the documentary – from Richard
Cizik to Tri Robinson to Allan Johnson (not a liberal among them) have
written in praise of how they were treated. You and you alone have
chosen to bear false witness to our conversation and to defame – in
your own words –the ethics and journalistic balance of the documentary.
You owe me arid my team an apology and a public retraction.

Bill

A Note Of Thanks

I just wanted to put up a note of thanks to all those who sent in Bible-related questions after my recent invitation for them–as well as those sending in questions on other topics.

So many folks responded that it’s taking me some time to work through the questions that were sent in, but I wanted to let you know that I’m still working on them and will let you know before your question goes up on the site.

Muchas gracias, mis amigos!

Catholic University Invites Member Of Babykilling Criminal Underground To Address Students

John over at Generations for Life writes:

I thought you might be interested in an entry I recently posted on the
Generations for Life blog.

Last week, Judith Arcana, a member of the group "Jane," which claimed to
have performed over 11,000 illegal abortions in Chicago in the years prior
to Roe v. Wade, spoke at Loyola University Chicago at the invitation of the
school’s Women’s Studies Department.

In the post, John quotes a former speech in which the babykiller explained how her underground murder syndicate worked:

Women joined the Service through periodic orientation meetings, and learned the necessary tasks from those who had come before them. Once their counseling skills had been developed in new recruits, and the group had come to trust them, they could learn more – doing everything from basic record keeping to becoming a medic, one who performed abortions.

Ultimately, we learned to do abortions in all three trimesters. Although we did only a handful in the third, as you may imagine, there were many in the second, no doubt because illegality forced women and girls to take so much time searching for abortionists and saving up money. The methods that we learned, we primarily learned from one man. He was not a doctor, but he was the best. Once we understood that many of the people doing abortions at that time were not doctors, we realized that we could do it too. This would mean women would not have to be charged a lot of money, could even come through the Service free.

So we pressed this man to teach us, as he had been taught. He was an extraordinary man in many ways, had been doing this work, and maybe other illegal work, virtually all of his life.

He also quotes her as saying

I performed abortions, I have had an abortion and I am in favor of women having abortions when we choose to do so. But we should never disregard the fact that being pregnant means there is a baby growing inside of a woman, a baby whose life is ended. We ought not to pretend this is not happening.

following which, he trenchantly notes

It’s bad enough when a Catholic university gives a platform to a pro-abortion politician or other public figure — that in itself is prohibited by the U. S. Catholic Bishops. Loyola, like so many other Catholic universities, has done that before.

But the fact that a Catholic university has given a platform to someone who actually facilitated abortions, has no regrets about having done so, and who, by her own admission, understands that abortion is the taking of a baby’s life — takes the word “scandal” to a whole new level.

Indeed!

GET THE STORY.

GodBlogCon 2006

GbcJust a note to let folks know that I’ll be attending and participating in the 2006 Godblog Conference or "GodBlogCon" being held later this month in the Los Angeles area.

The conference is devoted to the subject of religious blogging or "GodBlogs," and bigname participants include Hugh Hewitt and La Shawn Barber, as well as many others.

The convention runs from Thursday, October 26th to Saturday, October 28th and will be held on the campus of Biola University in La Mirada. (For those who may not know, Biola is a coined word meaning "Bible Institute of Los Angeles"–one of the most famous Chirstian schools on the West Coast and important in the history of American Evangelicalism.)

I’ll be participating in the panel "Briding the Christian Divide" on Friday morning at 9 a.m. along with co-panelists coming from Protestant and Orthodox traditions. Specifically, there’ll be

* John Shroeder (moderator; Blog: Blogotional)
* Joe Carter (Family Research Council; Blog: Evangelical Outpost)
* James Kushiner (Touchstone Magazine; Blog: Mere Comments)
* and myself

The purpose of the panel is to discuss how Christians of different traditions can and should interact as they promote the Christian faith through new media venues such as the blogosphere.

I’d really encourage anyone within spitting distance of L.A. to come to the event.

I’d also like to give a shot out to other Catholic bloggers and ask if they could consider promoting the event as well. The different Christian traditions need to work together to promote and preserve Christian culture in America and the world, and the new media tools that are becoming available will be central to that effort. The greater the participation of Catholics there can be in the event, the better for all.

MORE INFO ON THE CON HERE!

So I hope to see you there if you can possibly attend! If you need any further incentive to attend, just remind yourself: It’s what B16 would want you do to.

In The Mail

God_or_the_girl_1I just received a review copy of the DVD release of the A & E reality series "God or the Girl," which aired a piece back.

I didn’t see it when it aired, but it got very good reviews and was widely perceived as a thoughtful, responsible look at the issue of vocations discernment (despite its rather sensationalistic title), as exemplified by the experiences of several young men trying to discern whether they might be called to the priesthood.

A lot of folks in the Catholic community praised it, and now A & E Home Video has it out on DVD, along with new bonus features that were not part of the original broadcast.

If you’re interested but haven’t seen it, or if you have seen it and would like to again, or if you’d like to give it as a present to a young man discerning his own vocation, be sure to

GET
THE SERIES.

More Universal Indult Rumors

Tridentine_mass_1Okay, first let’s get the pedigree of the story out in the open:

She’s baaaaa-aaaaaaaak.

Ruth "I’m Too Dangerously Unqualified To Keep My Job" Gledhill–the religion correspondent for The Times of London, that is.

She’s back . . . and she’s quoting anonymous sources in the Vatican.

yah. . . . hoo.

What here anonymous sources are telling her is that His Most Awesomeness B16 has signed a universal indult allowing celebration of the Mass according to the 1962 Missal (i.e., the Tridentine rite) by any priest in the Church.

Specifically, according to Miss Too Dangerously Unqualified,

The new indult would permit any priest to introduce the Tridentine Mass
to his church, anywhere in the world, unless his bishop has explicitly
forbidden it in writing.

This is the most interesting thing in the story. If this is the way the indult is set up then it would still allow bishops to prohibit the celebration of the Tridentine rite in their dioceses, but they would have to take the step of doing so in a formal way. Unless a bishop were willing to set down his opposition in writing, priests would have liberty. This would effectively shift the burden from the way it is now. At the moment, the bishop has to specifically allow the celebration of this rite for it to be allowed. This would reverse that so that he would have to specifically deny it–and do so in writing.

That would be an interesting attempt at a compromise between the universal permission-bishop-not-withstanding that some would like and . . . well . . . whatever those who are afraid of such an idea are afraid of.

Gledhill also mentions:

Catholic bloggers have been anticipating the indult for months. The Cornell Society blog says that Father Martin Edwards, a London priest, was told by Cardinal Joseph Zen, of Hong Kong, that the indult had been signed. Cardinal Zen is alleged to have had this information from the Pope himself in a private meeting.

And, of course, she tosses off a few of her patented, Too Dangerously Unqualifiedisms, such as:

The priests of England and Wales are among those sometimes given permission to celebrate the Old Mass according to the 1962 Missal. [What . . . all of the priests in England and Wales? They’ve all been given permission to do this on occasion by their bishops, as current discipline requires?–ja]Tridentine Masses are said regularly at the Oratory and St James’s Spanish Place in London, but are harder to find outside the capital.

And

By bringing back Mass in Latin, Pope Benedict is signalling that his sympathies lie with conservatives in the Catholic Church.

Even setting aside the problematic use of the word "conservative" in this context, and the tendentious desire to frame the issue in terms of partisan conflict, is this really a news flash? Pope Benedict has been quite vocal about his sympathies for the Tridentine rite of Mass since long before he was pope. Or doesn’t Mrs. Gledhill know that?

Sigh.

Well, despite the fact that I’ve heard this one before, I hope it’s true.

One document that should be coming out soon is the pope’s Post-Synodal Exhortation, following last year’s Synod on the Eucharist. This document is expected out as soon as next month, and the pope himself has shown itchiness about wanting to get it out (having previously asked the bishops preparing material for him when it would be arriving). There are likely to be changes to the celebration of ordinary, vernacular Masses announced (i.e., changes to what the Missal of 2001 says to do), and the matter of the Tridentine order of Mass could be dealt with in the same document or in a parallel one.

Given what he did at the end of the Synod–taking the unusual step of making the bishops’ resolutions public–he might well simply release the final material submitted to him, plus a document of his own (probably a motu proprio) announcing his decisions.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime,

GET THE (DANGEROUSLY UNQUALIFIED!) STORY.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

PRE-PUBLICATION UPDATE: Catholic World News–a source which isn’t dangerously unqualified–is hearing the same thing. Unfortunately, most of

THEIR STORY
(CHT to the reader!)

is presently hidden behind a subscription requirement, but here are the highlights (EXCERPTS):

The motu
proprio that he has prepared– which, according to informed
sources, is now in final form– addresses other liturgical questions as
well as the issue of the traditional Mass.

Vatican sources say
that the papal document affirms the principle that there is only one
liturgical rite for the Latin Church. But this rite has two forms: the
"ordinary" liturgy (the Novus Ordo, celebrated in the vernacular
language) and the "extraordinary" (the Tridentine rite, in Latin).
These two forms have equal rights, the text indicates, and bishops are
strongly encouraged to allow free use of both forms.

Pope
Benedict is reportedly waiting for the best moment to release the new
document, which is currently circulating among Vatican dicasteries.
Speculation in Rome is that the indult will be announced at the same
time that the Pope releases his apostolic exhortation concluding the
Synod on the Eucharist. That document is expected soon, perhaps in
November.

Pope Benedict has made it clear– notably in
his meeting with the College of Cardinals in March– that he will move
forward with efforts to accommodate traditionalists. [N.B.–this was the sooper sekrit meeting he held back then, which everyone figgered was about this exact subject–ja.]

The document has been reviewed by the Congregation
for Divine Worship and by Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the
president of the Ecclesia Dei commission, as well as the Pope; it is
now in at least its third draft.’

SECOND PRE-PUBLICATION UPDATE: Catholic News Service–another not dangerously unqualified source–has picked up the story as well. According to them (EXCERPTS),

Pope Benedict XVI is preparing to expand permission to use the Tridentine Mass, the pre-Vatican II rite favored by traditionalist groups, said an informed Vatican source.

The pope is expected to issue a document "motu proprio," or on his own initiative, which will address the concerns of "various traditionalists," said the source, who asked not to be named.

Canadian Archbishop James Weisgerber of Winnipeg, Manitoba, told Catholic News Service Oct. 10 that Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Congregation for Clergy, had spoken briefly to Canadian bishops about the expected step.

GET THE STORY.

Given the number of news sources picking this up from unnamed sources, we are either dealing with one very talkative source of unofficial spreading of the word before the document’s release to prepare the field.

Given the sources such as Cardinal Zen and Archbishop Weisgerber (apparently) going on public record about it, I’m guessing that a release may lie in the quite near future.

Interfaith Stewardship Alliance

The global warming people are wrong, so we should just burn down all the forrests, kill all the endangered species, and suck the planet dry as part of our mandate to fill and subdue the earth, right?

Of course not.

God did not give us a mandate to suck the earth dry. That would be counter-productive, not least of all to ourselves. Instead, he called us to be stewards of creation. In Genesis, you’ll note that Adam is created "to tend and keep" the garden. He was the gardener of Eden. What was true of him as the head of the human race is true of the race as a whole: We we are called to steward–manage–the planet and the life forms and resources it contains. The material creation does have an orientation to the service of man (CCC 353), but this does not remove man’s responsibility to wisely steward the life and resources God has created (CCC 337 ff).

The problem for many Christians today who would like to find good environmental stewardship groups is that so many of the groups that are out there have been taken over by one form or another of environmental whackiness–even many Christian groups.

With that in mind, I was very pleased recently to renew my acquaintance with the Presbyterian author and scholar, E. Calvin Beisner, who is an old friend. (In fact, it was he who set me right on the birth control issue back when I was a Presbyterian.)

As part of our conversation, Cal informed me about a group he is involved with, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, which seeks to bring responsible stewardship principles to the discussion of the environment, without veering off into the extremes of environmental whackiness.

The ISA is truly an interfaith group, as can be seen from looking at a list of its formal advisors, which includes priests, ministers, rabbis, and professionals in a variety of fields.

I’m particularly appreciative of the group’s emphasis on managing the environment in a way that does not keep developing countries from developing. It is contrary to human nature and love of neighbor to confine millions of human beings to squalor and poverty in the name of perserving environmental goals that are formulated without respect to the human costs of achieving them. A balance must be found that harmonizes the need for preserving environmental resources with the needs of our fellow human beings, and this group is seeking to help in that effort.

I’d therefore invite you to

CHECK IT OUT.

Let Paul Be Paul

A reader writes:

I am studying at a Catholic college and have had the opportunity to take some classes on scripture.  I have been introduced to various methodologies, such as the historical critical method, that have definately aided in my understanding of the scriptures, but there is a point where these modern methods confuse me and don’t strenghten my faith.  One area in particular is in the Pauline tradition.  Because of differences in Greek syntax in different epistles, my professor tells us that Paul probably did not write some of them.  Rather, he believes that someone using Paul’s authority wrote them, which some scholars call Pseudo Paul.  Are you familiar with this assertion?  If so, what are your thoughts on this?  Is there some validity to these claims?  Are there any pastoral repercussions of this problem?

I am indeed aware of this claim, and I am not very impressed with it. A hundred and fifty years ago, F. C. Baur was claiming that there were only four authentic Pauline epistles (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, and Galatians), and the scholarly community has concluded that he was wrong in this claim and that other epistles in addition  are authentically Pauline. There are still scholars who don’t accept the whole corpus as Pauline, but the force of the evidence has pushed scholars in the direction of greater recognition of their authenticity, and I think those who continue to deny the authenticity of some are simply resisting the evidence and/or using a flawed methodology.

I think there are several problems here:

1) The individuals making this claim are almost invariably applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to the texts. That is, they are looking for reasons to distrust biblical texts or elements of them, with the result that they inappropriately shift the burden of proof onto those who would say that when a biblical text says that it is written by Paul (that is, he identifies himself within the text itself) that one must prove that this is the case.

Such a hermeneutic of suspicion is unwarranted, particularly for persons of faith regarding their own Scriptures, as well as incompatible with the basic purpose of language, one of whose chief goals is to communicate information. Virtually the whole enterprise of language would be undercut if a hermeneutic of suspicion were applied consistently, signalling that the default setting must be a hermeneutic of trust until evidence for the contrary is produced in particular cases.

It can be warranted to assume a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding particular types of claims in particular bodies of work. For example, authorship claims in the Book of Mormon. But in that case we have multiple reasons to distrust such authorship claims–reasons that in no way apply to the Pauline epistles (e.g., they aren’t claimed to be written by someone who cannot be located in history, from a civilization that cannot be located in history, or to be composed in an unattested language on golden plates that were kept hidden in a bag while being shown to "witnesses" of their existence and then translated by a man who kept his face covered with a hat using a "peep stone" as he dictated them to others).

The pedigree of the documents in question–which is both part of Sacred Tradition and which can be evaluated in historical terms–is just too strong to warrant a hermeneutic of suspicion being applied to the authorship claims of these documents.

Looking for internal literary clues like grammar and word choice to prove or disprove Pauline authorship is also virtually useless, for several reasons:

2) The epistles in question are devoted to different subjects, which is going to force significant changes in word frequency.

3) Many of the samples are simply too short to draw any firm conclusions based on statistical analysis of word choice or grammatical usages.

4) Authors vary their styles quite considerably depending on a variety of factors, such as who they are writing for (are they friendly with their audience? do they have strained relations with them? are they intimate companions? are they about to chew somebody out? are they writing for a group or a single individual?), what venue they’re writing in, what emotional effect they’re trying to create, how their skills have developed as a writer over time, and even what mood they are in.

I suspect that the biblical critics in question are not fully sensitive to this fact because they do not write that much and, when they do, they tend to write only in one style (e.g., academic papers or treatises), on a restricted range of subjects, and (most importantly) because they never stop to apply their own authorship criteria to what they themselves have written. If they did, they’d find out that their own books and papers were written by a hodge podge of different individuals and groups with different and conflicting agendas.

Let me give some illustrations of how an author’s style can change that should be immediately apparent to many readers of JA.O, you’ll find a lot more "YEE-HAW!"s on my blog than you will in my writing for This Rock, and my writings in This Rock (because of space restrictions) will have a different style than my books and booklets. You’ll also find a lot more grammatical and spelling mistakes on the blog since I’m doing this in the evening, without a copy editor, without a proof reader, and am basically putting up first drafts that I may well have only read once and then not edited.

5) Paul used amanuenses. These were individuals who would take dictation from Paul and then write his letters, which Paul would then approve and sign (2 Thess. 3:17). We even know the name of one such individual: Tertius (Rom. 16:22), who I’m guessing based on his name was the third child (or third son) in his family.

Anyone who has ever tried to take dictation from someone knows that there is invariably a smoothing out process that is done when setting down what someone else has said, because the person will stop in mid sentence, change direction, want to scratch things out, and the secretary will inject some of his or her own style into the resulting document, even proposing things that the dictator may wish to say.

How much of the amanuensis’ style gets into the text will depend on what the author wants to allow. In some cases, the author may just give talking points and let the amanuensis virtually ghostwrite the letter, subject to the author’s final approval. (That might be the kind of thing you’d want to do, for example, if you were in prison and didn’t have much contact with your amanuensis but felt you needed to send a letter.)

Whatever degree(s) of liberty Paul gave his amanuenses, the Holy Spirit superintended the process via divine inspiration, but the fact that he used them at all means that we should expect differences of style as he used different secretaries in different circumstances. (It’s unlikely that Tertius stuck with him for his whole career and was the one used on all of the Pauline epistles, or he’d get mentioned more.)

6) The above considerations are simply literary points that illustrate the problems in challenging the Pauline authorship of various epistles, but there is also a theological problem with doing so: Whatever is asserted by Sacred Scripture is asserted by the Holy Spirit, for the human authors wrote down all that the Holy Spirit wished and no more (Dei Verbum 11).

This means that if a document contains an authorship claim you either have to say that (a) the claim is true, (b) the claim is not an assertion of fact, or (c) that the claim is false, in which case the Christian understanding of the inspiration of Scripture is false.

The last is not an option for an orthodox Christian, which leaves you with options (a) and (b).

(b) is a possibility in particular cases. There are books of Scripture which appear to contain clues that signal the audience that the authorship claim is a literary device rather than an assertion of fact (e.g., in Wisdom or Tobit), but this is going to be very hard to maintain with the Pauline epistles.

It is not credible to claim that none of the Pauline authorship claims in Scripture are asssertions of fact. If you acknowledge any of the epistles as being written by him, and if those same books contain assertions that he wrote them (as they do) then I don’t see how you can regard the authorship claims of these books as being anything other than assertions of fact. (Paul is not going to write an epistle and claim authorship of it in the text as merely a literary device.)

That being the case, if you want to hold that a particular authorship claim is a literary device rather than an assertion of fact then you will need to produce evidence by which the original audience could have recognized the literary device for what it is (as can be done with Wisdom and Tobit).

If no such evidence can be found in the text then the text would seem to be misleading the original audience, and I don’t know how you can square that with a proper view of biblical inspiration.

I have heard no arguments as to why particular Pauline epistles should be seen as having cues in them to tell the original audience that the Pauline authorship claims in them are just literary devices, so I see no way to maintain this in the case of works in the Pauline corpus.

I thus find the whole theory a bunch of hooey.

INCIDENTALLY, HERE’S AN ESSAY BY C. S. LEWIS THAT MIGHT BE OF USE ON RELATED MATTERS.