Pauline Authorship and Canonization

The authorship of the Pauline Corpus and its component epistles may be one of the greatest controversies in New Testament scholarship. There seem to be just as many scholars as there are opinions. I discovered this issue last year, while studying a passage in 1 Timothy. For scholars that doubt Pauline authorship, the pastoral epistles seem to be the first books to receive the mark of doubt regarding the authorship of Paul. Despite recognition of the criticisms surrounding the Pauline Corpus, Polhill recognizes that the value of the epistles may lie in their Pauline nature rather than Pauline authorship. Regardless of actual authorship, one must concede that Paul’s original letters had a definite influence on subsequent epistles of "Pauline nature", if they were not written by Paul himself. I believe that the best argument for the canonization of the entire Pauline corpus lies in the text itself. As some would say, "The proof is in the pudding." One may examine the use of the epistles in the decades following its creation, but time has muddied the waters of subsequent uses of the epistles. Scholarship has not reached a consensus on the compilation of the Pauline corpus. Thus, I believe that the best way to examine the validity of an epistle is to compare its elements with that of well established epistles. I believe that once one examines the corpus as a whole, it is difficult to pick apart certain epistles as false or theologically unsound.
In Christ,
the other Paul