Paul’s name opens thirteen letters in the Bible, and a common claim in university classrooms is that he did not write some of them. Dr. Dennis Edwards, a New Testament professor and pastor, puts the usual list at six. The doubt is real and rests on serious evidence, but that evidence is cumulative, partly subjective and open to reasonable replies. It shows that a scholar can doubt that Paul wrote these letters. It does not prove that the Bible lied.
Which Letters Are Actually in Question?
Edwards counts from the other direction. In his words, “I tend to think in terms of ones that people don’t accept.” His list is Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians and the three pastoral letters: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus. Some count Hebrews as a seventh. But Hebrews never names its writer in its text, and Edwards notes that even evangelical scholars question whether Paul wrote it. So it is a different case. A letter with no named author cannot misrepresent its author.
Take those six from the thirteen and seven remain: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Edwards points to Romans and Philippians as letters that are not debated, and to 1 Thessalonians as the one usually thought to be Paul’s first. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, remembered from her own university course that critical scholars accept about seven. The two counts match.
So the dispute is not over whether Paul existed or wrote anything. It is over a defined group of letters, each judged by comparison with the letters nearly everyone accepts. The doubt is also not spread evenly across the six. Edwards gives his detailed objections for Ephesians and the pastorals, not for Colossians or 2 Thessalonians. He calls the historical problem “particularly relevant with the Pastorals,” which carry the heaviest load of questions. Yet even there the case is moving: he notes a growing number of scholars willing to read 2 Timothy as Paul’s.
What Kind of Evidence Could Settle It?
Suppose a later admirer wrote a letter in Paul’s name. What would we expect to find? Probably words and sentence habits that differ from the accepted letters, ideas that sound later or more developed and historical details that fit badly with what we know of Paul’s life. Edwards names three kinds of argument that track these: vocabulary and style, theology and history.
Each kind has a built-in problem. Any of the three differences could also appear if Paul wrote the letter under other conditions: a different secretary, a different audience, a different decade or a different crisis. So the useful question is not whether differences exist. They do. The question is which explanation the differences fit better. That is a judgment, not a measurement, and Edwards treats it as one.
Vocabulary and Style: The Weakest Kind of Evidence
The style argument is the one least visible to English readers. Edwards notes that these vocabulary issues “don’t readily come out in English.” In the disputed letters, readers of the Greek find words that rarely or never appear in Romans or Philippians. To some scholars, that pattern points to a different writer.
Edwards is frank about how far this goes. “Some of that might be a subjective argument,” he says. How do we account for a person’s choice of words? Writers change vocabulary with subject matter. A letter about church leadership will use words a letter about justification does not need.
He adds a historical factor: ancient letters were often dictated. A trained scribe, called an amanuensis, wrote down what the author said and could shape the grammar and phrasing. If Paul was in prison dictating, Edwards reasons, “one could argue that stylistic differences are present because the actual pen is being guided by somebody else.” His conclusion on this point is direct: “I think we don’t have to see different hands just because some language and grammar changes.”
The secretary explanation has its own limit. It is possible, but the conversation offers no direct evidence about which scribe wrote which letter, so it answers the style argument without proving that Paul wrote anything. What it does is weaken style as evidence in either direction. If style can change for several ordinary reasons, a change in style cannot decide authorship by itself.
Theology: A Different Mind, or the Same Mind Later?
The second kind of evidence concerns ideas. Edwards uses Ephesians as the example. In letters like Romans, salvation often points forward, toward something still to be completed. In Ephesians, he observes, salvation has already happened, and believers are spoken of as already seated in heavenly places. Some scholars use the term realized eschatology for this: the future hope is described as already present.
The text supports the observation:
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)
The Greek verb describes a completed action with lasting results, so other translations render it “you have been saved.” Ephesians 2:6 then speaks of believers already raised up and seated together with Christ in heavenly places.
Is that a different theology or a shift in emphasis? Edwards’s main reply concerns time. If 2 Timothy reflects the end of Paul’s life, he says, those ideas could have developed from the early letters of the 40s. “We’re talking 20 years,” he says. “My own theological thoughts have developed over time.” His principle is that “it’s fair to give somebody space to develop their thought over time.”
This is not a dodge. It exposes a standard the doubt depends on. If any growth in emphasis counts as evidence of another author, then no writer who worked for two decades could pass the test. Development does not prove Paul wrote Ephesians, but it shows the theological differences are consistent with a single author.
The accepted letters themselves provide a check. Romans already speaks of believers buried and raised with Christ, while still looking ahead to the resurrection (Romans 6:4–5). The “already” in Ephesians is stronger, but it is not foreign to Paul’s other writing.
History: What Acts Does and Does Not Record
The third kind of evidence is the most concrete, and Edwards gives it the most attention.
For Ephesians, he lays out two observations. Acts records that Paul spent a long time in Ephesus and gave the Ephesian elders an emotional farewell (Acts 19–20). Yet the letter ends without the personal greetings Paul usually includes. “Why doesn’t he say hello to anybody in Ephesus?” is the question Edwards says it raises. He also notes a textual detail: the words “at Ephesus” in the letter’s opening are missing from some ancient manuscripts, which leaves open who the first readers were.
Those two observations may explain each other. If the letter was not written only to Ephesus, a missing list of greetings to Ephesians would be less strange. That is an inference, not a settled conclusion, but it shows how one piece of evidence can weaken another. The KJV keeps “at Ephesus” in Ephesians 1:1, and on any reading, the letter’s teaching does not depend on that phrase.
For the pastoral letters, the historical question is more serious. Acts closes with Paul under house arrest in Rome (Acts 28:30–31), and Edwards says the reader gets the impression Paul will die there. If Paul wrote the pastoral letters, they seem to require travel and ministry that Acts never describes. Edwards points out that this is why some Bible maps show a hypothetical fourth missionary journey. It has to be reconstructed, because no document narrates it.
Here the gap matters more than the story. Acts ends without recording Paul’s death at all, and silence in a narrative is not proof that nothing happened afterward. The argument shows that the pastoral letters do not fit the events Acts records. It cannot show that the events they assume never took place.
Edwards adds one more historical point. The pastoral letters give instructions for choosing overseers and deacons, and they read as if the church will need structure for a long time to come. Some scholars see that as at odds with the urgency of 1 Thessalonians, which expects Christ’s return soon. Edwards also acknowledges that Paul already had leaders in his churches, and the accepted letters confirm it. Philippians 1:1 is addressed “to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi, with the bishops and deacons.” So the office existed in Paul’s lifetime. The open question is only how developed it was.
Edwards does not claim these problems disappear. “I’m not saying there aren’t answers to them, but I am saying they spark questions for us, and the careful reader will acknowledge that.”
If the Name Is Wrong, Did the Bible Lie?
This is the reader’s real fear, and Edwards does not avoid it. He separates two situations that people often confuse. Not knowing who wrote a book is one thing. Christians rely on Hebrews without knowing its author, and the Gospels do not name their writers in their text; their names come from early tradition. The harder case is different, as he puts it: “So it’s not to me that I don’t know who wrote something, it’s more the question of is it the person whose name is on the book?”
That is the strongest form of the objection. The disputed letters do not simply go without a name. Ephesians opens with “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God” (Ephesians 1:1). If Paul had no part in it, the opening line seems to be false.
Edwards gives the main historical point raised in reply. In the ancient world, people sometimes wrote in the name of a respected teacher. This practice, called pseudonymity, was meant to carry a mentor’s voice forward. He says it is “not quite plagiarism,” that it was a known practice outside Christian circles and that “it’s debated if that happened within Christian circles.” That final phrase sets the limit. The practice existed in the wider world. Whether early Christians accepted it in their own letters is the very point in dispute, so it cannot simply be assumed to resolve the problem.
Edwards encountered these arguments at both a conservative seminary and a Catholic doctoral program. He recalls that one of his professors there, Raymond Collins, wrote a book naming seven letters Paul did not write. Edwards takes that scholarship seriously without accepting it as a verdict. He reconciles 2 Timothy by giving weight to dictation and to how thought develops over time, and he points readers to the introduction by D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo, which argues for Pauline authorship and earlier dates.
He also places authorship inside a larger question: “it is important that we trust the reliability of the works, and that may touch on authorship.” The early church, in his account, judged writings by how well they reflected the faith and practice handed down from the apostles and by how close they stood to the apostles. Fields pushed him on the risk. If the disputed letters are dated late and cut off from Paul, how are they different from the later Gnostic gospels? His reply is that even critical dating stays fairly early: “I don’t think anybody would argue for very late time, even for the Pastorals.” Even in the early second century, he argues, these letters oppose Gnostic ideas rather than adopt them. By the church’s own test of fidelity to the faith it had received, they stand with the accepted letters, not with the Gnostic writings.
What the Evidence Establishes and What It Leaves Open
The evidence shows that the six letters differ from the accepted seven in vocabulary, in emphasis and in how well they fit the events Acts records. It shows that thoughtful scholars weigh those differences and conclude that Paul did not write some or all of these letters, with the pastorals drawing the most doubt.
The evidence does not establish forgery:
- Style is affected by secretaries and subject matter.
- Theology can grow over twenty years.
- The gaps in Acts are gaps, not testimony against Paul.
- Whether pseudonymity was acceptable inside the early church is still debated.
- The doubt itself is very different from the claim that these letters were written much later to change the faith.
Edwards ends with a working method more than a verdict: be fair to the data, and do not take any school’s viewpoint “hook, line and sinker.” For a reader who was told in a single classroom that the matter is closed, that is the most important correction. The question is open in a narrow and specific way. It is open because the evidence is mixed, not because the case against Paul was proven and then hidden.
