PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

original integrity of the pre-redaction Corinthian correspondence. Two questions of
plausibility are worth noting in relation to such reconstructions: that of an aggressively
singular Pauline Corpus; and that relating to the utilisation of 1 Corinthians by Clement.
An Aggressively Singular Pauline Corpus
Schmithals’ proposal, that an early redacted Pauline Corpus was pushed to become the
archetype for subsequent copies of the Pauline letters, would provide an explanation for
the general commonality of text and order in early manuscripts, 15 and would explain why
no attestation of pre-redaction versions has survived.
However, Gamble argued convincingly in 1975 that Schmithals’ position does not fit the
evidence of the significant variation in the textual tradition of Romans:
[I]t is, after all, only a hypothesis and not a matter of established fact that the
textual tradition has but a single source. That this assumption is, indeed,
mistaken seems to be clearly demonstrated by the textual peculiarities of the
letter to the Romans. 16
The significant “textual peculiarities” related to the ending of Romans include attestation
of fourteen-chapter text forms (for example, the eighth century Codex Amiatinus, which
appears to view Romans as including 1:1-14:23 and 16:25-27); fifteen-chapter text forms
(the Chester Beatty Papyrus, in which the closing doxology is displaced, occuring between
15 In 1975, Gamble claimed, “[T]he forms of the Pauline letters remain fundamentally the
same in all known witnesses. Except in the case of Romans, the tradition preserves no
textual evidence that any of the letters ever had basically different forms than the forms in
which we know them”. Gamble, “Redaction,” 418. By “basically different forms”
Gamble seems to imply major rearrangement such as is found in Romans. Porter,
furthermore, comments on the “amount of commonality between the early manuscripts” in
terms of ordering within the corpus: “In the light of this [the closeness of letter
destinations resulting in the possibility of easy early collation], it is not surprising that
variation in the Pauline corpus occurs within relatively narrow parameters… the
fluctuation in placement of Hebrews is the only real variable – there is otherwise virtual
fixity to the manuscript ordering”. Stanley E. Porter, “When and How Was the Pauline
Canon Compiled? An Assessment of Theories,” in The Pauline Canon (ed. Stanley E.
Porter; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 95-128; 122, 123.
16 Gamble, “Redaction,” 415.
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