The Formation of the Pauline Corpus of Letters

We know a good deal about the life of the Apostle Paul, and are also reasonably well-informed about the circumstances connected with the writing of his letters. Concerning, however, the collecting of those letters together--how, why, when and where this was done--we are curiously ignorant. The conventional answer has been that it happened gradually, as an almost inevitable, imperceptible process. The arguments, however, on which this answer is based, cannot claim to be conclusive, and in recent years two scholars in the United States have challenged the whole assumption. In this book Dr. Mitton presents both points of view and the arguments by which they are supported, and invites the reader to give consideration to the less familiar theory.