A pagan philosopher in salvation history: Placing the Seneca-Paul correspondence in its fourth-century context
Faughnan, Honor
Faughnan, Honor
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2024-12-03
Type
master thesis
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Abstract
The Seneca-Paul correspondence comprises fourteen short letters exchanged between the Roman pagan philosopher Seneca and the apostle Paul in the years immediately preceding the two men’s violent deaths in Rome at the hands of the same emperor. Though the authorship of the correspondence has been debated since the early-sixteenth century, there remain few points on which scholars agree. However, it is generally accepted on the basis of the linguistic evidence that the letters were not authored by Paul and Seneca but by a Christian writer in the second half of the fourth century, with a firm terminus ante quem of 392. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: what can the Seneca-Paul correspondence’s hypothesised late-fourth-century date of composition tell us about the nature of this enigmatic work, which is partly imaginative, partly historiographical and partly apocryphal? In particular, it interrogates what the late-fourth-century context in which the correspondence was written can tell us about the issues it raises, the historical assumptions it makes, the themes it foregrounds, and why it draws a connection between Paul and Seneca in the first place. It also seeks to answer the question: how does the Seneca-Paul correspondence compare to other fourth-century Christian texts which take equally seriously the significance of the overlap between Paul’s Roman mission and the calamitous events of Nero’s later reign, particularly those texts composed in the second half of the fourth century?
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University of Galway
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International