Correspondence of Paul and Seneca

, Seneca, and Aristotle. Seneca's reputation was partially linked to his apocryphal friendship with Paul. Paul of Tarsus was an early Christian theologian and evangelist, who wrote epistles to Christian communities and founded multiple churches across the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean region. Seneca the Younger was one of the foremost philosophers of Stoicism, a teacher and adviser to Emperor Nero, a dramatist, and a Roman government official. The correspondence between them comprises fourteen letters in total (8 from Seneca, 6 from Paul) and is written in Latin. It has little substantive content. It largely consists of the two praising each other; Seneca lavishes flattery on Paul, while Paul responds in kind. Essentially, the main interest of these letters is that they exist at all: they ostensibly demonstrate that Paul was important and respected enough to trade letters with the eminent philosopher Seneca, that Seneca was wise enough to understand Paul's greatness despite being a pagan, and that the two were friends. Many, but not all, surviving manuscripts include dates on some of the letters of the correspondence. The one epistle that does include substantive content is the 11th one dated 64 CE, which directly discusses the Great Fire of Rome. ==Reception in the late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages==

The earliest known reference to them is in Jerome's On Illustrious Men chapter 12, a work of around 392 CE: {{quote|Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, a disciple of the Stoic Sotion, and paternal uncle of the poet Lucan, was a man of very temperate life whom I would not place in a catalogue of saints, were it not that I was prompted to do so by those Letters from Paul to Seneca and from Seneca to Paul which are very widely read. In these, when Seneca was Nero's teacher and the most influential person of the period, he said that he wished to have the same position among his own [i.e., the pagans] which Paul had among the Christians. Two years before Peter and Paul were crowned with martyrdom, he was put to death by Nero. Augustine of Hippo also briefly mentions the correspondence, as does Pseudo-Linus. Paul's Epistle to Philemon says he was imprisoned in Rome and that the Praetorian Guard knew of this; the Guard was at one point commanded by Burrus, an ally of Seneca. Stoicism, much like Hellenistic Judaism, was considered a precursor to Christianity that helped influence its stances and terminology; ('conscience') was originally a Stoic term, for example, and Stoicism's criticisms of the (pagan) Roman religion was something Christians were eager to take for themselves as well. The Christian polemicist Tertullian called Seneca "" ("often ours") and approved of his criticism of pagan superstition. The medieval authors Peter of Cluny, Peter Abelard, and Petrarch all seem familiar with the correspondence. A few medieval writers such as Giovanni Colonna and Giovanni Boccaccio even claimed that Seneca had outright converted to Christianity before his suicide in 65 CE, partially on the basis of the correspondence. ==Scholarly analysis==

Scholars almost universally believe the correspondence to be forged. Later scholars detected errors of fact and chronology that the genuine Seneca would not have made, but a forger not intricately familiar with Roman history writing centuries later might have. Scholars noticed with skepticism just how late the letters appeared in history; Lactantius, a Christian author writing earlier in the 4th century, makes no mention of any such correspondence, despite frequently citing Seneca and positively evaluating both him and Paul. This suggests their creation in the middle of the 4th century, such that Lactantius would have been unfamiliar, yet Jerome would think them legitimate. yet Jerome only quotes the 12th epistle in support of listing Seneca as a saint, leading to suspicion that the version of the correspondence Jerome read in the late 4th century did not yet include the final two letters. The motive of the forger is unknown. J. B. Lightfoot wrote that it was likely "either to recommend Seneca to Christian readers or to recommend Christianity to students of Seneca," a position that Adolf von Harnack agreed with. Claude Barlow thought that the writings might have been a rhetorical exercise; essentially, a fictional essay by a novice writer practicing their craft that escaped to readers who did not realize its origins. Similarly, the work was perhaps an epistolary novel, similar to the letters of Chion of Heraclea. Bart Ehrman suggests that the creation of the letters may have been part of early Christian apologia. In this theory, a Roman pagan polemic against Christianity was the claim that Paul was not particularly significant in his era. The forger accepted the somewhat elitist terms of this argument – that only "great" people deserve to be listened to – and responded by having the greatest philosopher of Paul's day endorse and praise Paul, so mere flattery was enough to serve the purpose of the apologist. J. B. Lightfoot was caustic about the overall worth of the correspondence, criticizing "the poverty of thought and style, the errors in chronology and history, and the whole conception of the relative positions of the Stoic philosopher and the Christian Apostle" which "betray clearly the hand of a forger." ==Notes==