Excerpt from The Present Status of the Inquiry Concerning the Genuineness of the Pauline Epistles
As for the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul Schmidt admitted that with the exception of the eschatological passage of the second chapter and a few smaller interpolations there is no ground for supposing it spurious. But when it came to be more and more believed that the meaning of that Pauline "apocalypse" had been found, all considerations against it were dismissed, and critics such as Klopper and Julicher (Einleitung, 1894) without further hesitation defended its genuineness. And though Klopper at least still maintains the spuriousness of the epistle to the Ephesians, Julicher declares the objections against it insufficient for its rejection. Recently also Harnack in his Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur (Vol. 1, Leipzig, 1897) has treated all ten Pauline epistles which Marcion had in his canon as genuine. To the pastoral epistles only, as in Eichhorn's time, all recent criticism objects.
There is also, to be sure, a radical wing of recent criticism which even outstrips Baur, declaring as it does the four epistles unassailed by him, and thus the whole body of Pauline epistles, to be spurious. When Bruno Bauer first came forward in the middle of this century with this view it was universally rejected as hypercriticism hardly needing refutation; but recently several Dutch scholars have returned to the same theory. Among German scholars Steck in his Galaterbrief (Berlin, 1888) not only tried to prove the spuriousness of this epistle, but also rejected in connection with it the epistles to the Romans and Corinthians. Yet up to the present time he has been opposed, not less than his predecessor, Bruno Bauer, by all schools of criticism. When even a critic like Holtzmann declares this criticism to be the product of a mistaken exegesis and a historico-philosophical petitio principii, it is safe to say that there is as yet no occasion for entering into a detailed examination of it. The same holds also respecting the attempt, which has been more and more widely spreading of late, to prove more or less extensive interpolations in the text of the Pauline epistles transmitted to us (cf. C. Clemen, Die Einheitlichkeit der paulinischen Briefe, Gottingen, 1894).
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