This afternoon when I turned my attention to the late Raymond Brown’s An Introduction to the New Testament to read about the letter we know as “The Second Letter of Paul to Timothy,” knowing that I would have to confront the issue of New Testament authorship.[1] So that’s what this homily is about. There are two technical words that comes up in this discussion, I will mention them only once: pseudepigraphy (false writing) and pseudonymity (“false name”).[2] Now, I’m going to try to summarize what we know about who wrote what.
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