Correspondence of Paul and Seneca

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.

[1][2] For example, the first epistle from Seneca states that "[Paul's works] are so lofty and so brilliant with noble sentiments that in my opinion generations of men could hardly be enough to become established and perfected in them.

[13] The correspondence was in circulation during the Middle Ages among Latin-reading areas (Western Europe, rather than the Greek-reading Byzantine East), and likely contributed to Seneca having a good reputation among medieval Christians.

[5] Scholars such as Lorenzo Valla found that the writing style matched neither Seneca nor Paul, and the letters were denounced by Erasmus.

[22] 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.

[note 2] 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.

[10] Additionally, the 14th epistle is unusually direct about Paul's evangelism, with him calling on Seneca to "make yourself a new herald of Jesus Christ",[23] 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.

[15] 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.

[15] Critics generally deride the worth of the correspondence as well for not including much of anything interesting, such as a debate on the merits of Stoicism, Christianity, or even just court gossip.

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.

It is sufficient to say that the letters are inane and unworthy throughout; that the style of either correspondent is unlike his genuine writings; that the relations between the two, as there represented, are highly improbable; and lastly, that the chronological notices (which however are absent in some important [manuscripts]) are wrong in almost every instance.