Willem Christiaan van Manen

Willem Christiaan van Manen (8 August 1842 in Noordeloos – 12 July 1905 in Leiden) was a Dutch theologian.

He was professor in early Christian literature and New Testament exegesis at Leiden University (1885–1903) and belonged to the Dutch school of Radical Criticism.

[1][2] Van Manen's 1865 doctoral thesis in Utrecht about the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians concluded that this was a genuine letter by Paul of Tarsus.

But in 1889 he wrote a review where he agreed with a study by Rudolf Steck and with A. D. Loman, that all Pauline epistles were pseudepigraphs.

He argued that Acts was dependent on Flavius Josephus and other works, and assigned it to the second quarter of the 2nd century.