This study investigates the implications of pseudonymity for the interpretative process, arguing that we need to take into account the pseudepigraphal attempt to achieve a “reality effect” by employing tropes and concerns from authentic Pauline letters to lend the forged writing an air of verisimilitude. But in this way our ability, if we judge a text pseudepigraphal, to discern reality from appearance is severely problematized, and we should therefore consider the possibility that pseudepigraphal letters should be treated more as rhetorical compositions than as epistolary literature, since all the ostensive elements of epistolarity are fictionalized in a pseudepigraphal letter.

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The Tübingen School, centred on Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), was a theological movement marked by a thoroughgoingly critical approach to biblical and early Christian history, which flourished in a roughly twenty-five-year period, from the 1830s to the mid-1850s. This chapter first considers Baur’s own theological project, attending to the philosophical resources he musters to overcome a divide between rationalism and supernaturalism, and charting a series of his critical results in biblical and historical study. Baur’s distinctive form of historicizing idealism enabled him to see history as the realm of the Spirit’s self-mediation in the world, and so offered meaning to Baur’s historical results. The chapter then turns to offer a brief account of the other members of the ‘School’ before considering the influence of the movement on subsequent theological reflection.