Secretaries and the Authorship of New Testament Epistles: Evaluating the Historical Method behind the Amanuensis Hypothesis

The amanuensis hypothesis has long been a popular method of defending traditional authorship claims of disputed NT epistles. Scholars who espouse this view maintain that, in the Greco-Roman world, secretaries were afforded the freedom to (extensively) shape the letters they transcribed. As a result, proponents contend that authenticity judgments cannot be based on the style or content of a given letter. While various objections have been leveled against the theory over the years, its methodological underpinnings have been largely overlooked. With a view toward the standard objectives and processes that define the historical method, I examine how the amanuensis hypothesis has been constructed. I seek to demonstrate the (methodological) fragility of the theory by focusing on its historiographic aims, argumentative logic, and evidential basis.