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The intuitive view of the Pauline letters is that they were collected by their recipients, that means that they were collected by the churches in Greece and Asia Minor, what we today would call the "Eastern" tradition.
Ancient authors commonly retained a copy of the letters they have sent (see this question for the discussion).
Because of this, it has been argued that the Pauline letters we have today come from the publication of the whole set after his death, i.e. that they were published as a complete set in Rome, what we today would call the "Western" tradition.
The arguments in favor of this view are:
- Manuscripts of the Pauline epistles very often contain all 13 of them
- The order of these epistles are often very similar
- The Pauline epistles are named after the audience instead of the author
- A similar case happened when the writings of Ignatius were published after his death
The arguments against this view are:
- Papyrus 46, the oldest surviving longer manuscript of the Pauline letters does contain Hebrews directly after Romans, thus proving that at least this manuscript did not see the 13 Pauline letters as a unit. Codex Sinaiticus puts Hebrews between 1/2 Thessalonians and 1/2 Timothy, seemingly proving that Timothy/Titus/Philemon were seen as separate from the epistles that were sent to churches.
- There are 19 years between the first epistle (Epistle to the Galatians in AD 48) and Paul’s death (probably AD 67). The epistles themselves are often addressed to several churches (Galations is addressed to the chruchES in Galatia) and the recipients are called to share the epistles with each other (Col 4:16), therefore it does not seem very plausible that the Christians in the East did not copy these epistles. It seems to make much more sense that these epistles circulated in the East for years when Paul died.
- Works in Ancient times were often ordered from longest to shortest, therefore the very similar order of Pauline epistles in manuscripts is to be expected and does not indicate a common origin. Again, Papyrus 46 shows this, where Hebrews is put in second place, seemingly because it is the second-longest work. The fact that the order is not exactly the same is also proving this: Similar-sized works could be ordered either way (Papyrus 46 also switches Ephesians with Galatians for example), therefore it does prove that the order was independently determined and not standardized.
A hybrid view is of course also possible:
The epistles that were written to churches were collected by them, shared among them and circulated by the time of Paul’s death. After his death the 4 remaining letters, which were written to people and not churches and thus much more likely to get lost (and less likely to be copied and circulating right away) on the recipient’s side were published by the Roman church and added to the corpus. Those 4 epistles were also written shortly before his death and thus also had not much time to circulate among the churches in the East.
This would explain the peculiar order in Codex Sinaiticus.
It is of course also possible that the Eastern/Byzantine tradition goes back to the received letters and the Western tradition to the retained copies.
Another idea would be that the epistle to the Hebrews was lost when it was sent and only published after Paul’s death from the retained copy, which would explain why it was disputed for so long.
Are there any other arguments in favor or against either hypothesis?
