The canon within Paul's canon

The New Testament includes three documents called "Pastorals", 1-2 Timothy and Titus. They present themselves as from the Apostle Paul. Nineteenth-century German and English textual-critics ruled them out, for various reasons (like, why isn't Ignatius citing them in his own eminently pastoral letters?) but usually stylistic. Bart Ehrman has been offering some of these findings to the public. They might not all be good reasons. [h/t Tapscott.]

Here is a decent masters-thesis sort of status-quaestionis.

As these things go, my faith in Christ is based on... Christ, as presented by the Tradition. I treat the Pastorals as "sus". At the same time my faith does not depend on the Pastorals, one lacking in such faith must be warned not to base that unbelief on the absence of the Pastorals.

One factor here I did not know until now is that the saint Polycarp, correspondent with Ignatius, quotes Paul as teaching content with some 1 Timothy 6 parallels in it. William of Ockham, famously not a credulous sort with respect to Christianity, would have to admit that his Razor should be applied here. If Polycarp did not quote from 1 Timothy then ... where's the other Pauline papyrus?

Propose here that there was a Pauline tradition that brought the Pastorals to Polycarp. Our Youtuber linked above noted the Didache, also, paralleling the Pastorals. This is the sort of edifying material that would have circulated around the same sorts of Christian. We can throw in Hermas and 2 Clement.

That would explain why P46 didn't bother with the Pastorals: the editor may have accepted that triad as authentic (like Ephesians) but not fit for P46. There were plenty of booklets containing just the Gospels or (in Judaism) just the Torah; you can buy such excerpts to this very day. In the olden times they didn't have paper, and writing-tech was expensive. This collection goes out to this group of theologians; that collection to those Didache and Hermas lads. It was only much later that the Church cobbled them all together and shut out Didache and Hermas (and, note, if you're Catholic, they never wholly did shut out Didache).

If Marcion and the Gnostics didn't accept the Pastorals at all, that is - in this line of thought - because they were heretics who didn't understand.