Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Significance and Letters of Paul in a Nutshell Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Mike Johnson now that I've covered the Gospels and Acts in this Nutshell series, it is time to move on to the writings of Paul. Rather than start with his first letter in the New Testament Romans, I've decided to devote a couple of posts to Paul himself, one to his significance and surviving letters and and one to a biographical sketch. I start by giving a 50 word summary on his writings. The Seven Undisputed Letters In a nutshell Paul wrote seven of the letters attributed to him, addressing problems of churches he had established, five letters of a church he planned to visit, and of an individual convert, Philemon, resolving their issues by explaining the implications of his law free Gospel of Christ for faith and communal life. I found this 50 worder especially difficult. See if you can do better, but for now I will provide a short introduction to Paul and his letters.
[00:01:10] By any metric you choose, Paul was the most important figure in the history of Christianity, apart from Jesus himself. This can be seen from three the Christian Scriptures. Of the 27 books of the New Testament, fully 13 claim to be written by Paul. As we will see, he probably did not write six of these. They were written by later authors claiming to be Paul. That in itself, however, shows his unusual importance. Numerous later authors wanted to claim his authority for themselves. One other New Testament book, Hebrews, was admitted into the canon only when church fathers agreed, wrongly, that Paul had written it. One other New Testament book, Acts, is written largely about Paul. Other books, possibly Matthew and James, for example, may be attempts to counter Paul's views. And yet one other book calls Paul's letters Scripture. Altogether, that comes to 18 books, fully two thirds of the entire New Testament. The author of Luke, Acts, wrote more words than Paul in his surviving letters, but Paul made by far the greatest impact on the New Testament Christian theology. The Christian religion is founded on the belief in Jesus sacrificial death for sins, and his resurrection from the dead. Paul did not invent this message. He had persecuted Christians before his conversion, almost certainly because they were proclaiming Jesus as the crucified Messiah. But once he became a follower himself, Paul developed this view more than anyone else in the early Christian church, working out its logic and theological implications in a way that stood at the heart of the early Christian proclamation and at the foundation of subsequent Christian theology.
[00:03:05] Paul was the earliest serious Christian theologian we know of, the first to understand and proclaim the full meaning and significance of Jesus, death and resurrection. In particular, Paul was apparently the first to maintain that Jesus provided salvation for all people, Jew and Gentile alike, and that Gentiles did not have to adopt the ways of Judaism to join the community of Jesus followers.
[00:03:33] The Christian Mission Paul did not develop his theological views in an ivory tower, but on the mission field as he became the apostle to the Gentiles. More than anyone, he spread the Christian faith in the early years of the church, converting principally Gentiles and establishing churches in some of the major urban areas of the Roman world, especially in Asia Minor, modern Turkey and Macedonia, and Achaia.
[00:04:03] Paul in effect started the worldwide mission that within 300 years would make Christianity the largest religion in the Roman world and within 400 the official religion of Rome. From then it came to be the dominant religion in the west until today, a church that continues to accept Paul's theological views, his insistence that Gentiles do not need to become Jewish, and his letters as authoritative writings of Scripture. In short, no one else has ever played such a major role in the development and propagation of Christianity.
[00:04:41] Despite Paul's importance, there are difficulties connected with understanding his life and teachings. Among the most prominent of these are the the Problem of Acts Readers of the New Testament have nearly always assumed that the account of Paul's life and preaching in the Book of Acts was historically reliable. Today this is widely seen as a problem. As we saw in the nutshell posts on Acts, the passages in Acts and Paul's letters that overlap in their account of his life and teachings are often difficult, if not impossible to reconcile. Paul is obviously better positioned to know what he actually did and preached, and that means to understand Paul's views, we have to stick to his own letters. It also means that a good bit of information about Paul found only in Acts, for example that he was from Tarsus, was a Roman citizen, studied with the great Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem, converted on the road to Damascus, preached extensively in synagogues, defended himself before Roman administrators, etc. May not be historical.
[00:05:49] The Problem with Pseudonymity to understand Paul's life and teachings, we are more or less restricted to his surviving letters. But which letters did he actually write? We have some letters allegedly written by Paul from outside the New Testament, such as Third Corinthians, the letter to the Laodiceans, six letters to the philosopher Seneca. No one today thinks Paul wrote these works. What about inside the New Testament? As mentioned, the authenticity of six letters has long been doubted by Ephesians, Colossians 2, Thessalonians 1 and 2, Timothy and Titus. On the other hand, nearly everyone accepts the so called undisputed Romans 1 and 2, Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians 1, Thessalonians, and Philemon. These, then, are almost universally the ones used to determine the outline of Paul's life and teachings.
[00:06:49] The Problem of Interpretation Even the undisputed letters, however, are notoriously difficult to interpret, with fine scholars spending entire careers just working to understand one or the other of them. On the surface, the letters may appear simple, and in many passages they are reasonably straightforward. Others not so much. Yet others? Well, good luck with them. Most attentive readers will have no problem understanding Galatians 1, 18, 24. But what about Galatians 2:17, 19? Yeah, not so much. People read the verses and sometimes think they make sense. But go slowly, word for word, and see what you think. You may think they're obvious, and if you do well, more power to you.
[00:07:41] The Problem of the Occasional Nature of the Letters Scholars have long said that Paul wrote occasional letters. By that they do not mean he wrote them only occasionally, though that may be true too, but that he wrote them for specific occasions. Six of the letters are addressing situations of Paul's own churches he has heard about. The other Romans is written to a church he has not founded but wants to visit, and is dealing with another set of problems. Because the letters are responding to situations that we are not informed about outside of the letters themselves, it is often difficult to understand what Paul is saying. It's like hearing only one side of a telephone conversation. Sometimes you can piece together what the other side is talking about, and when you do, it all makes sense. On the other hand, sometimes you get it wrong and either don't understand or, even worse, think you understand when you don't. Your only option, though, is to figure out the context of what you're hearing. Sometimes with Paul's letters, that is not overly difficult, I'd say with Galatians, for example. Other times it is much disputed, for example, with 1 Corinthians chapter 15.
[00:08:58] But if you get it wrong, the other problem this raises is that since none of Paul's letters is a systematic treatment of his thought, Romans might be considered the closest thing. But it's really not that we can't expect to get the full scoop of any aspect of his theology. In addition, we can't assume that anything he does not address in these letters is necessarily unimportant to him. We know, for example, that a correct celebration of the Lord's Supper was hugely important to him because of what he says in First Corinthians, chapter 11. God has made some of the Corinthians ill and taken the lives of others of them because of how they conduct themselves at it. But if the Corinthians were not botching the event, Paul never would have had an occasion to mention the meal, so we would be clueless about how important it was to him. All in all, Paul's letters are both invaluable and problematic. Since they are our only reliable sources for understanding Paul and his teachings, scholars have to find ways around the problems and establish, to the best of their ability, what the letters mean. In the next post, I'll describe what we can know about Paul's life, and in the ones that follow, I'll summarize what we can know about each of the Pauline letters, both undisputed and disputed.
