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Introduction

Since the rise of modern biblical scholarship there has not been unanimity as to how to characterize Paul. He has been praised for having delivered Christianity from Judaism. Lately it has been argued that he remained so thoroughly a Jew that he was not a Christian at all. Others think he became a Christian because he had become a totally frustrated Pharisee by his failure to observe the law of Moses. Some consider him to have been a male chauvinist with few redeeming qualities. Others see in him a messianist with masochistic tendencies. Some think he was a conceited authoritarian who had no patience with the views of others. For a time it was popular to see him as a mystic who wished to lose himself by being in Christ. It has been said that, as one concerned with the life of the Spirit, he saw reason as the enemy of faith and required his converts to sacrifice the intellect on the altar of submission to authority. All these are, at least in part, reactions against the prevailing picture of him as the one who laid the foundation for the doctrines of righteousness by faith and the God of grace on which the Protestant Reformation was built.

Friedrich Nietzsche considered Paul an ambitious and cunning authoritarian with delusions of grandeur and a lust for power, a very unpleasant and insecure man due to his anxiety as to how best to keep the Jewish law. He had come to see the law as the cross “to which he felt himself nailed.” According to him, by becoming Christian, thanks to the apostleship of Paul, the radiant and healthy Greek culture of Apollo and Dionysus was subverted and almost lost, much to the detriment of Western culture.

As early as the Middle Ages Paul was seen as one who denied the life of the senses, especially what had to do with sexuality. He was paraded as the model celibate, an other-worldly idealist. Back then his other-worldliness and denial of the life of the senses was considered positively. Today these attributes are counted against him. It is somewhat of a surprise to find that one of the Church Fathers of the second century saw him as the apostle of the heretics. Still, even those who highlight negative aspects of his ministry find it impossible to dismiss him all together. He was, no doubt, a powerful personality who incited strong reactions during his lifetime and ever since.

Today most scholars would say that Paul was not a doctrinal builder. It has also become more difficult to see him as a mystic who wished to escape from the troubles and conflicts of life in this world. My reading of Paul tells me that he was very much in touch with the human reality, and understood that faith and reason are inseparable faculties of the healthy Christian. My meditations on his letters tell me that he was very much a Jew of the first century, fully conversant with Hellenistic culture and totally committed to faith in the God of his fathers.

As one wishing to understand the thought of the apostle Paul, my first task must be to consider the evidence now available for determining the sources of his thought. It is quite legitimate to take for granted the traditional assignments of authorship and to read Paul’s letters for devotional purposes. It is possible to write a systematic presentation of the canonical Paul by extracting elements from all the letters ascribed to him according to the traditional rubrics of systematic theology. Such volumes quite often say more about their authors than about Paul. If, on the other hand, one’s purpose is to come to terms with Paul’s Gospel in his own time and culture and evaluate his role as a participant in the formation of what eventually became Christianity, then one must do a thorough analysis of the letters traditionally considered his and come to some conclusions concerning their authorship.

The New Testament canon contains thirteen letters which claim to have been written by Paul and one that has traditionally been ascribed to him. With the rise of modern literary and historical criticism, the authorship of these letters has come under scrutiny, and the Pauline authorship of some of them has been denied by many scholars. Today every student of Paul agrees that Paul wrote seven letters. These are: To the Romans, To the Corinthians I, To the Corinthians II, To the Galatians, To the Philippians, To the Thessalonians I and To Philemon. The Pauline authorship of the other seven is defended by some scholars and denied by others. Each one of these, of course, is considered separately and judged differently as to its claims to Pauline authorship.

Already by the time of the Renaissance the Pauline authorship of To the Hebrews, which does not claim to have been written by Paul, was being questioned by biblical students. Today most scholars do not think that Paul wrote it. The evidence against its Pauline authorship is overwhelming, both in terms of style and of content. In terms of style, its Greek is, together with that of Luke and Acts, the most stylish of the New Testament, a much higher literary Greek than that of the letters of Paul. Its rhetorical format, as an extended exhortation to Christians who seem to be getting tired of the demands the gospel makes on them, and are discouraged by their failings along the way, indicates that it does not belong to the early stages of the Christian mission. In terms of content, its vocabulary is quite distinct. It is preoccupied with the question of repentance, which is not a Pauline issue, and looks at sin primarily in cultic terms. Most significantly, its cosmology is cast in a Stoic symbolic universe, rather than the Platonic one found in Paul.

After To the Hebrews the letter To the Ephesians is probably the one whose Pauline authorship is denied by most scholars. Again, it is a matter of its style and content. Both argue for its belonging to the latter part of the first century. It has been said that in the letters of Paul the arguments move like a mountain brook, jumping and bubbling in a rapid flow. By contrast, in Ephesians the presentation moves ponderously and slowly like a river in a plain. The sentences are extremely long with numerous dependent clauses and repetitive grandeur. It represents the beginnings of liturgical pomposity.

The content of To the Ephesians also differs significantly with that of Paul’s writings. Rather than to have the future Parousia (the public appearance of an enthroned Christ) as its focus, it is satisfied with life within the church built on the foundation of the apostles. Paul would never agree to a foundation other than Christ. For him, the apostles are only slaves of Christ. The purpose of the letter is to promote church unity. Thus, it evinces the transition of Christianity from a movement to an ecclesiastical phenomenon.

The Pastoral Epistles, To Timothy I, To Timothy II and To Titus, also belong to the same period and represent the beginnings of an ecclesiastical institution with hierarchical officials. Even if their style is more like that of Paul, the content deals with situations quite unknown at the time of Paul. In Paul’s time, Christianity was not yet firmly distinguished from Judaism, and women were quite prominent in the leadership of the house churches.

To the Thessalonians II is considered by many to have been written by someone other than Paul primarily because of its view of the Parousia. While in To the Thessalonians I the Parousia is expected to take place momentarily, certainly when both Paul and the addressees are still alive, in To the Thessalonians II the emphasis is a warning against expecting that the Parousia will take place any time soon. Also the tone of these letters is quite different. While in the first Paul addresses the Thessalonians in the most tender and familiar terms, picturing himself as both their mother and their father, in the second the author uses rather stern imposing language.

The letter on which the scholarly opinion is most balanced between those in favor and those opposed to its having been written by Paul is To the Colossians. I agree with those who conclude that it was not written by Paul. My reasons are quite simple. In the first place, the letter is an argument against those teachers who make Christianity a kind of mystery cult in which, by means of ascetic practices that follow prescribed rules and regulations, individuals ascend to the heavenly spheres ruled by the “elemental spirits of the world” and participate in worship with angels. In other words, it has to do with the need to attain to perfection by self-denial in order to travel through the spheres. As most students recognize, the subject matter is somewhat similar to that which Paul deals with in To the Galatians, which also refers to the “elemental spirits of the world” in reference to “works of law” (Gal. 3:14; 4:3). Dealing with this question in To the Galatians Paul enters into a full discussion of the nature and the function of Torah, the law, in order to show the error of those teaching that such endeavors are necessary. In the letter To the Colossians there is not one single allusion, much less a reference to Torah. The argument is based on the wording of an early Christian hymn instead. Besides, circumcision, the identity mark of Judaism which is repeatedly relativized by Paul in To the Galatians, To the Romans, and To the Corinthians I, plays a central role as a metaphor for the crucifixion in To the Colossians. The death of Christ on the cross, rather than being the death of the humanity descended from Adam, is the circumcision that perfects the body of the universe, which is, in fact, the body of Christ. In turn the baptism of Christians is the circumcision that perfects them. In Paul’s letters the body of Christ is not the Pleroma, the fullness of all things in the universe, but the community of those baptized into his death and resurrection. Paul’s vision is sociological and historical, while the universe of To the Colossians is esoteric and cosmic.

It must be recognized, of course, that the judgment that a particular book of the New Testament was not written by Paul does not in any way reflect on its canonical authority or its inspiration. Not all the books of the New Testament were written by Paul, of course, and we do not know the identity of the writers of many of the biblical books, most significantly of the authors of the four gospels. The issue here is determining which books may be used to paint a picture of the thought of Paul.

Those who use all of the fourteen books ascribed to Paul as evidence for a presentation of Paul’s thought, defend their position by arguing that with the passage of time Paul grew in understanding and thus his thought evolved with experience and maturation. It is absolutely true that we all grow and mature in our thinking and that we do not necessarily see things in the same way when we are twenty and when we are sixty years old. In the case of Paul, however, two things militate against the view that his writings reflect maturation and growth with experience. One is that the ministry of Paul did not last forty years. His first letter is usually dated around the year 50 CE, and he died around the year 62 CE, thus his writings come from a twelve year period of his life. The other is that the evidence I have outlined above does not show development, but at best significant differences and at worst contradictions.

On the basis of the above considerations, my meditations will draw from the seven letters I am confident came from him. Of course, most probably Paul did not actually write any of them. His practice was to dictate them to one of his associates. At the end of To the Romans, Tertius, “the writer of this letter” (Rom. 16:22), sends greetings to the addressees. At the conclusion of To the Corinthians I, we read: “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand” (1 Cor. 16:21). Apparently, this endorsement came to be used by those who wrote pseudonymously. The sentence appears at the end of To the Colossians and of To the Thessalonians II. In the latter case, it adds: “This is the mark in every letter of mine; It is the way I write” (Col. 4:18; 2 Th. 3:17). If that were true, with the exception of To the Corinthians I, none of his actual letters were written by him. To the Galatians is without a doubt the letter which Paul wrote in a state of extreme agitation. Apparently, after having dictated the body of the letter, he took the stylus and the papyrus from the scribe and wrote himself 6:11 – 18, giving a concise summary of his gospel as the proclamation of a new creation and ending with a rather abrupt dismissal of his opponents. This section begins with the words, “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.” Apparently Paul’s calligraphy was not up to par.

Another important factor to be taken into account is that we do not possess any of the original letters. The earliest manuscripts in our possession come from the latter part of the second century, and they are only fragments of letters. We have full texts from the middle of the third century on. Besides, the letters were sent to different churches. After having been read at their meeting, they were stored we know not where or how. At the time Paul was not considered a prominent Christian personality, and it is clear that some of the letters evoked strong negative reactions. Certainly Paul wrote letters that were lost in antiquity. In To the Corinthians I, he refers to a letter written to the Corinthians sometime before (1 Cor. 5:9).

Most likely, what brought Paul to the attention of Early Christianity was the publication of Acts of the Apostles, where Paul is presented as the thirteenth disciple and the pioneer of the mission to the Gentiles. Whoever took it upon himself to collect and publish his letters sometime after that, remains unknown. The collector and publisher missed some letters and edited fragments of letter as a single letter. Thus, To the Corinthians II consists of several fragments that have been pieced together. The same may be the case of To the Philippians, which seems to consist of two fragments. Scholars also consider possible that whoever collected and published the letters, or another hand, may have added a phrase or two here and there. While I recognize that we have letters that went through a process of collecting and editing some thirty years after they were written, my purpose is not to reconstruct their history but to understand the thought of Paul through them. Still, in my meditations I will take into account the possibility of additions to the authentic letters by a later hand. These factors do not in the least diminish my admiration and respect for Paul as I endeavor to put the results of my struggles with them into clear, comprehensible, simple, language.

In my meditations I had to bridge three gaps: the language gap, the culture gap, and the time gap. In the first place there is a language gap. It becomes quite evident, for example, when considering the words “faith” and “beliefs.” These English words are sometimes used synonymously and at others a differentiation is made between having faith and having beliefs. Beside, in English there is no verbal form of the noun “faith.” In Greek, the root pist is used for the verb pisteuo and the noun pistis. Something is lost when “having faith” [pisteuo] becomes “believing.” The action takes a purely intellectual connotation. Examples of this kind can be easily found. Something is lost when the Greek diakonia becomes “dispensation,” or psyxe is translated “mind.”

The second is a culture gap. These days our culture is becoming more aware of our holistic nature. It is readily recognized, for example, that there are psycho-somatic disorders, that one cannot treat the body as if it were a machine. Still, there are strong forces in the culture eager to deny the existence of the soul and to reduce reality to its material manifestations. Matters of the mind and the soul, both reasoning processes and emotional reactions are considered just electrical and chemical phenomena in the brain. Some claim that all that is can be explained by science. Our secularized culture is quite different from the Hellenistic culture in which Paul lived and preached the Gospel. While philosophers had been for some time making a critical evaluation of the pervasive mythologies that informed everyday life, most of the people lived in a world in which the human and the divine worlds were mutually permeable.

Even though our culture of late is recognizing that we are social beings, we Westerners still live in individualistic societies. This means that we tend to interpret Paul in individualistic and dualistic terms. Paul, however, took human beings to be integrated units of body, soul and spirit; but each unit was a member of a corporate personality. In this, he was quite true to his Hebraic traditions.

As a good apocalypticist he affirmed the reality of the Fall that introduced evil into the world. It placed the world under the power of sin and “the god of this world.” Even if apocalypticism is now quite popular as a format for entertainment, it is not taken seriously in our scientific culture. This means that if the faith of Paul is to be taken seriously, his expression of it in apocalyptic terms must be transcribed into meaningful contemporary cultural terms. In these meditations I limit myself to bridging the cultural gap to make the message of Paul understandable in Paul’s own terms within his symbolic universe. I will not elaborate how his message may best be expressed in the twenty first century.

The time gap has two dimensions. In the first place, between us and Paul there are twenty centuries of human history, and one must make every effort not to be anachronistic. Besides there is a most important difference in the way in which we place ourselves in time. Paul, no doubt, understood himself to be living in the time when the Parousia of the Lord was to take place momentarily. We live two thousand years later and the Parousia has not taken place. Today it is impossible to announce an imminent Parousia and be credible outside the apocalyptic mindset. Again, my conscious effort is to make Paul’s understanding of time an important factor to be taken into account when reading him. I leave it to my readers to find in Paul’s faith a meaningful way to understand themselves in time once most people cannot envision its imminent end by the hand of God. Besides, with the coming of the atomic age, humans have demonstrated their capacity to destroy the world without God’s help. Thank you very much, God; but, no thanks. This gives a totally different perspective to our understanding of ourselves in space and time.

The letters make clear that Paul had a strong personality and a quick temper. He could flare up and issue anathemas as well as become contrite and appeal for understanding in the sweetest terms. They also reveal that he was not one of the leaders of the church, and did not enjoy wide acceptance during his lifetime. Envoys sent by the leaders in Jerusalem seem to have trailed him trying to undo what Paul had been doing. Paul admits that in the sight of others he made an unimpressive appearance. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a second century legend, gives an admiring but not idealistic picture of him. “In stature he was a man of middling size, and his hair was scanty, and his legs were a little crooked, and his knees were projecting, and he had large [another version, “blue”] eyes, and his eyebrows met, and his nose was somewhat long, and he was full of grace and mercy; at one time he seemed like a man, and at another time he seemed like an angel.” The many details would argue that this straightforward description preserves something of a living tradition concerning Paul’s physical appearance.

Whatever his appearance may have been, no doubt, he was an amazing human being who took it upon himself to carry in his flesh the marks of Jesus (Gal. 6:17). It is also quite evident that he lived in the real world of human struggles and personality conflicts, His correspondence with the Corinthians reveals the serious tensions that developed between them and Paul. He refers to having made them a visit that resulted in a total break up of their relationship (2 Cor. 2:1). The catalogue of the many punishments he suffered while engaged in his service of Christ leaves no doubt of the reality of the world in which he lived (2 Cor. 11:23 – 28). He faced squarely the present, rather than escaping to the past or the future. It is because of this, that I find his writings extremely relevant.

My admiration of Paul does not mean that I do not read his letters critically, that is to say, seriously, or that I take everything he says as normative. I like to meditate on his letters to internalize how he lived his Christianity in the first century so as to live my Christianity well in the twenty first. I take very seriously his faith and I share it. How he expressed his faith in his time and culture gives me models with which to express my faith in my time and culture.

No doubt Martin Luther read Paul in a new way and did a great service to the future of the Gospel. His struggles with the entrenched theology of his day liberated many from the non-gospel of guilt and punishments predominant in his day. The battles Luther fought, however, need be fought no longer. Righteousness by Faith and Sola Scriptura have become common currency in the Christian landscape. God’s grace is now preached from every pulpit; Catholics have become as serious students of the Bible as any Protestant, and Protestants have become aware of the importance of Tradition as much as Catholics have long been. It is high time, therefore, to outgrow the tensions that separated Christians after Luther. Reading Paul with Righteousness by Faith and Sola Scriptura as determining factors can only prevent the reading of Paul on his own terms. The problem these days is, to a large degree, that Righteousness by Faith and Sola Scriptura have become slogans for modern ideological distortions of the Gospel.

Today many Christians read the Bible overlooking the actual authors of the different books, pretending that the Bible has only one author. This is a willful failure to look at the evidence. I think that the richness of the Bible can only be tapped when each one of its authors is given the opportunity to speak authentically in time and space. It is when Paul is allowed to be Paul that one gains a sense of his flaming faith, hope and love. When a biblical author becomes a real person expressing faith under inspiration, what is read takes on new meaning and authority. The message is more authentic when the human factor is given its due. I trust my readers will find in these meditations invitations to have profitable dialogues with Paul.