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A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LETTERS OF PAUL

The Letters of Paul

There is no more interesting body of documents in the New Testament than the letters of Paul. That is because, of all forms of literature, a letter is most personal. Demetrius, one of the ancient Greek literary critics, once wrote: ‘Everyone reveals his own soul in his letters. In every other form of composition it is possible to discern the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as the epistolary’ (Demetrius, On Style, 227). It is precisely because he left us so many letters that we feel we know Paul so well. In them, he opened his mind and heart to the people he loved so much; and in them, to this day, we can see that great mind grappling with the problems of the early Church, and feel that great heart throbbing with love for men and women, even when they were misguided and mistaken.

The Difficulty of Letters

At the same time, there is often nothing so difficult to understand as a letter. Demetrius (On Style, 223) quotes a saying of Artemon, who edited the letters of Aristotle. Artemon said that a letter ought to be written in the same manner as a dialogue, because it was one of the two sides of a discussion. In other words, reading a letter is like listening to one side of a telephone conversation. So, when we read the letters of Paul, we often find ourselves in difficulty. We do not possess the letter which he was answering, we do not fully know the circumstances with which he was dealing, and it is only from the letter itself that we can deduce the situation which prompted it. Before we can hope to understand fully any letter Paul wrote, we must try to reconstruct the situation that produced it.

The Ancient Letters

It is a great pity that Paul’s letters were ever called epistles. They are in the most literal sense letters. One of the great lights shed on the interpretation of the New Testament has been the discovery and the publication of the papyri. In the ancient world, papyrus was the substance on which most documents were written. It was composed of strips of the pith of a certain bulrush that grew on the banks of the Nile. These strips were laid one on top of the other to form a substance very like brown paper. The sands of the Egyptian desert were ideal for preservation; for papyrus, although very brittle, will last forever as long as moisture does not get at it. As a result, from the Egyptian rubbish heaps, archaeologists have rescued hundreds of documents – marriage contracts, legal agreements, government forms and, most interesting of all, private letters. When we read these private letters, we find that there was a pattern to which nearly all conformed, and we find that Paul’s letters reproduce exactly that pattern. Here is one of these ancient letters. It is from a soldier, called Apion, to his father Epimachus. He is writing from Misenum to tell his father that he has arrived safely after a stormy passage.

Apion sends heartiest greetings to his father and lord Epimachus. I pray above all that you are well and fit; and that things are going well with you and my sister and her daughter and my brother. I thank my Lord Serapis [his god] that he kept me safe when I was in peril on the sea. As soon as I got to Misenum I got my journey money from Caesar – three gold pieces. And things are going fine with me. So I beg you, my dear father, send me a line, first to let me know how you are, and then about my brothers, and thirdly, that I may kiss your hand, because you brought me up well, and because of that I hope, God willing, soon to be promoted. Give Capito my heartiest greetings, and my brothers and Serenilla and my friends. I sent you a little picture of myself painted by Euctemon. My military name is Antonius Maximus. I pray for your good health. Serenus sends good wishes, Agathos Daimon’s boy, and Turbo, Gallonius’s son. (G. Milligan, Selections from the Greek Papyri, 36)

Little did Apion think that we would be reading his letter to his father some 2,000 years after he had written it. It shows how little human nature changes. The young man is hoping for promotion quickly. Who will Serenilla be but the girl he left behind? He sends the ancient equivalent of a photograph to the family and friends at home. Now, that letter falls into certain sections. (1) There is a greeting. (2) There is a prayer for the health of the recipients. (3) There is a thanksgiving to the gods. (4) There are the special contents. (5) Finally, there are the special salutations and the personal greetings. Practically every one of Paul’s letters shows exactly the same sections, as we now demonstrate.

(1) The greeting: Romans 1:1; 1 Corinthians 1:1; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Galatians 1:1; Ephesians 1:1; Philippians 1:1; Colossians 1:1–2; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:1.

(2) The prayer: in every case, Paul prays for the grace of God on the people to whom he writes: Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3; 2 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:3; Ephesians 1:2; Philippians 1:3; Colossians 1:2; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:2.

(3) The thanksgiving: Romans 1:8; 1 Corinthians 1:4; 2 Corinthians 1:3; Ephesians 1:3; Philippians 1:3; 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 2 Thessalonians 1:3.

(4) The special contents: the main body of the letters.

(5) The special salutations and personal greetings: Romans 16; 1 Corinthians 16:19; 2 Corinthians 13:13; Philippians 4:21–2; Colossians 4:12–15; 1 Thessalonians 5:26.

When Paul wrote letters, he wrote them on the pattern which everyone used. The German theologian Adolf Deissmann says of them: ‘They differ from the messages of the homely papyrus leaves of Egypt, not as letters but only as the letters of Paul.’ When we read Paul’s letters, we are reading things which were meant to be not academic exercises and theological treatises, but human documents written by a friend to his friends.

The Immediate Situation

With a very few exceptions, Paul’s letters were written to meet an immediate situation. They were not systematic arguments which he sat down to write in the peace and silence of his study. There was some threatening situation in Corinth, or Galatia, or Philippi, or Thessalonica, and he wrote a letter to meet it. He was not in the least thinking of us when he wrote, but solely of the people to whom he was writing. Deissmann writes: ‘Paul had no thought of adding a few fresh compositions to the already extant Jewish epistles; still less of enriching the sacred literature of his nation . . . He had no presentiment of the place his words would occupy in universal history; not so much that they would be in existence in the next generation, far less that one day people would look at them as Holy Scripture.’ We must always remember that a thing need not be of only passing interest because it was written to meet an immediate situation. Every one of the great love songs of the world was written at a particular time for one person; but they live on for the benefit and enjoyment of all. It is precisely because Paul’s letters were written to meet a threatening danger or a pressing need that they still throb with life. And it is because human need and the human situation do not change that God speaks to us through them today.

The Spoken Word

There is one other thing that we must note about these letters. Paul did what most people did in his day. He did not normally pen his own letters, but dictated them to a secretary and then added his own authenticating signature. (We actually know the name of one of the people who did the writing for him. In Romans 16:22, Tertius, the secretary, slips in his own greeting before the letter draws to an end.) In 1 Corinthians 16:21, Paul says in effect: ‘This is my own signature, my autograph, so that you can be sure this letter comes from me’ (cf. Colossians 4:18; 2 Thessalonians 3:17).

This explains a great deal. Sometimes Paul is hard to understand, because his sentences begin and never finish; his grammar breaks down and the construction becomes complicated. We must not think of him sitting quietly at a desk, carefully polishing each sentence as he writes. We must think of him striding up and down some little room, pouring out a torrent of words, while his secretary races to get them down. When Paul composed his letters, he had in his mind’s eye a vision of the people to whom he was writing, and he was pouring out his heart to them in words that fell over each other in his eagerness to help.