On Romans

 

The Letter to the Romans: Who, When, and Why?

March 22, 2025

Bart Ehrman

In my previous post I summarized the major themes of the letter to the Romans; in that context I mentioned already some of the key aspects of both authorship and purpose.  But in this post I want to dig deeper into who wrote it, when, and at particular length, why.

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Romans is the sixth book of the New Testament and the first for which we are virtually certain as to the authorship.  The Gospels and Acts are anonymous, only later attributed to their eponymous authors (eponymous being one of those words I love).  Romans, however, names its author — in the first word!  “Paul.”  Lots of other writings claim to be by the apostle Paul but were actually written by other people claiming to be Paul, as I’ve mentioned; six of those are in the NT (at least six that are debated) and there are more than that outside it (none of which are debated).

But in this case there is little doubt about the matter.  This letter claims to be by Paul, is in Paul’s writing style, embraces Pauline themes found throughout his other letters, makes sense in Paul’s historical context, and so on.  So, it is the first of Paul’s “undisputed” letters.

Where it fits into Paul’s known chronology can be (and sometimes is) debated, but it is widely considered the final letter of Paul we have.  As we will see, he indicates that he has finished his missionary work in the eastern part of the empire and now wants to take the gospel to the “ends of the earth,” to Spain, the westernmost region known to those in the Roman world at the time.  The other letters were written to and in areas of Asia Minor ,Macedonia, and Achaeas (Turkey and Greece).  He’s finished there and ready to head west.

The other letters probably date mainly throughout the decade of the 50s; if this is Paul’s last it can plausibly be put in the early 60s — pick 62 as a possible date; the tradition is that he was martyred in 64 CE in Rome, but we don’t have good evidence for it.

With this letter, far more interesting and important than the who and when is the why.  I take much of the following from the discussion in my undergraduate textbook, edited for current purposes (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction…. Oxford University Press).

As I pointed out in my earlier post, Romans differs in one significant way from all of Paul’s other letters: it is written to a congregation that Paul did not establish, in a city that he had never visited (see Romans 1:10-15).  Given what we know about Paul’s own sense of his apostolic mission, this should immediately give us pause.  Paul’s other letters were written to deal with problems that had arisen among those whom he had converted to faith in Christ.  That clearly is not the case here.  Why, though, would he be writing to someone else’s congregation?

At least on the surface, Paul does not appear to be writing to resolve problems that he has heard about within the Roman church.  As I indicated before, the issues  he discusses appear to relate instead to his own understanding of the Christian gospel.  This is clearly the case in chaps. 1-11; but even his exhortations in chaps. 12-15 are general in nature, not explicitly directed to problems specific to the Christians in Rome.  Nowhere, for example, does he indicate that he has learned of their struggles and that he is writing to convey his apostolic advice (contrast all of his other letters).  Is it possible then that he simply wants to expound some of his views and explain why he holds them?  This is possible, of course; but why would he want to do so for a church that he has never seen?

There may be some clues concerning Paul’s motivation at the beginning and end of the letter.  At the outset he states that he is eager to visit the church to share his gospel with them (1:10-15).  One might think that Paul is preparing the Romans for his visit, giving them advance notice about what he is up to.  But at the end of the letter a fuller agenda becomes more evident.  There he indicates he has completed the work that he has to do where he is — probably Achaia (in Corinth itself?), since according to Romans 16:1 the person carrying the letter, Phoebe, is a deacon of the church in Cenchreae, Corinth’s nearby port; moreover, he is eager to extend his mission into the Western regions, specifically Spain, and wants to visit Rome on the way.

But now, with no further place for me in these regions, I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you when I go to Spain.  For I do hope to see you on my journey and to be sent on by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little while (Romans 15:23-24).

In light of these comments, it appears that Paul is interested in more than simply meeting with these Roman Christians.  He evidently wants them to provide support — moral and financial — for his westward mission; possibly he would like to use Rome as the base of his operation to the regions beyond.  But why would he need to provide such a lengthy exposition of his views in order to get their support?  Don’t they already know who he is — the apostle to the Gentiles?  And wouldn’t they readily undertake to provide him with whatever assistance is needed?

As I suggested in my previous post, this may be precisely the point.  Either the Romans have only a dim knowledge of who Paul is or, even more likely, they have heard a great deal about him and what they have heard has made them suspicious.  If this is the case, or at least if Paul believes that it is, then presumably their suspicions would relate to the issues that Paul addresses throughout the letter, issues such as whether Gentiles and Jews can really be thought of as equal before God and, if so, (a) whether God has forsaken his promises that the Jews would be his special people and (b) whether Paul’s “law-free gospel” to the Gentiles leads to lawless and immoral behavior.

The tone and style of this letter support the view that Paul wrote it in order to explain himself to a congregation whose assistance he was eager to receive.  When reading through Romans carefully, one gets the sense that Paul is constantly having to defend himself and to justify his views by making careful and reasoned arguments (see, for example, 3:8; 6:1, 15; 7:1; etc.).  Moreover, he makes this defense in a neatly crafted way, following a rhetorical style known in antiquity as the “diatribe.”  This involved advancing an argument by stating a thesis, having an imaginary opponent raise possible objections to it, and then providing answers to these objections.  Consider the following rhetorical questions and answers:

Then what advantage has the Jew?  Or what is the value of circumcision?  Much in every way.  For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God (Romans 3:1-2).

What then? Are we any better off?  No, not at all; for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin (Romans 3:9).

What then are we to say?  Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?  By no means!  How can we who died to sin go on living in it?  (Romans 6:1-2).

Since the author both asks and answers the questions, the diatribe is remarkably effective for showing that he knows what he is talking about and that he is always right.  By employing this style, Paul could effectively counter arguments that others had made against his teachings.

It may be worth noting that Paul’s travel plans include not only the trip through Rome to Spain, but an earlier jaunt to Jerusalem.  Paul has collected funds for the poor Christians of Judea from his Gentile converts in Macedonia and Achaia (Romans 15:25-27) and appears uneasy over his upcoming trip to deliver them (Romans 15:30-32).  He is quite openly fearful of “unbelievers” in Judea (presumably Jews who don’t take kindly to his faith in Jesus) and apprehensive of his reception by the “saints” (presumably Jewish-Christians who have not warmed to his law-free gospel to the Gentiles).  Some scholars have suspected that his letter to the Romans is a kind of trial run for his views, an attempt to get his thoughts organized on paper before having to present them to a hostile audience in Judea.

There may be some truth in this, but it may be best to see the letter as chiefly directed to the situation that Paul expects to find where he addresses it, in Rome.  He wants to use this church as his base of operation and knows (or thinks) that he has some opposition.  He writes a letter in order to persuade this congregation of the truth of his version of the gospel.  This is a gospel that insists that Jews and Gentiles are on equal footing before God: both are equally alienated from God and both can be made right with God only through Christ’s death and resurrection.  Moreover, the salvation that is offered in Christ comes to people apart from adherence to the Jewish Law, even though the Law itself bears witness to this faith as the only means of salvation.  Indeed, Christ is the goal of this Law.  Above all else, this shows that God has not gone back on his promises to the Jews and has not rejected them as his people.  In Christ, all of the promises of God have come to fruition.  Furthermore, the Romans can rest assured that this gospel does not lead to moral laxity: Paul is himself no moral reprobate and he does not urge his converts to engage in wild and lawless activities.

 Red Scare

by Clay Risen (Scribner)

Nonfiction

The Red Scare reshaped every institution in American life: Hollywood, labor unions, churches, universities, elementary schools—and, above all, the national-security state. Risen, a journalist at the New York Times, describes the biggest showdowns and the many oddities of the anti-Communist surge, in addition to the fear and suffering of those who bore the brunt of it. His book, a marvellous accounting that covers many moments of high drama, also usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets. It also describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end.

From The New Yorker

Bart Ehrman on Paul

 

Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a Nutshell

March 18, 2025

I will now move to a nutshell mini-thread on the individual Pauline letters in the New Testament.  I will be covering them in canonical sequence, including both the so-called undisputed Pauline letters, which I’m saying are “so-called” simply because scholars in every field dispute flippin’ everything (well, almost everything), and the disputed epistles, which, as it turns out are undisputably disputed!

The thirteen letters are arranged not in chronological (or alphabetical!) sequence, but by length: with Romans as the longest and Philemon the shortest.  Note: in this arrangement, letters to the SAME audience (two each to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians) are combined in order to determine their length.

And so, the sequence (with U meaning undisputed and D disputed) is

• Romans (U)
• 1 Corinthians (U)
• 2 Corinthians (U)
• Galatians (U)
• Ephesians (D)
• Philippians (U)
• Colossians (D)
• 1 Thessalonians (U)
• 2 Thessalonians (D)
• 1 Timothy (D)
• 2 Timothy (D)
• Titus (D)
• Philemon (U)

In this four-post mini-thread, I deal with the letter to the Romans.  I begin by giving a 50-word summary.  If you know Romans well, have ever read it, have heard about it (!), try your own summary.  Tomorrow mine may be different, for now, here’s my first-ever attempt.

Paul’s writes his letter to the Roman church to garner their support for his missionary endeavors to the far west by explaining that salvation comes only through Christ’s death and resurrection on the basis of faith, both for gentiles and Jews, who are and always will be God’s chosen people. 

I will now try to expand this summary by providing a still brief but larger nutshell summary of this long and complicated letter.

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The letter to the Romans is unique among Paul’s letters in that it is not written to a church he had himself founded to help them deal with their problems but to a church want to visit en route to his missionary endeavors in the western parts of the empire.  His goal in writing is to announce his visit and to secure the church’s support (moral and possibly financial) for his westward mission.  He is particularly concerned to clarify his actual gospel message, apparently because he knows (or thinks) it has been misrepresented and the Roman community is dubious about his teachings.

In particular, it appears Paul has been interpreted as saying that he is the apostle to the gentiles because God has rejected his chosen people the Jews.  In addition, since Paul preaches that salvation comes apart from keeping the law of the Jews, some of his opponents are claiming he is endorsing or at least indifferent to “lawless behavior” among his converts.

The letter to the Romans tries to set the record straight on both accounts.  Paul explains why he certainly does preach that “justification” – that is, becoming “right” with God comes to Jews and gentiles only through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ, not through keeping God’s commands.

But that does not mean he thinks God has abandoned the Jews as his people.  On the contrary, Jews have a great advantage as God’s chosen ones, and he is using them to bring salvation to the entire world.  Moreover, far from leading to a life of sin, this gospel provides is the only means for escaping from the “power” of sin to stand pure before God.

Because of this unique purpose for the letter – as an explanation of what he preaches and why, Romans is distinct among Paul’s letters.  Here he tries to provide a more systematic exposition of his thought, rather than deal with various problems that have arisen in one of his communities.   It is not that they letter is a kind of  “systematic theology” that explores distinct doctrinal ideas in sequencek the way theologians have provided expositions of the true faith over the centuries, for example, by laying out the correct view of God, of Christ, of the Spirit, of salvation, of the afterlife, etc. in clearly demarcated categories.  Paul is describing the message he preaches to gain support for his mission.  That is to say, it too is an “occasional” letter, written for a purpose.  Knowing that purpose can help explain much of what Paul chooses to discuss..

He introduces his exposition by strongly affirming his gospel message: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is God’s saving power for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.”  In this context, “Greek” means “non-Jew,” that is, gentile, that is “pagan.”   The “good news” Paul preaches is a manifestation of God’s power, it comes only by faith (to those who “believe”), whether Jew or gentile.

To explain this message, Paul provides a “bad-news/good-news” scenario  (1:18-3:20), explaining that all people are alienated from God because they have knowingly sinned against him.   Pagans, he claims, have always known full well from observing the world around them that there is only one God, the Creator of all; but they have willfully rejected this knowledge to worship multitudes of other gods.  Moreover, because they have rejected God, he has rejected them, which is why they lead such immoral and licentious lives (ch. 1).

He then argues that Jews are as bad as pagans, even worse: God revealed himself specially to the Jews and gave them his law.  But they regularly break it, sinning against God even as his own people.  They too are without excuse (ch. 2).

In sum:  all people have sinned and fallen short of what God demands; all are alienated from him, whether Jew or gentile.  No one is righteous.  Everyone, therefore, stands condemned before God (3:1-20).

After this very bad news, Paul gives the good news (end of ch. 3).  God has provided a way to be “righteous” (that is, “to be right” with him).  Christ’s death has brought an atonement for sin to all who believe in him, making it possible to be “redeemed” from sin by his blood and to obtain a “right standing” (“justification”) before God.  Moreover, this path of salvation – the only one provided by God – is available to both Jew and gentile, not based on law but on faith.

Paul goes on to argue that this way of salvation is not an innovation God dreamt up after the other options had failed, but had been his plan all along.  Scripture shows that as far back as Abraham, the father of the Jews, “righteousness” came by faith, not by doing being circumcised or doing the “works of the law” (ch. 4).  Faith is the natural and long-planned way of salvation that God had established at the beginning.

Paul’s view of sin and salvation, however, is even more complicated than he reveals in these opening four chapters. Another way he explains the bad-news / good-news scenario is far less familiar to readers (often not even noticed). The reason all people sin according to Paul is that sin is not merely an act of disobedience against God; it is also a cosmic power aligned against God that was unleashed against the world starting with Adam.  In this sense, sin is a kind of demonic force that has overpowered all humans and put them into subjection to itself, rather than to God.

Paul deals with this aspect of sin in chapter 5-8.  Everyone descended from Adam is “enslaved” to sin, and it is a far greater power than anyone can overcome on their own.  Having the law of God cannot help a person escape this power of sin, since the law indicates what God wants his people to do but does not provide the power to do it (ch. 5).  Everyone necessarily does what they do not want to do (ch. 7).  That’s the other set of bad news.  All humans are enslaved to sin and there is no way to break free.

But God has provided liberation from sin through the death of Jesus. When Christ died he took the power of sin upon himself and therefore put it to death.  Anyone who is united with Christ by being baptized into him has similarly died to sin.  Baptized believers have been set free from the power that alienates them from God (Romans 6).  They now have Christ and God as their masters.  And they no longer need to be dominated by the power of sin (chs. 5-8).

Again, this does not mean that God has abandoned his chosen ones, the Jews.  In chapters 9-11 Paul gets to the heart of the matter, one of the ultimate points of his book.  The gospel of God’s salvation has indeed now gone to the gentiles and will ultimately lead to their salvation.  But God has not rejected his own people.  On the contrary, in the end “All Israel will be saved.”

Paul’s arguments in these three chapters are notoriously difficult, but it is clear he believes God allowed (ordained?) Jews to reject their salvation in Christ in order to open up the door for gentiles to be brought into the community of faith.  Eventually, when Jews realize salvation has now come to those who are not physical descendants of Abraham, they would become of those now brought into the fold of God’s chosen people, and turn to Christ, and be saved.  This is God’s plan of salvation for the world..

Paul explains that even though Jews have advantages over gentiles – they were the ones given the covenant, the law, and the messiah – they do not have a superior salvation in Christ. Jews and gentiles who believe are equal before God.  That also means, though, that even though Jews originally rejected the messages of Christ, gentiles in Christ are superior.  All believers are of equal standing.

Paul then devotes our four four chapters to explaining that this gospel message of salvation by faith in Christ apart from the law does not lead to lawless behavior.  On the contrary, those who are in Christ, whether Jew or gentile, are now freed from the power of sin and can and should lead lives in total obedience to God.  Paul provides some advice of important ethical implications of what this salvation entails, and above all insists that everyone should “love their neighbor as themselves” (quoting Leviticus 19:18), because, as he says (in an echo of what Jesus himself is reported to have said, “Love fulfills the law” (13:8-10).

In the final chapter Paul greets a number of Roman Christians he personally knows (over 25 of them), most of them by name.

 

Auburn is No. 1 overall seed as NCAA men’s bracket is revealed for March Madness

• 8:12 p.m.
  Watch out for No. 13 seed Grand Canyon, which could go to Waco, Texas, and upset...
• 8:11 p.m.
  UCLA is women’s overall No. 1 seed, tops Spokane 1 Region

Paul (2) Bart Ehrman UNC Chapel Hill

 

The Life of Paul in a Nutshell

March 15, 2025

Now that I have provided an overview of the significance of Paul and his letters (my previous post) I can summarize what we can know about his life.  I begin by trying to give a fifty-word version:

Paul, originally a zealous Greek-speaking Jew, vigorously opposed early Christians before having a vision of the resurrected Jesus that convinced him that the crucifixion was God’s plan of salvation for both Jew and gentile, leading him to spread his law-free gospel to gentiles in major urban areas of the Mediterranean.

Now I can provide a fuller summary of what we can know of Paul’s life. We are fortunate that it is so well documented, with a biographical account in the book of Acts and a collection of seven letters that he himself wrote, in which he occasionally mentions aspects of his past.

But there are major difficulties as well.  Because the key aspects of his life were already known among his converts in the churches he founded, in his letters he refers to it only rarely and often allusively.  Unlike his original readers, we usually do not have the fuller story, making it difficult to piece together the entire puzzle.  Moreover, when what we read in Acts overlaps with his own comments about his life and teachings, they are often at odds, making it difficult to rely on Acts as a reliable source of information.

We also have numerous later legends about Paul, especially in the highly entertaining book of the late second century, The Acts of Paul (which includes the stories of Paul and Thecla, his letter “3 Corinthians,” and an account of his beheading); but there is little here that can help us to know what he really said and did.

Most of our reliable information, therefore, comes from the few scattered references in passages such as Galatians 1-2 and Philippians 3:4-6, along with his recollections of what he preached and what he teaches throughout the letters, especially, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans.

Paul’s comments in Galatians 1 clearly show that he was born and raised Jewish; and the fact that his native language was Greek shows he did not come from Israel.  He indicates he was a highly religious Jew, who kept the law of the Jews faithfully – claiming in fact that he was “blameless” in the righteousness required by the law (Philippians 3:6).  He also indicates he had been a Pharisee.   (The claims that he was a Roman citizen from Tarsus trained in Jerusalem under rabbi Gamaliel are only from Acts and so cannot be trusted; he himself says nothing about them.)

He also indicates that when he first learned of Jews proclaiming Jesus to be the messiah, he found it offensive and potentially blasphemous, and set out to “destroy” the church (Galatians 1).  He does not tell us what his persecution of Christians involved.

In the midst of his violent opposition, however, some three years after Jesus’ death, he had a vision of Jesus that made him realize he was still alive, or rather, that he had been returned to life.  (Paul himself does not talk about being “blinded by the light” on the “road to Damascus” as in the book of Acts).  This led to Paul’s “conversion.”  It was not a conversion from one religion to another, from Judaism to Christianity.  Paul remained a faithful Jew.  But he converted from opposing Christ to believing in him, from persecuting Christians to proclaiming their message.  He did not think of Christianity as a different religion, but the correct understanding of the ancient faith of Israel.

Most important, once Paul had his vision and came to be believe Jesus had been raised from the dead, he drew a set of conclusions that not only affected his own understandings of God, Christ, and salvation, but that in the end transformed the Christian religion, opening it it up not only to Jews but also gentiles.  Had this not happened, it is difficult to see how Christianity could have spread as it did (principally among former pagans), eventually taking over the Roman world.

The views Paul developed, probably very quickly, appear to have come as necessarily corollaries of the fact, which he took to be a fact, that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

• If God raised Jesus, he must have been God’s chosen one whom he especially favored.
• If Jesus was the one God specially favored, then his death must have not been an accident but part of God’s plan.
• God’s plan must have been that his chosen one had to die.
• But since he was specially favored by God, he would not have had to die for any sins or wrongs he had done.
• His death then must have been for the sins of others.
• Thus Jesus’ death was therefore a sacrifice planned all along by God to bring salvation.
• If this was God’s plan for salvation, then it must be the only way of salvation. If salvation could have been acquired some other way, God would not have had to sacrifice his Son and his Son would not have had to sacrifice his life.
• Jews who belonged to the covenant of God and who observed the law were indeed his chosen people; but they needed the death of the messiah to bring about their salvation (since it was the only way).
• Keeping the law, therefore, was not sufficient for salvation, for Jews or anyone else. God’s plan of salvation came apart from keeping the law.
• Therefore keeping the law was not a requirement for being right before God. Only faith in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus could bring salvation.
• Jews of course would continue keeping God’s law as his chosen people. But gentiles who came to believe in Jesus did not need to keep the Jewish law.  They needed only to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
• Anyone who thought that keeping the law was a prerequisite for salvation misunderstood God’s plan, and in fact was opposed to God.

Paul believed God had revealed all this to him in the vision he had of Jesus.  Moreover, he believed that since God had revealed it to him in particular, he was the one called to bring about the salvation of the world.  God had appointed him to take the gospel to gentiles.  Almost immediately Paul began a mission to convert pagans to faith in Christ.

Paul’s missionary endeavors may have started in the Nabatean kingdom (“Arabia”) soon after he had his vision (Galatians 1:17).  He indicates he did not consult with the other apostles in Jerusalem (Peter, James the brother of Jesus, John, etc.) and that he did not learn the message of the gospel from them.  Only after three years did he go to visit Peter to explain what he had seen and how he was ordained to take the message to gentiles.

After that Paul engaged in missionary work by moving from one city to another, mainly in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Macedonia, and Achaia (modern Greece).  He appears to have worked as a leather worker, allowing him to move from one place to another, set up shop, preach his message to customers, their families, and anyone else he came in contact with.  As he converted a few pagans to renounce their ancestral religions to follow Jesus, he organized them into a small community, meeting with them as their numbers grew, instructing them in the Jewish scriptures and their new faith, urging them to convert others, and then leaving the city to move to the next and repeat the process.

Paul often faced opposition from both Jews in local synagogues and gentiles who considered him a trouble maker; he indicates that he repeatedly was beaten and flogged by opponents for his efforts (2 Corinthians 11:23-25).  He saw this as evidence that he was the true apostle of Christ, the one who suffered for the sake of others.

He also faced opposition within his own churches as they grew and developed, and among other Christian missionaries who objected to his understandings of the faith (as he indicates in numerous places, e.g., Galatians 1; Philippians 3; 2 Corinthians).

Paul is traditionally said to have ended his life in Rome, where he was martyred under Nero in the year 64.  It may well be that he died around then but we have no secure evidence of his final years or death in any of our earliest sources, apart from the letter of 1 Clement, written around 95 CE, which indicates he had suffered martyrdom, but suggests it may have been somewhere in the farthest reaches of the west (Spain? 1 Clement 5).

 

Paul - Bart Ehrman - UNC Chapel Hill

 

The Significance and Letters of Paul, in a Nutshell

March 13, 2025

Now that I have 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 one to a biographical sketch.

I start by giving a 50 word summary 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 (Romans), 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.

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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 perspectives:

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 NT book, Hebrews, was admitted into the canon only when church fathers agreed (wrongly), the Paul had written it.  One other NT 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 2/3 of the entire NT.  The author of Luke-Acts wrote more words than Paul (in his surviving letters), but Paul made by far the greatest impact on the NT.

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 NT book, Hebrews, was admitted into the canon only when church fathers agreed (wrongly), the Paul had written it.  One other NT 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 2/3 of the entire NT.  The author of Luke-Acts wrote more words than Paul (in his surviving letters), but Paul made by far the greatest impact on the NT.

 

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.

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.

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 (modern Greece).

Paul, in effect, started the worldwide mission that within three hundred years would make Christianity the largest religion in the Roman world and within four hundred 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.

 

Despite Paul’s importance, there are difficulties connected with understanding his life and teachings.  Among the most prominent of these are the following:

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, in the passages in Acts and Paul’s letters that overlap in what their accounts of his life and teaching are often difficult if not impossible to reconcile.  Paul is obviously better positioned to know what he actually did and preached.

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.

The Problem of 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 3 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 have long been doubted by scholars: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.  On the other hand, nearly everyone accepts the (so-called) “undisputed” letters – 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.

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 may think they’re obvious, and if you do, well, more power to you.

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 the letters themselves, it is often difficult to understand what Paul is saying.  It is 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 15).  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 not really 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 1 Corinthians 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 the undisputed and the disputed.

 

 

 I think everyone has struggled to perfectly define what's going on here. Is this autocracy? Oligarchy? Kakistocracy? Is Trump simply out of control, behaving like a Mad King, even worse than the one this country rebelled against in the first place? A widely read Atlantic article from last month by Jonathan Rauch gives a definition to the process that makes the most sense to me. He reaches back to German sociologist Max Weber who defined this as something called "patrimonialism."

Weber believed that rulers gain legitimacy from two one of two systems, the first being what Rausch calls "rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms." That would be the system we have been operating under since the founding of our country under the Constitution. Patrimonialism, on the other hand, is the system under which nearly everyone on earth lived until pretty recently in human history. Quoting a book called "The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future" by Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, which defines it as the state being "little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler":

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Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.

That's what Trump and Musk are in the process of creating: A pre-modern patrimonial government where everything is decided through them on a personal basis.

Rausch makes the case that this is not necessarily authoritarian since authoritarian systems like Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union were heavily bureaucratized. It can even begin as a democracy. But over time it almost always devolves into autocracy.

Rausch says that patrimonialism has two inherent weaknesses that make it vulnerable: incompetence and corruption. Once you chase out all the people who know how to make things run (bureaucrats) and allow corruption to supercede the needs of the people it breaks down.

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Rausch says, "corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you." It's the most potent argument against this patrimonial presidency, that's for sure.

I've never understood why more wasn't made of Trump's outright corruption in his first term. Now they are just waving it in our faces and it's a thousand times more blatant. Musk waving around a chainsaw and Trump hawking Teslas on the White House driveway last week says it all. Let's hope the opposition can get it together enough to pound that message home this time.

-Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com