Yesterday one of my fellow-travelers on a trip I'm taking wanted to talk about Paul and his self-image, and whether Paul had a rather (or extremely) exalted view of his own importance.  I gave him one of my standard answers, that I think it's impossible to engage in a psychological analysis of a person's self-image when they lived millennia ago (it's certainly hard enough when they share our time and culture and we've known them for years). But it is possible to know, sometimes, what a person actually thought about themselves on some level.  And however we evaluate the psychological elements involved, I do think it's safe to say that Paul saw himself as an important and inspired person in the history of the salvation of the world.  Make of it what you will! Here's how I have explained it before, based on my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press), edited here for the occasion.   ****************************** To make sense of how Paul’s conversion affected his actual life, not just his theology, [...]

In the previous post I began to answer the question of which lost books of early Christianity I would most like to have discovered, by discussing the earliest writings of which we are familiar, the letters of Paul, most of which (presumably) have been lost.  I would love for us to find some of them.  I doubt if we ever will, but who knows? I suppose we'd all love to have more letters from Paul, and not merely for sentimental reasons (it's not that it "would be nice").  Paul is without a doubt the most important figure in the Christian tradition next to Jesus himself.  His writings have served as a basis for Christian ethical and theological thought for centuries.  And yet we know so little about what he thought and taught. When people read Paul’s letters, they frequently neglect to realize that are all “occasional” writings.  By that I do not mean that Paul occasionally wrote letters, but that Paul wrote his letters for particular occasions.   The letters are addressed to situations [...]

Now that the semester is over and, well, I’m retired from teaching (!), I am able to start in seriously on doing research for my next book project, on how we got the canon of the New Testament.  There are 27  books in the canon.  Why these 27 in particular?  Why were others excluded – other Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Apocalypses, etc.?  Who decided?  On what grounds? And when? I’ve blogged about the book in recent months (back when I thought I’d be able to do some serious research in it during the fall semester!  Oh well…); if you’re interested, here are two posts: My Next Book: Creating the Bible — How We Got the Canon of the New Testament My First Scholarly Encounter with the Canon of the New Testament   Here I can explain how I’m starting to approach the issue. There are tons of books about the formation of the canon that are almost entirely focused on the issues of names and dates – based on our surviving evidence which books [...]

I have been providing bullet-point summaries of the books of the New Testament, based on my fuller "nutshell summaries,"  along with some questions to think about in reflecting on the books.  With this post I will complete the undisputed Pauline epistles, that is, the seven letters that by virtual consensus are considered to be authentically from Paul's hand, by dealing with two, the letters to the Philippians and the only one of these letters to an individual, Philemon. Again, if you want to refresh your memory on the books, they are short (Philemon is a single page!) and not complicated to re(read); you can find my posts on them here: Philippians Philippians in a Nutshell Philippians: Who Wrote It? When and Why? Philippians: For Further Reading The Most Widely Discussed Passage of Philippians Philemon Philemon in a Nutshell Philemon and the Morality of Slavery Philemon: For Further Reading At a Glance:  Philippians The letter is written to Christians that Paul had converted in the city of Philippi, in eastern Macedonia. Paul wrote [...]

Now that I have finished this subthread on the letters of Paul in a nutshell, I'd like to provide brief summaries of the various Pauline writings (both "undisputed" and deutero-Pauline).  These posts will be quick and to the point.  In them I reproduce my overviews called "At a Glance" for each letter that I give in my textbook as the final bit of each discussion for each book, along with a couple of questions to reflect on.  If  the summaries don't make immediate sense and/or the questions don't seem to have an obvious question, I'd recommend rereading the relevant posts from a while back. In this post I deal the the letter to the Romans.  Here are the previous posts, in case you need a reminder: https://ehrmanblog.org/pauls-letter-to-the-romans-in-a-nutshell/ https://ehrmanblog.org/the-letter-to-the-romans-who-when-and-why/ https://ehrmanblog.org/unusually-important-for-pauls-letter-to-the-romans-pauls-models-of-salvation/   ROMANS: AT A GLANCE Unlike Paul’s other surviving letters, Romans was written to a church he had not founded or even visited. It was written evidently to secure the support of the Roman Christians for Paul’s missionary endeavors farther west, in Spain. [...]