Loading...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:
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Could you please list the parts of the undisputed seven that are suspected of being alterations/additions made by later scribes?
Do you mean list all the textual variants? It would require a book. There are many hundreds. They aren’t suspected — there are differences in our manuscripts. (Unless you’re referring to something else.)
Including your own references to Bauer in your books. Most helpful as are your other posts in this series. What would also be helpful would be an explanation of why Walter Bauer is so important and a reference to book(s) explaining the signifiant of Bauer.
I discuss him and his significance in my opening chapter of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and, probalby more accessibly, in Lost Christianities (pp. 172-79).
I’ve also posted on him a number of times, e.g., https://ehrmanblog.org/the-revolutionary-understanding-of-orthodoxy-and-heresy-an-evaluation-of-bauers-views/
Thank you Dr Ehrman. This was extremely useful as I am doing some private study of Paul and his Theology, following your NINT conference last year, and this gives me an excellent overview. Much appreciated.
Do scholars recognize that Paul could be fudging the truth in his letters? For instance, in his dispute with Peter in Galatians, his description of Peter’s actions might represent a straw man version of what Peter actually did and thought. Since we only have Paul’s side of the argument, we might be misinterpreting the Paul/Peter dispute because Paul is leaving out crucial details that weaken his position.
“Could be”? Yes, absolutely: it’s a regular topic of scholarly conversation (and has been since the beginnig of biblical scholarship), and the one-sided report of the dispute with Peter is often one of the key passages.
I’m curious about when Paul’s letter were compiled and by whom? It seems almost miraculous that, in that time period, letters sent to various destinations around the Mediterranean could somehow be gathered up together in one place. What are the earliest fragments or complete copies we have?
It’s an unusually complicated questoin that has vexed scholars for a very long time. There’s nothing miraculous about it. The letters of Ignatius (somewhat weirdly, we have seven of those too), were also collected together, and they too were sent to a wide range of places). But how it happened is trick. Already by 2 Peter we have a references to Paul’s Letters (calling them Scripture! 2 Pet 3:16). Ignatius (around 110) knows of his letters. Etc. Our earliest relatively full ms (called P45) comes from later, around 200. Both Marcion (around 140) and P45 apparenlty were missig the three Pastoral epistles (P45 is fragmentary and Marcion had only 10 letters in his canon; whether he knew more can’t be determined.). And… it actually gets pretty complex once you’re in teh weeds.
Yup! How the collection was compiled?.
Take, for instance, Romans. This letter was addressed to a church not founded by Paul, so why did this church preserve it?
I can understand why the Corinthians or the Philippians would highly appreciate a letter from the very founder of their churches,
but the Romans? For them, Paul was just another itinerant Christian preacher who wanted to visit them.
The same applies to Galatians.
We know the Galatians were saving money for Paul’s collection (1 Cor 16:1).
We also know from the very letter to the Galatians that some trouble arose there after some unknown rivals visited his church.
But when Paul finally finished his collection, he did not mention the Galatians among the collaborators (Romans 15:26).
So we have to assume that the Galatians refused to collaborate, or even worse, that he finally lost the battle with his rivals!
Yet, we still have the letter, so at least some of the Galatians must have remained loyal. But why didn’t they contribute to the collection?
One possibility is that someone made copies of Paul’s letters before they were sent,
so the letters were not collected from the original versions in the various churches Paul addressed but rather from these copies
Hey Bart! I’ve just joined the blog after listening to the podcast for a few months and being into this whole biblical research thing for about two years. Really appreciate your work – I haven’t gotten around to most of your books yet (not for lack of trying, they’re not at my local libraries/book stores), but I did get the chance to read The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and found it very interesting/useful in my personal projects.
What’s the etiquette like regarding asking questions on the blog? I have *many* a burning question on subjects I haven’t seen much discussion/scholarly work on, but they don’t necessarily pertain to the most recent blog post. Would those be better suited to the forum?
For now, I’ll ask one that *is* relevant here: are there any reasonable arguments against the authenticity of Philemon? I have seen some on Early Writings or r/AcademicBiblical offer up the idea from time to time, but never a cohesive study on it. It seems that with the heavy debate on some of Paul’s epistles (e.g Colossians and 2 Thessalonians) that Philemon could potentially be pseudepigrapha, only it’s too bite-sized to be fully confident in that or see any dead giveaways.
Welcome! You can ask any question of relevance to what we do on the blog at any time based on any post whether or not it has any relevance to the quesiton.
I prefer you limit it to one at a time. More than two at a time and I usually stop answering at two.
I don’t know of any strong argument against Philemon since forgeries tend to be pushing for an agenda of some kind (such as Col and 2 Thess) whereas this is such a personal letter that it seems unlikely. Normally there’d be some kind of obvious, nore generalizeable point. A related questoin is why anyone wanted it in the canon in the first place!
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Thanks for your valuable knowledge!
Do you think we can glean any insights about the historical Paul through the pseudonymous letters or through the church fathers or later non-canonical books about him?
Not so much. But we can certainly see how Paul was *understood* and interpreted, and htat too is valuable — not for understanding him directly but for understanding how Christianity was developing in different times and places.
If Paul rebranded Jesus’ movement for Gentiles, making him the first megachurch pastor, does that mean billions have actually been ‘Paul-ians’ all along?
I’d say most have Paul’s theology today — or at least based their views on it — rthat than Jesus’s. As many have said, Christiannity is anbd always has been more the religion *about* Jesus than the religion *of* Jesus.
I wonder if you could comment on how god became omnipotent etc.
Believers would say he never did “become” omnipotent. He eternally is.
Dr.B, any thoughts on Albert Schweitzer’s ”The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle”?
It’s a classic. I haven’t looked at it in years (decades!) though.
I want to respectfully take issue with this statement in the “Nutshell” posting” Paul,”…in effect, started the worldwide mission that within three hundred years would make Christianity the largest religion…”
Some years elapsed between when Paul’s conversion via a “near-death experience” during which his spirit travelled to a different realm and was commissioned by the spirit of Jesus to be an apostle and when he. [I believe this event was triggered when his body was struck by lightening and severely burned while travelling on the road to Damascus. Note that his detailed account in Acts 22: 6-11 and 2nd Corinthians 12: 1-4 match closely with those given by thousands of individuals since then — see the two books by Dr. Raymond Moody or books by others.] In Romans, Paul is writing to an established group of Christians in Rome, so someone preceded Paul in getting converts. We also know that missionaries established large groups of early followers of Jesus in Alexandria.
I also respectfully urge you to read about the latest book by Dr. Jim Tucker that describes 65 years of research into reincarnation. More than a billion people believe reincarnation is real.
Bill Steigelmann