Summary: Bible - Pauline Epistles

The GIST

Pauline Epistles is the name for the thirteen books of the New Testament that carry the name of Paul the Apostle: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon. They are letters, sent to churches and to individuals, and they include some of the earliest Christian documents that survive. Because they were written while the new faith was still working out what it believed, they open a window on the convictions and quarrels of the first Christians. As part of the New Testament they are foundational texts for Christian theology and for Christian ethics.

In every one of the thirteen the writer says he is Paul. Whether that is true of all of them is a long-standing question in biblical scholarship. Most scholars are confident about seven, divided about three, and doubtful about three. A fourteenth work, the Epistle to the Hebrews, long travelled with the collection without bearing his name. To read the Pauline letters well is to know what kind of writing they are, how they were produced and gathered, and how much is and is not certain about them.

What It Says

The seven that are agreed. The majority of scholars believe Paul himself wrote seven of the letters, and they can be set out in the order of their usual dates. Galatians comes first, around 48 AD. First Thessalonians follows, around 49 to 51. The two letters to Corinth come next, First Corinthians around 53 to 54 and Second Corinthians around 55 to 56. Romans is placed around 55 to 57. Philippians and Philemon are dated either to 57 to 59 or to about 62. These seven are the firm ground of the collection, the place where a reader meets Paul with the least doubt about who is speaking, and they fall within roughly a decade and a half.

The three that divide opinion. On Second Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians, scholars are about evenly split. Second Thessalonians has strong support for being genuine. Colossians is defended on the ground that it has unmistakably Pauline features of style found nowhere else in the New Testament, and its advocates argue that the differences between it and the other letters have been overstated. If these three are Paul's, they belong to about 51 to 52 for Second Thessalonians, 57 to 59 or 62 for Colossians, and 62 for Ephesians. If they are not, those dates are probably wrong.

The three that many doubt. First Timothy, Second Timothy and Titus, the three letters addressed to individual church leaders, are widely seen as pseudepigraphic, meaning written in Paul's name by someone else. Their traditional dates run from about 62 to 67, but their content suggests to many scholars that they were written a decade or more later than that.

How the doubtful letters are explained. Some scholars think the disputed letters came from followers of Paul who wrote in his name, drawing on his surviving letters and on others that have since been lost. Attributing a work to a revered teacher was a common practice at the time. The case against these letters rests mostly on internal evidence, such as style, vocabulary and subject matter, which the article on the subject describes as tending to be subjective. Those who defend them point to external evidence instead: manuscripts, the testimony of ancient writers, early lists of accepted books and early collections. They add that early Christians consistently rejected forgeries, and that writings under a false name were unlikely to gain the wide circulation these letters had.

Paul and his secretaries. One fact complicates every argument from style. Paul did not write alone. He says outright in several letters that he used secretaries, and sometimes names them. A number of scholars have suggested, from details he gives about himself, that he had some physical difficulty, perhaps poor eyesight or damaged hands. He may also have had a team of readers. That adds layers to the question of how any letter was composed, and offers one possible explanation for letters that do not quite sound like him. The scholar Candida Moss has argued that enslaved and formerly enslaved secretaries played a large and overlooked part in producing early Christian texts like these, and that their contribution deserves recognition. Paul's secretaries and close associates also carried the letters to their destinations and brought news from one church to another.

The shape of a letter. Paul wrote within the conventions of his world. His letters follow the standard Greco-Roman pattern, with some changes of his own: an opening, a thanksgiving or blessing, the body, and a closing. Nor was he unusual in having his letters collected and published. Letter collections were a recognised kind of literature, and those of Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the Younger and Ignatius of Antioch offer comparisons. In that world authors helped assemble their own letters for circulation, secretaries made duplicate copies, collections were arranged by recipient or subject and not by date, and collections were sometimes enlarged after the author's death, even with writings by other hands.

The order on the page. This explains something that puzzles many first-time readers: the letters are not printed in the order they were written. The arrangement, which is remarkably stable across the manuscripts, runs by length, from the longest letter to the shortest, with the letters to individuals kept together in a final group. So Romans stands first and Philemon last, although neither is first or last in time. There is one small anomaly: Galatians comes before Ephesians, which is slightly longer. In modern editions the whole group sits between the Acts of the Apostles and the general epistles, though most Greek manuscripts put the general epistles first.

Hebrews at the edge. The Epistle to the Hebrews is anonymous and is not really in the form of a letter, yet it has long been included among Paul's collected letters. It was traditionally considered his, although Rome questioned that. From the sixteenth century opinion moved steadily away, and few scholars now ascribe it to him, mainly because it does not read like his other letters in style or content and because, unlike them, it never claims him as author. Its wandering position in the manuscripts tells the same story. Some copies put it after Romans, some before the letters to individuals, and most after Philemon, which is where modern editions leave it, a practice made popular by Jerome's Latin Bible in the fourth century.

Letters that are missing, and letters that are false. The collection is not everything Paul wrote. His own words seem to point to letters that have not survived: an earlier letter to Corinth, mentioned in First Corinthians; a severe letter to the same church, written between the two that remain; an earlier letter to the Ephesians; and possibly a letter to the Laodiceans mentioned in Colossians. Later generations filled such gaps with inventions. A Third Epistle to the Corinthians was accepted for a time by the Syriac and Armenian churches and is now dated to the later second century. A Latin Epistle to the Laodiceans, found in some old Bibles, is largely stitched together from verses of Philippians. A supposed exchange of letters between Paul and the philosopher Seneca is universally regarded as a forgery of the fourth century. An Epistle to the Alexandrians is known only because an early list denounces it.

Why It Matters

These letters stand at the centre of the New Testament's formation. A collection of Paul's letters circulated on its own, apart from other early Christian writings, before it became part of the larger book, and when the canon was settled the gospels and Paul's letters were the core of what the New Testament would be. The scholar David Trobisch thinks it likely that Paul himself first gathered his letters for publication. It was normal in his day for a letter writer to keep one copy and send another, and surviving ancient collections began sometimes from the sender's copies and sometimes from the recipients'.

Questions about authorship are not only modern. Rome questioned whether Paul wrote Hebrews long before the sixteenth century, and Jerome knew of ancient doubts about it. Churches and scholars do not all draw the lines in the same place: some churches still ascribe Hebrews to Paul, while most of Christianity and modern scholarship do not. What is not in dispute is the standing of the seven agreed letters as some of the earliest Christian documents in existence, and the place the whole collection holds as a foundation of Christian theology and ethics.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants to hear the earliest Christian voice that can be dated with confidence, and anyone interested in how ancient letters were written, copied and gathered into books. Readers who have met Paul only in single verses will find it helps to know which letter came when, which are certainly his and which are debated. Begin with one of the seven agreed letters and read it whole, as its first hearers did.