Reading Paul

...and how we got here...

This is the first in a series of posts examining the undisputed epistles of Paul, those letters found in the Christian Canon (New Testament) that scholars have agreed were reliably written by (or, more accurately, dictated by) the man we now know as Paul. Our first task is to ask how we got here, and what we plan to do with this topic.

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Shortly after the presidential election of 2024 I began to wonder how I might, given my age and limitations, respond appropriately to the fascist turn that the U.S. had taken, especially in light of the role of so-called christian nationalism in that election.

The one thing I felt certain about was my ability to read and interpret the gospel message in a way that felt truer to Jesus’ actual teaching, a way that opened up a message of compassion, inclusion, humility, and peace rather than the power-over violence that was (and is) being noised about. So, early in 2025 I began to examine the Gospel of Luke, highlighting its nature as a constructed narrative and its use of techniques like verisimilitude and parables to illustrate elements of Jesus’ teaching as well as his own behavior.

That series led to a clear understanding that all of the language in Luke (as well as Mark and Matthew as all three have a common source) that concerns kingdom or kingship or Jesus as King was intended metaphorically. That Jesus in no way intended to become king over anyone, nor was he here to establish some form of kingdom in opposition to Rome.

If you’d like to see some of those posts, you can start with these:

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Once the work on Luke was complete, I noticed that ‘kingdom’ was NOT the only way the Bible describes life for followers of Jesus. The Gospel of John, written a bit later than Luke’s, uses the phrase ‘eternal life’ to indicate the quality of life Jesus promised his followers. That led to a fascinating set of studies, starting with this one:

Turns out, Luke’s metaphorical ‘kingdom’ and John’s ‘eternal life’ look a lot alike, suggesting that Christians may not want to hold too closely to the language of kingdom and kingship. We should be extremely cautious when we apply titles like Lord and King to Jesus since they can be easily subverted to create empires that eventually fly in the face of Jesus’ actual teaching and behavior.

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And that all brings us to Paul, the acknowledged author of several letters to Christian communities in and around the Mediterranean. Paul’s letters have their own vocabulary for life within those communities, eschewing the language of ‘kingdom’ and in favor of life ‘in Christ.’

For the balance of this series, we will look at the seven undisputed letters, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans, in the order scholars agree is earliest to latest, seeking to understand how Paul uses that phrase, ‘in Christ,’ in the context of each letter.

Why these seven? Briefly, the vocabulary, tone, and content of these letters form a consistent whole. (Here’s another Substacker, Andrew Springer, with a whole article on this question.) Reading these epistles (Greek for ‘letters’) one can easily imagine them coming from the same mind. There are three others, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, whose content and tone are so radically different from the uncontested letters of Paul that they are referred to as the Pastoral Epistles, and dated to c. 100 CE, decades after Paul’s death. That leaves three others, Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, that are considered ‘disputed,’ that is, scholars differ on whether these were written by Paul or not.

For the sake of working within the most authentic expressions of Paul’s thought, I will stick with the seven undisputed epistles and leave the others out of the present examination.

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A few things to know about Paul:

~ Paul never met Jesus. He never heard him preach. He hunted down Jews who followed Jesus, presumably because they were ‘traitors’ to his understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. His encounter with Christ took the form of a mystical vision, some time after the resurrection. Paul’s focus was on the Risen Christ, the one he reported having met as an inward vision (Galatians 1:16), after which he did not speak with the inner circle of Jesus’ followers for three years.

~ Also in Galatians, Paul makes it clear that he was educated as a Jew and was a particularly zealous Jew at that. Yet his mission as an emissary for Christ is to the pagan population of Asia Minor, translating his particular vision of Christianity into terms the Greek-speaking world around him would understand.

~ Paul wrote his letters before any of the gospels were written. However, the events recorded in the gospels took place years before Paul encountered Christ and began his work sharing the good news with pagan communities. This means we need to remember that Paul didn’t have the gospels as a guide, nor does his writing reflect ‘back’ to the gospel texts. At best he might have bumped into early collections of Jesus’ sayings or teachings, but we cannot draw straight lines from the gospels to the epistles.

~ There is another biblical source of information about Paul: the Book of Acts. Commonly attributed to the same author as the gospel of Luke, Acts is likewise a constructed narrative depicting the early days of the Christian community and their various controversies, as well as Paul’s travels around the Mediterranean sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ among Greek and other pagan communities. As this text was written from another viewpoint, not Paul’s own, it will not come up for examination in this series.

All of these contribute to a need to approach Paul’s letters with caution, noting especially where his particular view diverges from the clear message of the gospels. [Here’s another post from Andrew Springer that goes into detail on this topic.] While the Jesus we meet in the gospel narratives was deeply concerned with the social and bodily well-being of the people he encountered, Paul tends to focus on ‘right belief’ as the correct path for his followers. It may be that the phrase ‘in Christ’ will be the bridge between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ of the Epistles. We’ll see.

And finally, our guides for this series will be John Dominic Crossan and the late Marcus J. Borg, co-authors of The First Paul, a wise and readable look at the seven undisputed letters. [Link to the book via The Borg Foundation, as I prefer not to link directly to you-know-who.]

We start next week with Paul’s first letter to the community at Thessalonika, known as 1 Thessalonians.

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Thanks for coming along for this next segment of the journey. As a quick note, I’ll be having surgery again shortly after this post comes out. I hope to have a few more ready to go, but there may be a pause while I get the next few polished and ready to share. Thank you, and bless you for reading this far!