NT2213 The Pauline Tradition: 1 & 2 Corinthians
Mary E. Hinkle
Associate Professor of New Testament
Luther Seminary
Fall 2004

Week 3 | Sept. 20-26

Week 3 | To Do List and Links

1. Read this web page.
2. Read Cousar textbook (The Letters of Paul), pages 15-62.
3. Weblog.
4. Complete the Hunt for Paul's Letters. (web version | print-friendly version)

Paul Writes Letters

Almost everything we know about Paul's theology, we learn from letters that he wrote.  The New Testament includes thirteen letters bearing Paul's name.  Even if Paul wrote all of those letters, we still have only letters from him, letters written to particular times, places and problems.  In your work in this class you may hear the letters referred to as "occasional documents."  This means that they were written to particular occasions, rather than being written to be shared widely or being written with a general or generic audience in mind.  When we read Paul, we are reading mail. 

What's more, we are not even reading mail addressed originally to us.  Of course, Christians confess that Paul's letters are addressed to us in a sense. They are, after all, scripture, and as such they are God's Word to us.  Even so, sometimes when reading these letters, we get the sense that they are addressing someone else's problems.  What should we do with two chapters on eating meat offered to idols?  Why all the fuss about women covering their heads?  I agree with Paul (or whoever wrote 2 Timothy) that, "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Tim 3:16-17), but sometimes it is not altogether clear to me just how certain parts of Paul's letters are useful in these ways.

Parts of Letters

The ancients had at least as many forms of letters as we do. There were letters of friendship, letters of exhortation and advice, formal letters between government officials, etc. We will not study the differences between these types of letters. Instead, I offer here a simplified list of the parts of a standard letter form.

Generally, letters included these parts:

• Sender’s self designation
• Addressees
• Greeting
• Thanksgiving
• Theme
• Body
• Closing

Philemon as an Example

Even though Paul’s letter to Philemon is his shortest letter in the New Testament, it contains all of these parts.  Look at the division of the letter I have created below.  Think about how you would fill in the names of each part of the letter.  Begin to notice how the different parts of the letter may work together to communicate Paul’s meaning.

The Pauline Corpus

The word, "corpus" means "body" in Latin.  The Pauline corpus is just the body of Paul's works.  It usually refers to all thirteen New Testament letters that bear Paul's name.

Cousar's chapter on the deutero-Pauline letters (165-80) is a fine introduction to the question of how modern students of the New Testament have come to think that some of the NT letters attributed to Paul were actually written by second generation students of Paul.  (By the way, "deutero" is a prefix meaning "second.")

The question of who wrote what matters more for understanding early church history than it does (to me anyway) for taking all the letters seriously as scripture. 

Here is a list of how the thirteen letters are divided into "certainly by Paul," "maybe," and "maybe not."    Those in the "maybe not" and "likely not" columns are sometimes called deutero-Pauline letters.
 

There are a couple of other ways of organizing the Pauline Corpus that might interest you.  Some letters are called Hauptbriefe by German scholars.  The word means major letters.  Other letters were composed in prison and are called, coincidentally enough, Prison Letters.  Finally, the letters addressed to Timothy and Titus, early "pastors" of the church, are sometimes called the Pastoral Letters.  Here are lists for easy remembering of this information.  As you can see, some letters make more than one of these lists:

Read more about Paul as a letter-writer in Charles Cousar's book, The Letters of Paul, chapters 1-3.