Paul’s Letters: Christianity in Crisis

Season 2 · Episode 15

Full episode description

Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian writings we have, older than any of the four gospels. They are also crisis correspondence. Each one was written to a specific city, in response to a specific fracture, with Paul reading from across the Mediterranean what he could of a situation he could not be in. The theology in the letters is theology under pressure.

This episode walks:

• the seven undisputed letters of Paul, written by Paul himself between roughly 50 and 60 CE
• the six contested letters, including the three Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus), which most critical scholars now agree were written under Paul’s name a generation or more after his death
• the specific crises behind each letter, from the divisions at Corinth to the gentile question at Galatia to the imminent end of the world expected at Thessalonica
• the Letter to the Romans as Paul’s bridge into the imperial capital
• the way the Pauline collection was assembled, copied, and corrupted over time
• the slow drift toward institutional control visible in the silencing of women across the letters
• the two great silences in the Pauline corpus, who killed Jesus, and what the Letter of James suggests about a Jesus movement that did not centre on the cross at all

By the time the canon hardens, Paul has become an institution. The letters that won inclusion were the letters that told the consolidating church exactly what it wanted to hear.

The man who shaped Christianity most has been reshaped, in turn, by the church he made possible.

Not from tradition. From evidence.