Interpreting the Pauline Epistles

Thomas R. Schreiner

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801038129
• eBook ISBN: 9781441236395
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Leading Pauline-studies expert Thomas Schreiner provides an updated guide to the exegesis of the New Testament epistles traditionally assigned to Paul. The first edition helped thousands of students dig deeper into studying the New Testament epistles. This new edition is revised throughout to account for changes in the field and to incorporate the author's maturing judgments. The book helps readers understand the nature of first-century letters, do textual criticism, investigate historical and introductory issues, probe theological context, and much more.

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Understanding the Nature of Letters

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The Question of Genre

Perhaps the most important issue in interpretation is the issue of genre. If we misunderstand the genre of a text, the rest of our analysis will be askew. If we interpret a fairy tale as a historical report, the interpretation may be profound and insightful in many ways, but the interpretation will be fatally flawed from the beginning because of a misreading of the genre of the text.

All thirteen writings attributed to Paul are letters. The most unsophisticated reader intuitively grasps that letters are quite different from Gospels or other books like Acts and Revelation. The question for the interpreter is, What difference does it make that Paul wrote letters rather than Gospels? Or to put it another way, What can we learn about the genre of the Pauline Letters that will help us interpret them more accurately? This chapter will try to answer this question.

Letters or Epistles?

It is important to discern the nature of the Pauline Letters before interpreting them. In contemporary scholarship the relationship between Pauline Letters and other letters written in the ancient Greco-Roman world is being keenly studied.[1] In the early part of the twentieth century, Adolf Deissmann argued that Paul’s writings should be designated as letters in distinction from epistles.[2] Epistles, he maintained, were artistically written for a wider public and intended for posterity, while letters were dashed off to address specific situations and problems and were never intended to be literary compositions. Paul’s Letters, he claimed, are not literary treatises. They are occasional documents (i.e., addressed to specific situations) written in the language of the common people. According to Deissmann, Paul wrote his letters to react to specific problems that occurred in the churches but never conceived of them as documents that would continue to function authoritatively in the future life of the church.

Deissmann was surely right in stressing that Paul wrote his letters to specific situations and to address particular problems in his congregations. There is no indication that Paul expected later generations to read them. Nevertheless, Deissmann’s neat distinction between letters and epistles has been rightly questioned by contemporary scholarship, and his thesis should be modified for the following reasons. First, Deissmann overemphasizes the similarity between the papyri and the Pauline Letters. Even a cursory reading of the papyri and the Pauline Letters demonstrates the remarkable differences that exist between the two bodies of literature. For instance, Paul’s Letters display a literary quality and structure that are not evident in the papyri. In fact, some recent scholars have contended that the Pauline Letters are patterned after Greek rhetoric. Even if these scholars overemphasize this point, they are surely right in asserting that the letters are literary products. Paul’s Letters are occasional in nature, and yet they show every evidence of being carefully written compositions.

Second, Deissmann rightly stresses the occasional nature of the Pauline Letters (a topic we will address below), but the letters were not merely private individual letters. Paul wrote them as an apostle of Jesus Christ, and he expected them to be read and obeyed by the Christian community (1 Cor. 14:37; 1 Thess. 5:27; 2 Thess. 3:14). Indeed, even though Colossians addressed a specific situation, Paul thought its message would be helpful to the Laodiceans (Col. 4:16). Apparently Paul believed that his specific and occasional instructions for the Colossians had a wider significance so that his words were relevant not only for the Colossians but also for the Laodiceans. Furthermore, Paul clearly said that his words were the very word of God (1 Cor. 14:37–38; see Gal. 1:8). He did not conceive of his letters as mere human advice (cf. 1 Thess. 2:13). Thus, the letters had a normative and authoritative status from the beginning (which is perhaps why they were preserved), and letters written to particular communities could apply to other churches as well.

Structure of Pauline Letters

An analysis of the structure of Pauline Letters is essential for proper interpretation. A helpful tool for an analysis of forms in Paul is the book titled Pauline Parallels.[3] Here Pauline passages that reflect the same literary form or are on the same topic are collected so that the reader can compare and contrast parallel passages. Paul’s Letters follow the format of most Greco-Roman letters of his day, containing the opening, the body, and the closing.

The Opening

The opening usually has the following four elements: (1) the sender of the letter is named (e.g., “Paul”); (2) the addressees of the letter are specified (e.g., “to the Thessalonians”); (3) the greeting (“grace and peace”); and (4) the prayer, which was usually a thanksgiving (“I thank God”).

SENDER OF LETTER

Paul adds his own twist to each of these conventional patterns in the opening of the letters. He often designates himself as an “apostle” or as a “slave” when he names himself as the sender. Also Paul typically lists various cosenders in his letters: “Paul and Silas and Timothy” (1 Thess. 1:1; 2 Thess. 1:1); “Paul and Timothy” (Phil. 1:1); “Paul . . . and all the brothers with me” (Gal. 1:1–2); “Paul and Sosthenes” (1 Cor. 1:1). Not all the letters, however, have cosenders (Rom. 1:1; Eph. 1:1; 1 Tim. 1:1; 2 Tim. 1:1; Titus 1:1). Paul may name some of these cosenders because they have participated with him in the planting of the church. I think it is doubtful that the cosenders played a major role in the actual composition of the letters. By referring to his partners, Paul may also be indicating that the gospel he preaches and writes about is not his private opinion; the brothers with him recognize its authority as well. For example, the inclusion of “all the brothers with me” in Gal. 1:2 is an indication that Paul’s gospel is accepted as truth by the Christian community from which he writes. It is the Galatians, not Paul, who have deviated from the apostolic traditions.

How Paul designates himself is significant interpretively. On the one hand, his authority as an apostle is highlighted and expanded on in Galatians (1:1), where his gospel is being questioned and the Galatians have wandered from the truth. In Rom. 1:1–7 Paul elaborates on his apostleship and his gospel in order to introduce himself to his readers in Rome. In the opening, Paul previews the letter; in the rest of the letter, he unfolds his gospel for Jews and gentiles. On the other hand, omission of any reference to his apostolic authority in 1 Thessalonians may be a clue that there was no dispute regarding Paul’s apostolic authority in Thessalonica. So too in the personal and warm letter to Philemon, Paul identifies himself as δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ (“prisoner of Christ Jesus,” Philem. 1). In writing to a personal friend in a delicate situation, Paul does not want to appeal to his apostolic authority. Moreover, his self-designation fits with the emphasis on his present status and Onesimus’s usefulness to him in prison (Philem. 9–13).

In the letter to the Philippians, which contains several suggestions that the church is plagued with lack of unity (Phil. 1:27–2:4; 4:2–3), Paul does not call himself an apostle, but designates himself and Timothy as δοῦλοι (“servants,” 1:1). From the beginning Paul uses himself as a model and example for the Philippians. Disunity is caused by self-exaltation and the failure to be a servant to brothers and sisters. Paul, Timothy (2:19–24), Epaphroditus (2:25–30), and most significantly the Lord Jesus (2:6–11) all have the mind-set of a servant.

ADDRESSEES

The addressees in Paul’s Letters are Christian communities, and Paul has these communities in view even when he writes to individuals such as Philemon, Timothy, and Titus. Paul adds distinctive features here as well. The Thessalonians are addressed as those who are “in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 1:1; see 2 Thess. 1:1, which in Greek is precisely the same with the addition of the pronoun ἡμῶν, “our”). He often calls his readers “saints,” “beloved,” “called,” or “sanctified.” In Philippians, Paul specifically mentions the “overseers and deacons” (Phil. 1:1). Nowhere else does he mention church leaders in the addressee section, and so the interpreter must probe to discover the reason for this distinctive feature in Philippians. The church of Corinth was rent by division (1 Cor. 1:10–4:21), and so Paul’s inclusion of “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both theirs and ours” (1 Cor. 1:2 NRSV), is intended to remind the Corinthians of the wider scope of the body of Christ. This foreshadows Paul’s emphasis on the traditions of other churches in 1 Corinthians (11:2, 16, 23–26; 14:33b; 15:1–4). The same emphasis on the wider scope of God’s church also appears in 2 Cor. 1:1.

GREETING

The typical Hellenistic greeting in letters was χαίρειν (“greetings,” as in Acts 15:23). Paul, however, Christianizes the greeting by changing it to the Greek word χάρις (grace), a distinctive element in his gospel. Most Hebrew or Aramaic letters would greet the recipients with the word שָׁלוֹם (peace), and this may account for Paul’s inclusion of the word εἰρήνη (peace) in the greeting. Perhaps both “grace and peace” were included because Paul wanted to include both Hellenistic and Jewish literary conventions in his greetings to represent his gospel’s emphasis on the equal standing of gentiles and Jews before God (Gal. 3:28–29; Rom. 1:16; 15:7–13). Paul adds the word ἔλεος (mercy), which is also found in some Jewish letters, to his greeting in 1 Tim. 1:1 and 2 Tim. 1:2.

Almost all of the greetings in Paul’s Letters are from “God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The exceptions are Col. 1:2, where only God the Father is mentioned, and 1 Thess. 1:1, where Paul simply greets the readers with the words “grace and peace to you.” In Titus 1:4 Paul adds the attribution “our Savior” to “Christ Jesus,” probably because Savior is a central theme in this letter. In Gal. 1:4 Paul adds a statement on the purpose of the giving of God’s Son: “[He] gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age.” Here he signals one of the major themes of the letter. The Galatians have, so to speak, been put under a spell and have failed to see the significance of the cross of Christ (see 2:21; 3:1, 13; 4:4–5; 5:11; 6:12, 14). If they capitulate to a false gospel, then they will be entrapped in the present evil age, from which Christ died to liberate them. Careful reading of the opening, therefore, is essential because it alerts the reader to central themes that will be developed in the letter.

PRAYER

The last element of the opening is the prayer.[4] Hellenistic letters usually contained a health wish and then a prayer to the gods for the addressee. Almost all of Paul’s Letters have a thanksgiving (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:4–9; Col. 1:3–8) or a blessing (2 Cor. 1:3–7; Eph. 1:3–14).[5] Only Galatians and Titus lack a thanksgiving; the latter lacks it because Paul was writing a brief letter of instruction to his trusted assistant, while the former lacks it because the Galatians’ abandonment of the gospel rather than thanksgiving was in the forefront of Paul’s mind. He does not follow any set pattern in his thanksgivings. The thanksgiving in 1 Cor. 1:4–9 is discrete and easily separable. In Phil. 1:3–11 and Col. 1:3–14 a petition is added to the thanksgiving section. In 1 Thessalonians the thanksgiving period is longer (1:2–3:13) and is punctuated with other themes. The interpreter should be careful to allow each letter to express its distinctive message, since Paul’s style does not necessarily follow any particular pattern.

One of the most important conclusions that has been established by the work of Schubert, O’Brien, and Wiles is the function of the prayers in the Pauline argument. Paul’s thanksgivings and intercessory prayers often signal the major themes in the letter and thus demand careful analysis. The thanksgiving sections reveal Paul’s pastoral care for the Christian communities and secure their goodwill. They also have a didactic and paraenetic purpose, instructing and exhorting the readers in the Christian life. Finally, a liturgical element is probably present as well, making the public reading of the letter appropriate for corporate worship.

An example may help here. In 1 Cor. 1:4–9 Paul thanks God for the spiritual gifts and the richness of knowledge in the Corinthian community. We know from the rest of the letter (chaps. 1–4; 8–10; 12–14) that the Corinthians misunderstood the role of knowledge and spiritual gifts. They wrongly exalted themselves for their superior knowledge and their experience of spiritual gifts. From the beginning of the letter, Paul acknowledges that spiritual gifts and knowledge are to be celebrated. Nevertheless, the thanksgiving section stresses that all praise should go to God for these benefits, not to the Corinthians. There is no justification for pride or self-exaltation. The thanksgiving anticipates, then, Paul’s subsequent response to the problems in the Corinthian community.

The Body

The next major section of Pauline Letters, the body, is the subject of intensive investigation for literary patterns and structure. Scholars have not reached a consensus yet on the structure of Pauline Letters, and this is hardly surprising since the letters exhibit remarkable diversity. The wise interpreter will begin with a careful analysis of the contents of the letter itself instead of trying to fit it into any preexisting type.

The Closing

It is often difficult to determine precisely where the body of a Pauline letter ends and where its closing begins. Many of Paul’s Letters include the following elements in the closing.[6]

1. Travel plans or personal situation (Rom. 15:22–29; 1 Cor. 16:5–9; Eph. 6:21–22; Col. 4:7–9; 2 Tim. 4:9–17; Titus 3:12)
2. Prayer (Rom. 15:33; 16:25–27; 1 Thess. 5:23; 2 Thess. 3:16)
3. Commendation of fellow workers (Rom. 16:1–2; 1 Cor. 16:10–12)
4. Prayer requests (Rom. 15:30–32; Col. 4:2–4; Eph. 6:18–20; 1 Thess. 5:25)
5. Greetings (Rom. 16:3–16, 21–23; 1 Cor. 16:19–21; 2 Cor. 13:12; Phil. 4:21–22; Col. 4:10–15; 2 Tim. 4:19–21; Titus 3:15a; Philem. 23–24)
6. Final instructions and exhortations (Rom. 16:17–20a; 1 Cor. 16:13–18; 2 Cor. 13:11; Gal. 6:11–17; Col. 4:16–18a; 1 Thess. 5:27; 2 Thess. 3:14–15; 1 Tim. 6:20–21a; Philem. 21–22)
7. Holy kiss (1 Cor. 16:20b; 2 Cor. 13:12a; 1 Thess. 5:26)
8. Autographed greeting (1 Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11; Col. 4:18a; 2 Thess. 3:17; Philem. 19)
9. A χάρις (grace) benediction (Rom. 16:20b; 1 Cor. 16:23–24; 2 Cor. 13:14 (13:13 in Greek); Gal. 6:18; Eph. 6:24; Phil. 4:23; Col. 4:18b; 1 Thess. 5:28; 2 Thess. 3:18; 1 Tim. 6:21b; 2 Tim. 4:22b; Titus 3:15b; Philem. 25)

The order of these items varies in the different letters, lacking any obvious preformed pattern. The only constant is that the benediction comes at the end, except in Romans. Most He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Understanding the Nature of Letters
• 2. Doing Textual Criticism
• 3. Translating and Analyzing the Letter
• 4. Investigating Historical and Introductory Issues
• 5. Diagramming and Conducting a Grammatical Analysis
• 6. Tracing the Argument
• 7. Doing Lexical Studies
• 8. Probing the Theological Context
• 9. Delineating the Significance of Paul’s Letters
• Conclusion
• Select Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles
• Notes