Paul The Letter Writer

This clear and user-friendly introduction to the interpretive method called "epistolary analysis" shows how focusing on the form and function of Paul's letters yields valuable insights into the apostle's purpose and meaning. The author helps readers interpret Paul's letters properly by paying close attention to the apostle's use of ancient letter-writing conventions. Paul is an extremely skilled letter writer who deliberately adapts or expands traditional epistolary forms so that his persuasive purposes are enhanced. This is an ideal supplemental textbook for courses on Paul or the New Testament. It contains numerous analyses of key Pauline texts, including a final chapter analyzing the apostle's Letter to Philemon as a "test case" to demonstrate the benefits of this interpretive approach.

How did Paul use his secretaries? Did he rely on co-authors? Did his rhetorical education affect the way he organised his material? This book confronts these questions on the basis of extensive quotations from classical Greek and Latin authors. A synoptic survey of the beginnings and ends of the letters brings out the extent to which Paul both used and adapted current epistolary conventions. The intention of the book is to humanize the Pauline letters and make their complex theology less daunting. (Adapted from back cover).

Informed by the historical evidence and with a sharp eye for telltale clues in the Apostle Paul's letters, E. Randolph Richards takes us into his world and places us on the scene with Paul the letter writer offering a glimpse that overthrows our preconceptions and offers a new perspective on how this important portion of Christian Scripture came to be.

This engaging study shows how Paul's stylized use of the official Roman letter - a form of communication of great social import in his day - played a crucial role in his apostolic ministry, conveying both his self-identity and sense of authority. M. Luther Stirewalt describes the logistics of letter writing in the first-century Mediterranean world and shows how official letters served to substitute for speeches to an audience, to convey executive, official, or bureaucratic matters, or to bring complaints or petitions from citizens to officials. He then shows how Paul structured his apostolic correspondence after these models of writing, drawing evidence directly from seven Pauline epistles: 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, Galatians, and Romans. Cutting a new angle on Paul's purposes, his ministry, and his pastoral concerns, Stirewalt's "Paul, the Letter Writer" will appeal to readers of the Bible and ancient history.

With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait. Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how. Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John’s reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public’s reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists’ work), and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.

This study argues for new perspectives on the letters of Paul, especially the Second Letter to Timothy. It examines striking aspects of Paul's letters, especially the fact that many of them are co-authored, that six of them acknowledge that a secretary has penned the letter, and that 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus are the only ones addressed to individuals. It investigates the implications of these facts for the concept of Pauline authorship. Prior maintains that the received arguments, statistical as well as literary, which exclude 2 Timothy from the influence of Paul, are less than convincing. The author suggests an original reading of 2 Timothy arguing it was composed by Paul towards the end of his first Roman imprisonment. Contrary to all interpretations of the letter which argue that Paul was about to be martyred, Prior claims that Paul was confident that he would be released, and was assembling a mission team to bring his proclamation of the Gospel to a completion. Timothy's courage and missionary zeal needed rekindling, for he and Mark were to be key figures in this new team.

The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.

Making use of letters--both formal and personal--that have been preserved through the ages, Stanley Stowers analyzes the cultural setting within which Christianity arose. The Library of Early Christianity is a series of eight outstanding books exploring the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts in which the New Testament developed.

"Paul's letters, the earliest writings in the New Testament, are filled with allusions, images and quotations from the Old Testament. This book investigates Paul's appropriation of Scripture from a perspective based on recent literary-critical studies of intertextuality."--Amazon.com.