When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus in Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments” (2 Timothy 4:13).
“I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else” (1 Corinthians 1:16).
“And one thing more: Prepare a guest room for me, because I hope to be restored to you in answer to your prayers” (Philemon 1:22).
It’s a bit startling to encounter such personal, prosaic comments alongside some of Scripture’s most memorable lines—“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1); “Whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable . . . think about such things” (Philippians 4:8). But the juxtaposition serves as a useful reminder that twenty-two of the New Testament’s twenty-seven books aren’t actually books. They’re letters.
While literary epistles were common in the ancient world, the degree to which the genre dominated early Christian communication and instruction is striking. As New Testament scholar M. Eugene Boring noted, “In no other religious community have letters become sacred Scripture or played such a formative role.”1
Of course, the authors did not consider their letters Scripture at the time, nor did the recipients. The concerns of the world’s first Christians were far more practical: how to get financial support for ministry, how to respond to arguments that Gentile converts needed to be circumcised, what to do with the influx of poor widows joining the church, which Roman laws to observe and which to challenge, and most important, how to foster theological and communal unity between Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, men and women, new converts and mature Christians.
Although the Gospels appear before the Epistles in the ordering of the New Testament, it’s likely the Epistles were written first, their messages revealing the most pressing questions, teachings, debates, and dramas of the early church. Most of these letters were composed by the apostle Paul, or by students writing in his name; others are attributed to the apostles Peter, James, Jude, and John.2 The recipients were new followers of Jesus, most of them Gentiles, meeting in house churches in cities and towns across the Roman Empire.
Scholars generally divide ancient letters into two categories: “real letters” (correspondence intended for a specific and limited audience, like a soldier writing home), and “non-real letters” (literary works in epistolary form intended for the general public, like the published letters of the ancient philosopher Seneca). But the Epistles of the New Testament combine elements of both, and as a result, contain instructions both general—“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5)—and specific—“Greet my dear friend Epenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in the province of Asia” (Romans 16:5). Furthermore, as letters emerging from an ancient Greco-Roman context, the Epistles presume certain cultural norms, like patriarchy, slavery, and patronage, and reflect the unique concerns of a minority religious sect in an imperial context. They expect women to wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:6), men to have short hair (11:14), and everyone to “greet one another with a holy kiss” (16:20). They wrestle with the age-old question of how to live as citizens of the kingdom of God in the shadow of the empire, as well as specific questions about whether Christians should buy discounted meat after it has been sacrificed to Roman gods. As a result, many passages carry a timeless, universal quality—“God is love” (1 John 4:16), while others reflect the unique challenges confronting followers of Jesus in the first century—“Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience” (1 Corinthians 10:25).
As Pastor Adam Hamilton explained, “When you read one of Paul’s letters, or any other New Testament letter, you are reading someone else’s mail. Christians often forget this. They read Paul’s letters as though he wrote just for them. This works fine most of the time; Paul’s instructions, his theological reflections and his practical concerns are amazingly timeless. But they become most meaningful, and we are least likely to misapply their teaching, when we seek to understand why he may have written this or that to a given church.”3
A verse in a letter addressed to Titus illustrates this perfectly. Angered by some of the false teachings emerging from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, which Titus is busy trying to fix, the apostle Paul declared, “One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’ This saying is true” (Titus 1:12–13).
Believe it or not, I’ve never once heard a sermon preached on this passage. And yet, if these words are truly the inerrant and unchanging words of God intended as universal commands for all people in all places at all times, and if the culture and context are irrelevant to the “plain meaning of the text,” then apparently Christians need to do a better job of mobilizing against the Cretan people. Perhaps we need to construct some “God Hates Cretans” signs, or lobby the government to deport Cretan immigrants, or boycott all movies starring Jennifer Aniston, whose father, I hear, is a lazy, evil, gluttonous Cretan.
I’m being facetious of course, but my point is, we dishonor the intent and purpose of the Epistles when we assume they were written in a vacuum for the purpose of filling our desk calendars with inspirational quotes or our theology papers with proof texts. (For the record, Paul told Titus to find among the Cretans leaders who were “blameless,” “hospitable,” “self-controlled,” and “disciplined,” so obviously he didn’t apply the stereotype to all from the island.) The Epistles were never intended to be applied as law. Even conservative biblical scholar F. F. Bruce once remarked that the apostle Paul would “roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.”4
Like so much of Scripture, the Epistles were written for us but not to us. Modern readers benefit immensely from seeing how the earliest followers of Jesus applied his teachings to their lives and communities, particularly in the midst of outside persecution and internal debate. Just think of how much we owe the apostle Paul for reminding us “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self control” and “against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23 NASB). That never stops being true. But we get into trouble when we mistake instructions intended for a specific group of people at a specific moment in history as universally binding for all.
We see this happen a lot with the New Testament household codes, found in various forms in Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Peter. Many modern readers assume teachings about wives submitting to their husbands appear exclusively in the pages of Scripture and thus reflect uniquely “biblical” views about women’s roles in the home. But to the people who first heard these letters read aloud in their churches, the words of Peter and Paul would have struck them as both familiar and strange, a sort of Christian remix on familiar Greco-Roman philosophy that positioned the male head of house as the rightful ruler over his subordinate wives, children, and slaves. By instructing men to love their wives and respect their slaves, and by telling everyone to “submit to one another” with Jesus as the ultimate head of house, the apostles offer correctives to cultural norms without upending them. They challenge new believers to reconsider their relationships with one another now that, in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Galatians 3:28). The plot thickens when we pay attention to some of the recurring characters in the Epistles and see a progression toward more freedom and autonomy for slaves like Onesimus and women like Nympha, Priscilla, Junia, and Lydia.
So the question for modern readers, then, is whether the point of the New Testament household codes is to reinforce the Greco-Roman household structure as God’s ideal for all people, in all places, for all time, or whether the point is to encourage Christians to imitate Jesus in their relationships, regardless of the culture or their status in it.
In a sense, the Epistles are a lot like wisdom literature, for they remind us that wisdom isn’t just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true. Untangling culturally conditioned assumptions from universal truths in order to figure out how the wisdom of the Epistles might apply to us today is the task of modern-day hermeneutics, and it’s not an easy one.
Consider, for example, the confusion around how ancient people understood the terms natural and unnatural. You’d never know it from current debate, but the Bible says very little about same-sex behavior and arguably nothing at all about committed same-sex relationships, whose prevalence in the ancient world is a subject of historical debate. One of the few, indirect references to same-sex activity in Scripture appears in Romans 1, where the apostle Paul, arguing that both Jews and Gentiles need salvation, alludes to Gentiles who were so “inflamed with lust” that the “women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” and men “committed shameful acts with other men” (Romans 1:26–27).
It’s important to understand that in the first century, same-sex relationships were not thought to be expressions of sexual orientations but rather products of excessive sexual desire wherein people engaging in same-sex behavior did so out of an excess of lust that could not be satisfied.5 The most common forms of same-sex behavior in the Greco-Roman world were pederasty and sex between masters and their slaves, and the majority of men who indulged in those practices also engaged in heterosexual behavior with their wives. (In other words, they weren’t, as we understand it today, gay.) In Paul’s world, if a man took the active role in a sexual encounter, his behavior was deemed “natural,” but if he took the passive role, his behavior was considered “unnatural,” for he had taken the presumed position of a woman, deemed in that culture to be his inferior. The opposite was true for women: sexual passivity was deemed “natural,” while dominance was “unnatural.” These ideas were rooted in the honor-shame cultures of the Mediterranean and heavily influenced by patriarchal assumptions.
Now, lest you think this only applies to same-sex relationships, consider this: Paul uses the very same language in a letter to the Corinthian church to argue that women should wear head coverings and men shouldn’t have long hair. “Judge for yourselves,” he wrote, “Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?” (1 Corinthians 11:13–15, emphasis mine). He goes on to decry short-haired women and men with covered heads as similarly “unnatural,” appealing to everything from the created order to male authority to the opinions of angels. “If anyone wants to be contentious about this,” he concluded, “we have no other practice—nor do the churches of God” (11:16).
And yet many of the same Christians who condemn all same-sex behavior as “unnatural” according to the Bible, don’t apply the same standards to head coverings or hair lengths among the men and women in their own congregations. Most understand Paul’s language to the Corinthians to describe cultural customs, based on ancient views of gender roles, not universal truths.
So once again we are left with some questions: Must we adopt first-century, Mediterranean cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality in order to embrace the gospel Paul was preaching there? Must we condemn all short-haired women, long-haired men, and gay and lesbian couples as “unnatural”? Do we apply the same rightful condemnation of pederasty and rape in ancient Rome to loving, committed same-sex relationships today?
My experience loving and engaging with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends has convinced me that the Bible has been unfairly used against them, often with tragic results, but Christians can disagree on that. And they often do, fiercely.
With all these cultural angles to consider and heated debates to navigate, a lot of folks lose faith in the Epistles. They assume that Paul was just a first-century misogynist, the churches of Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, and Colossae merely products of their time, just as divisive and dysfunctional as churches today. There have been moments when I too have grown weary of confronting prejudices advanced in the Bible’s name and, frustrated, found myself wondering, Why letters? Why would God use a medium so easily misunderstood and misapplied to introduce the gospel to the world?
Dr. Boring addressed the question brilliantly. “The early Christians did not believe that God became incarnate in humanity in general,” he wrote, “or in some abstract principle, but in one particular Aramaic-speaking Jew, born in an obscure land under Roman rule, crucified under the local governor Pontius Pilate.”
This “scandal of particularity,” he said, “is related to the essential character of human life. No one lives in general; every human life is unique. The letters of the New Testament are appropriate to the incarnation.”6
No one lives in general—not even Christ or his church. The Christian life isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of propositions, but about following Jesus in the context of actual marriages, actual communities, actual churches, actual political differences, actual budget meetings, actual cultural changes, actual racial tensions, actual theological disagreements. Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning, it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one. The reason the Bible includes so many seemingly irrelevant details about donkeys falling into pits and women covering their heads and Cretans being liars and Jews and Gentiles sharing meals together is because, believe it or not, God cares about that stuff—because God cares about us.
No doubt when the Christians of 2218 read our books, blog posts, and church newsletters, they will think to themselves, Why in the world was that an issue of debate? and Can you believe that’s how they thought about things back then? and How was it not obvious that LEGGINGS ARE NOT PANTS? Yet the Spirit will be just as present and active then as it is now, as it was more than two thousand years ago.
While the nature of our differences and debates has changed, the apostles’ advice about how to handle those conflicts remains applicable to us all.
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).
“Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another . . . eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does. . . . Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food” (Romans 14:1–3, 20).
“You are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ . . . If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it” (1 Corinthians 12:27, 21, 26).
“Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry” (Ephesians 4:26).
The Epistles reveal, with startling concreteness, how the announcement of God’s victory over sin and death through Jesus played itself out in real life among a group of highly dissimilar people.
“The Bible looks the way it does,” wrote Peter Enns, “because, like Jesus, when God shows up, it’s in the thick of things.”7
Even after I’d come to terms with the Bible’s war stories and learned to embrace the Bible’s tensions and contradictions as fitting and good, even after I’d given up on trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not and resolved to keep wrestling with the confounding force that it is, there remained one obstacle in the way of a fresh start with my once beloved Magic Book. To make peace with the Bible, I had to make peace with Paul.
I know I’m not the only woman who has been crowded into a corner after a church service or Christian conference by a red-faced man insisting I shouldn’t be allowed to speak there because the Bible is clear: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet” (1 Timothy 2:12).
I once held the quivering body of a middle-aged woman, sobbing with her head on my shoulder, as she told me her story of living with an abusive husband for twenty years, her family and church insisting she remain with him because the Bible is clear: “Wives submit to your husbands.”
For many of my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends, what they know of Paul they know from verses scribbled across protest signs held by people who insist that God hates the likes of them. For those who grew up in church, what they remember most—what haunted them through countless sleepless nights and thoughts of suicide—was the fear that if they came out, they would go to hell, because the Bible is clear: “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men . . . will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9–10).
In the buildup to the American Civil War, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery, often citing Scripture in support of the Confederate cause. The Southern Baptist denomination exists today because Baptists from the South did not want to be told by Baptists in the North that owning black people was wrong. After all, they argued, the Bible is clear: “Slaves obey your earthly masters” (Ephesians 6:5).
Ask someone involved in the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties and they’ll tell you their acts of civil disobedience—staging sit-ins at “whites only” restaurants, marching across that bridge in Selma—were often met with objections from white Christians who claimed such actions were “unbiblical,” because the Bible is clear: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1).
The supposed clarity of Scripture, and specifically of the apostle Paul, has been invoked far too often in far too many cruelties to remain unaddressed. For many progressive believers, Christianity’s most famous missionary is something of a thorn in their flesh (see what I did there?), Paul’s words about women, sex, slavery, the death penalty, and submitting to the government invoked so routinely in opposition to their social causes that they’ve grown exasperated by him. On the other hand, among more conservative believers, Paul gets the opposite treatment and tends to be idolized for his theological lucidity on matters of salvation, justification, election, and atonement. I once heard an evangelical pastor brag that he had never preached from any biblical text that wasn’t authored by Paul, not even the Gospels. I couldn’t help but laugh when the same guy gave Catholics a hard time for venerating Mary.
Both groups, I suspect, suffer from the habit of dislocating Paul from his original context and mission. N. T. Wright insisted that the New Testament “must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas.’”8 When we unmoor the Epistles from their larger story, we tend to think of Paul as a disembodied voice affirming or unsettling our own points of view, rather than a religious, first-century Jew whose life was upended by an encounter with Jesus Christ.
As it turns out, the letters of Paul weren’t written by a crotchety misogynist intent on regulating the behaviors of women and minorities for millennia to come, nor were they composed by a godlike philosopher disseminating soteriological truths into the universe from an ivory tower. The apostle Paul was a smart, worldly, and broad-minded Jew who had been utterly transformed by what he saw as his singular mission in life: to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and welcome them in to Israel’s story. In pursuit of that mission, Paul was determined to break down every religious, ethnic, and cultural barrier that stood in the way.
(Here it’s worth noting that in the ancient world, letters were sometimes composed in the name of a famous teacher from the past, and scholars suspect that, given the language employed and other historical indicators, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus were not composed by Paul himself, but by students writing under his name. Seven epistles remain largely undisputed as authentically Pauline—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon—while Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are debatable.9 For simplicity, I refer to Paul as the author of all the epistles attributed to him.)
Paul of Tarsus was a proud Jew, “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5). A Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee, he knew and loved the Torah and maintained his Jewish identity in a pagan culture. He was also a Roman citizen and Greek, profoundly influenced by Hellenistic thought. Paul knew at least three languages—Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic—and himself possessed both a Jewish name, Saul, and a Greek and Roman name, Paul.
Originally a persecutor of Christians, Paul experienced a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus one day, when a blinding light threw him to the ground and a voice from heaven asked, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). Despite their fears, the Christians in Damascus and Jerusalem welcomed Paul into their homes and cared for him until his sight was restored, acts of radical, risky hospitality that undoubtedly shaped Paul’s posture toward others in the years to come. As he came to terms with this divine interruption to his own story, Paul began to understand its place in a larger story, and to preach Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, whose life, death, and resurrection fulfilled biblical prophecy, in particular Isaiah’s vision that Israel would be “a light for the Gentiles” that would bring “salvation to the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6; Acts 13:47).
This message of good news for all people of all nations became Paul’s obsession. As he traveled the region with other followers of Jesus, sharing the gospel in cities across Asia and Europe, he almost always preached first to the Jews in the synagogues and then to the Gentiles at their marketplaces, academic forums, and homes. He described himself as a “slave to everyone” willing to become “all things to all people . . . for the sake of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:19, 22, 23).
As author and biblical scholar Stephen J. Binz explained, Paul “used his global, multicultural, and breadth of thought for the sake of the universal gospel he proclaimed. Paul was a man who could talk with rabbis on the streets of Jerusalem and with philosophers on the streets of Athens . . . He knew the ancient wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures, and he knew the wisdom of Greek literature, such as that of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato.”10
Paul typically had more success with the Gentiles than the Jews, though he routinely faced angry mobs from both camps. He once triggered a riot in Ephesus when his work threatened to put a dent in the sale of tchotchkes devoted to the goddess Artemis, whose temple drew tourists to the town. Unsurprisingly, Paul’s declaration of the good news found special resonance among people of lower classes, and with slaves, widows, and women.
In fact, women proved to be a vital force in the ministry of Paul, serving as apostles, teachers, benefactors, and friends. Paul was once imprisoned with a woman named Junia, whom he described as “outstanding among the apostles” (Romans 16:7), and some of his dearest friends were Priscilla and Aquila, a pair I like to think of as the church’s first power couple, complete with rhyming monikers—Prisquila, if you like—whom Paul appears to have regarded as equals, sometimes referring first to Priscilla and sometimes referring first to Aquila. Priscilla was a renowned teacher whose mentorship of Apollos helped correct some of the famous preacher’s early views. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he thanked multiple women for their leadership and support, referring to them as his “co-workers.” Romans 16 includes thanks to Junia and Priscilla, as well as a deacon named Phoebe, a “dear friend” named Persis, and Mary, Tryphena, Tryphosa, and a host of other women “who worked very hard in the Lord” (v. 12). The degree to which Paul reinforced traditional gender roles in his letters varies from church to church and city to city. In places where women in leadership assisted in the spreading of the gospel, Paul encouraged it; where it might prove too disruptive or confusing, he discouraged it. (Notably, the most restrictive New Testament instructions regarding women in leadership appear in a letter to Timothy in Ephesus, home of the infamous Artemis riots.) In fact, in his first-century context, Paul would likely have been perceived as radically inclusive and egalitarian. For him, nothing mattered more than unleashing the gospel and moving out of the way any unnecessary cultural or religious obstructions that might impede its proliferation.
We see this attitude in the position he took in one of the first big debates of the early church. As Gentiles began responding to the gospel and believing in Jesus as Savior, some Jewish Christians understandably assumed that these new converts ought to receive the sign of circumcision, follow Jewish dietary restrictions, and observe other precepts of the law before becoming part of the community of God’s people. If Gentiles wanted in on the blessings of the covenant, they must be faithful to the Torah. That only seemed “biblical.”
But Paul and his friend Barnabas vehemently disagreed, so much so that they traveled back to Jerusalem to try and settle the dispute with the apostles and elders there. At this Jerusalem Council, the pair joined Peter, James, and other apostolic heavyweights to hash it all out, and in one of the most significant religious decisions in history, it was determined that Gentiles did not need to be circumcised but should only abstain from those foods and activities that might impede their ability to share a table of fellowship and live in harmony with their Jewish brothers and sisters.
“It is my judgment,” the apostle James concluded, “. . . that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God” (Acts 15:19).
Of course, many remained unconvinced, which is why Paul spent so much time in his letters arguing for grace over law. He wasn’t speaking in some abstract way against religious legalism or “salvation by works,” nor was he damning the entire Jewish community of which he was still proudly a part. He was simply making the same case he had been making from the beginning, that Jews and Gentiles are now one in the family of God because the faithfulness of Jesus on behalf of Israel and for the rest of the world “made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14). Perhaps the most powerful reinforcement of this commitment appears in Paul’s trademark greeting, completely unique in ancient literature. Every New Testament letter authored by Paul or in his name begins with “grace and peace to you,” a combination of the Greek word charis (grace) with the Hebrew word shalom (peace), a seemingly mundane turn of phrase packed with rich theological meaning for both groups, pointing them toward mercy, wholeness, justice, and unity.
Yes, Paul did a lot of theologizing. The man never met a metaphor he didn’t like. But every letter he wrote was in service to an inclusive, grace-filled gospel that he believed was good news for everyone, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, man and woman alike.
So in considering the writings of Paul, the question is not, Are head coverings good or bad? The question is, in that context, Did head coverings help or hurt the advancement of the gospel and the preservation of unity?
The question is not, Should Christians eat meat? but rather, in that context, Did eating meat help or hurt the advancement of the gospel and the preservation of unity? And as we consider the application of Paul’s teachings in our various contexts today, the question is not, Should women be allowed to preach? but Do women preachers help or hurt the advancement of the gospel and the preservation of unity? Paul was smart enough to know the answers to these questions would vary from church to church and person to person, so surely he was smart enough to also know they would vary from culture to culture and century to century.
Was Paul a man of his time? Of course. But that’s exactly the point. God meets us where we are, as we are. The Spirit shows up in the thick of it.
We don’t have to embrace everything about Paul’s culture in order to embrace the good news he preached within it, that “neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39 ESV).