Part Five: The Voice

The letter to the Romans opens with two names before it gets to Paul's. The first is Paul himself, "a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God." The second is Tertius, and Tertius is not an apostle. Tertius is the man who wrote the letter. "I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord."

A scribe signing his own greeting into a letter is one of those small facts that opens a door you did not know was there. It tells you that Paul did not sit alone in a room and write these words with his own hand. It tells you that there was a room, and there was another person in it, and there was the scratch of a reed pen on papyrus, and there was the sound of Paul's voice saying the words and another human being writing them down. It tells you that the letter you are about to read was an oral event before it was a document. It tells you that Paul's voice reached the churches through a human hand.

This is the chapter that sets up everything that follows in Part Five. Before we get to what Paul said, we have to understand how what he said got made. The letters are not a book. They were not composed to be read silently. They were not put together with the care of a treatise. They were dictated in real time, carried on foot for weeks, and read aloud to a room full of people who had never heard Paul's voice and would never hear it again except through the letter. The letters are the closest we will ever get to hearing Paul speak, and they are the closest we will ever get to a man losing his temper, defending himself, and begging, all at first hand. But they arrive to us through material conditions that deserve to be understood before the words are understood. This chapter is about those conditions. It is about the scribe, the scroll, the courier, and the room.

The standard picture of Paul writing a letter is wrong in almost every particular. He is not sitting at a desk with a quill in his hand, composing slowly and carefully, working and reworking a text until it is finished. That picture belongs to a later age, and it belongs to a later idea of what a writer does. Paul did not write letters as a writer writes. He produced them as a man who had things to say to people who needed to hear them, and he produced them through the one mechanism available to him for getting words onto a surface at the speed of speech: dictation.

Dictation was not an unusual way to produce a letter in the ancient world. It was the normal way. Most letters were produced by someone speaking and someone else writing. The speaking person was the author; the writing person was the scribe or amanuensis. The author's role was to compose the thought and speak it. The scribe's role was to put it on the page. In the Roman world, this was so standard that a letter could legitimately be described as authored by the person who spoke it even if the person who held the pen was someone else. The handwriting was not the authorship. The voice was.

For Paul, this is significant for several reasons. First, it means the letters are closer to speech than they are to writing. They were produced at the speed of speech, in the mode of speech, by a man who was thinking in words and saying them, not by a man who was composing sentences and revising them. The repetitions, the digressions, the sudden shifts in tone, the places where Paul seems to lose the thread and then find it again — these are not defects of writing. They are the marks of spoken composition. The letters preserve a voice in a way that a carefully written treatise would not.

Second, it means the letters bear the imprint of the man who wrote them down. Tertius did not just transcribe Paul's words with perfect neutrality. He produced the text, and his presence is on it. He signed his own greeting. This may have been conventional — scribes sometimes added their own greetings to letters — but it is also a gesture of presence. Tertius was not a ghost. He was a person in the room, doing a job, and when the letter went out, his name went with it. The letter to the Romans began with the voice of a Jewish preacher from Tarsus and the hand of a Greek-named scribe, and neither of them was invisible.

Third, it means that the letters are not a uniform body of work in the sense that they all went through the same process. Some of them may have been more dictated than others. Some may have been written with more or less intervention from the scribe. Some may have been drafted in outline and then worked up. We cannot know the exact process for each letter, and we should not pretend to. But we can say with confidence that whatever the variation, the mode was oral composition through a scribe, and the result is a set of documents that are, in an important sense, spoken words fixed on a page.

This matters for how we read them. If you read Paul silently, you are reading him in a mode he never knew. Nobody read silently in the ancient world in the way we read silently now. Reading was aloud, or at least in a voice meant to be heard. The letters were written to be read aloud to a gathering. They were letters to churches, and churches met together, and when a letter arrived, someone stood up and read it. The text was designed for an audience of listeners, not readers. The rhythm of the sentences, the repetitions, the rhetorical questions, the diatribes — these are features of oral composition addressed to listeners who would hear the whole thing at once and could not go back and reread a sentence. The letters work differently when you hear them. They work differently when you read them silently. This is not a defect of modern reading. It is a difference between two modes, and the letters belong to the first.

Tertius is the only scribe Paul mentions by name. He appears only in Romans 16:22, in that single line of greeting. We do not know where he came from, how he learned to write Greek, what his relationship to Paul was, whether he travelled with Paul or was hired locally in Corinth or wherever the letter was produced. We only know that he was there, that he wrote the letter, and that he thought it was appropriate to add his own greeting.

The name Tertius is a Latin name. Paul's world was Greek-speaking in the eastern Mediterranean and Latin-speaking in the administration and the west. A man named Tertius writing in Greek is not a contradiction; many people in the Roman world were bilingual or lived in linguistic borderlands. But it does suggest that the scribe was a person of some status — literacy was not universal, and a scribe capable of producing a polished Greek letter was a professional of some kind. He was not a child or an ignorant household slave. He was the kind of person who could be entrusted with a letter that would carry the authority of an apostle to a church he had never visited.

The presence of a named scribe also tells us something about the economics of letter production. Writing a letter on papyrus was not free. Papyrus was an expensive material, imported from Egypt, sold in rolls of varying quality and length. A letter of the length of Romans — substantial, running to several pages when written — would have cost money. The materials alone were a cost. The scribe's time was a cost. The whole operation was a small business expense, the kind of thing a travelling preacher would have to budget for.

This is one of those points where the modern reader's assumptions can mislead. We imagine Paul writing letters as if he had a supply of paper and a pen and wrote whenever he felt like it. In the ancient world, writing was a deliberate act with real material costs. You did not write a letter casually. You wrote one when you had something to say that was worth the cost. The letters that survive are not a complete archive of everything Paul wrote. They are the letters that were preserved, and they are the letters that someone thought were worth carrying and copying and keeping. Behind them is an infrastructure of material cost that we rarely pause to consider.

The letter, once made, had to travel. The Roman world had a communication system that was, for its time, remarkably effective. There were roads — the famous Roman roads, built for armies and maintained for commerce — and there were sea lanes, and there were waystations and inns and ports. A letter could move from one end of the Mediterranean to the other in weeks rather than months, which is fast by ancient standards but slow by any modern standard.

Paul's letters were carried by people. The letters themselves sometimes name the carriers: Timothy, Titus, Tychicus, Onesimus, Phoebe. These are not professional couriers in the sense of a postal service employee. They are members of the network — colleagues, co-workers, people Paul trusted. Phoebe, in particular, is worth pausing over. She is the person Paul identifies as carrying the letter to the Romans. He calls her a "sister," a "servant of the church at Cenchreae," and a "patron of many and of myself as well." The Greek word translated "patron" is prostatis, and it is significant — it is the feminine form of a word that means a protector, a benefactor, someone of standing who supports others. Whatever else Phoebe was, she was a woman of means and standing who had the capacity to carry a letter from Corinth to Rome and the standing to be received in a church she did not know.

The journey from Corinth to Rome was considerable. It was by sea, which was faster than land but subject to the seasons and the weather. A ship could make the crossing in a matter of days or a week under good conditions, but a letter carried on foot was a different matter entirely. Some of Paul's letters were carried by people walking — walking for weeks through territory that was not always safe, through towns and cities and roads where the carrier was not always welcome. The courier was not just a delivery mechanism. The courier was the physical embodiment of the connection between the letter-writer and the letter-reader. The letter arrived because a person walked it, and the person who walked it was someone Paul knew and trusted, and the person who received it would meet that carrier face to face.

This is one of the things that makes the letters so different from what we think of as correspondence. When you write a letter today, it goes into a system. It disappears into a mailbox or a server and arrives without you ever seeing the person who carried it. When Paul wrote a letter, he handed it to a specific named person, and that person walked or sailed to a specific place, and the letter arrived in the hands of a specific person who had probably been expecting it. The letter was embedded in a human relationship before it was ever read. The carrier was part of the message. When the letter was read aloud, the carrier was probably in the room, or had recently been in the room, and the people listening knew that the carrier had brought the words of someone they knew, or knew of, or had heard about. The letter was not a disembodied text. It was a voice that had travelled.

When the letter arrived, it was read aloud. This is the moment the letter was made for. The letter was written to be heard, and the hearing was the event. Someone in the church — a leader, a literate member, the carrier — stood up and read the letter to the assembled gathering. The letter was heard as a whole. The listeners did not get to go back and reread a paragraph. They heard the argument unfold in real time, and they had to follow it as it went. The structure of the argument, the rhetorical devices, the points of emphasis — these were all designed for an audience listening once.

This changes how we should read the letters, even when we read them silently in a modern translation. We should hear them as we read them. We should hear the repetitions as a speaker pressing a point. We should hear the shifts in tone as a speaker adapting to the moment. We should hear the anger as a man who was angry, speaking to people who knew he was angry. The letters are documents of spoken argument, and their power is in part a power of voice. Paul was, by his own account, not a powerful speaker. He says in 2 Corinthians that his letters are weighty but his bodily presence is weak and his speech insignificant. So the letters are where he is most himself and most powerful — in the written form that carried his voice when his voice in person was not enough.

There is a strange poignancy in this. Paul's voice reached the churches through the letter. His voice did not reach them in person, or not always, and not in the way he would have wanted. He wrote letters because he was not there, or because he was far away, or because the things he had to say could not wait for a visit. The letter was a substitute for presence, and it was a better one than presence would have been in some cases. The letter could say what the moment would not allow him to say to someone's face. The letter could argue at length what a conversation would only hint at. The letter could preserve what he wanted said and how he wanted it said. But the letter was also a record of absence, and the fact that the letter had to be written at all was a fact about the distance between Paul and the churches he loved and fought with and wrote to.

The letter, once read aloud, was probably kept. Not every letter was kept, and not every letter was copied. The letters that survive are a sample — a small one — of what Paul wrote. We know he wrote more than seven letters. He refers to letters we do not have. He wrote to churches and individuals whose letters are lost. The seven undisputed letters are the ones that were preserved and copied and circulated and eventually collected and included in the canon. They are not the whole of Paul's letter-writing. They are the fragment that survived.

The preservation process was slow and uneven. Letters were copied by hand, by scribes working in the generations after Paul's death, and they were circulated among churches, and some were kept and some were lost, and the ones we have are the ones that made it through a series of decisions about what was worth keeping. The collection of Paul's letters was not a straightforward process. It was contested. Some churches valued some letters more than others. Some letters were preferred because they addressed issues that remained live. Some were excluded because they were thought to be not by Paul or because they addressed issues that had passed. The letters as we have them are the result of a process of selection that took place over decades and then centuries.

This matters for how we read the letters, because the letters we have are not a random sample. They are the letters that someone decided were worth preserving. That decision was not neutral. The letters that survived are the letters that spoke to later problems, or that were attributed to Paul, or that were useful for later purposes. The collection is not the whole of Paul. It is the part of Paul that was kept, and the part that was kept was shaped by the concerns of the people who kept it.

The material conditions of the letters are not incidental to their meaning. They are part of what the letters are. A letter dictated by a man to a scribe named Tertius, written on expensive papyrus in Corinth, carried by a woman named Phoebe across the sea to Rome, and read aloud to a gathering of people who had never met Paul — this letter is not the same thing as a book written by an author for readers. It is a document of relationship, of presence-at-a-distance, of a voice reaching across a gap that the material conditions of the ancient world made difficult to bridge.

The letters are the only first-person documents we have from Paul. Everything else about him comes secondhand: Acts, the later traditions, the legends. The letters are his voice. They are the closest we will ever get to hearing him speak. But they are also filtered through a scribe, through the material cost of papyrus, through the journey of a courier, through the reading aloud in a room. They are his voice, but they are his voice as it reached others, in a particular form, at a particular cost, through particular hands.

This is the setup for Part Five. The chapters that follow will deal with what the letters say — about his scars, about slavery, about Israel, about the things he was most torn about. But they will deal with those things as they come to us through the letters, and the letters are documents made in the way this chapter describes. The voice is real. The hand is real. The material conditions are real. And the reader who understands those conditions is better positioned to hear what Paul actually said, and what he did not say, and what the silence around him means.

The next chapter is about the scars. It is about the list of beatings and shipwrecks and hardships that Paul gives in 2 Corinthians, and about the thorn in the flesh that he asked to be removed and was not. It is about the most human passage he wrote, and about what it says about the man who wrote it.

In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul gives a list. It is the most personal thing he wrote, and it is one of the most extraordinary self-descriptions in ancient literature. He does not give it as a boast in the ordinary sense. He gives it because the rivals in Corinth have made it necessary — they have demanded visible credentials, and he has none that they will accept, so he gives them the credentials that are invisible and that they would not value. He says he has laboured more than any of them, but he gives the labour in the form of a list of things that happened to him, not things he accomplished. Beatings. Imprisonments. Shipwrecks. Dangers from rivers, from robbers, from his own people, from the Gentiles, from the city, from the wilderness, from the sea. False brothers. Weariness and pain. Many a night he spent in the open. He was hungry and thirsty. He was often cold and naked. On top of everything else, the daily pressure of his concern for all the churches.

And then, at the end of the list, he says there is one more thing — one more thing that would disqualify anyone else from claiming apostolic authority, and that he has been carrying all the same. "A messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being too elated." He asked the Lord three times to remove it. The Lord did not remove it. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

This is the chapter about the scars. It is the chapter about the wounds Paul carried, and about the list he made of them, and about the thorn that he never identified and that he never got rid of. The chapter is not about diagnosing the thorn. It is not about figuring out what Paul's illness was, or whether he had epilepsy or malaria or conjunctivitis or some chronic condition we can name. It is about the passage itself, and about what it says about the man who wrote it, and about the way Paul understood his suffering in relation to his authority. The thorn is the most human passage he wrote, and it deserves to be read as what it is — a man describing something he cannot name and cannot remove and that he has had to live with, and finding in that fact not a defeat but the shape of his power.

The list at the beginning of 2 Corinthians 11 is a catalogue of what happened to Paul in the course of his ministry. It covers the whole span of his active life, from the earliest persecutions to the present. The items are specific in some respects and general in others. We know the kinds of things he lists — beatings, imprisonment, shipwrecks — because they are things that happen to people who are on the move in the Roman world, who are opposed by the people in the places they visit, who are taking risks that the people around them would not take. We know that some of them happened because Paul's letters and Acts and other sources confirm them in various ways. We know that he was imprisoned, at least once in Philippi and at least once in Caesarea, and probably more times than we can count. We know he was beaten, and we know the kind of beating he describes — the flogging with rods in Philippi. We know he was in danger from his own people, because the Jerusalem confrontation and the later opposition from the circumcision party were real. We know he was in danger from Gentiles, because the riot in Ephesus and the opposition in Corinth were real. We know he was shipwrecked at least once, on the voyage to Rome, and possibly more than once.

But we do not know the full extent of the list. We do not know how many beatings he had, or where, or by whom. We do not know how many imprisonments, or how long they lasted. We do not know how many shipwrecks, or where, or what the sequence was. Paul gives the list in the form of a summary, and he gives it as a summary that is meant to make a point, not to provide a chronology. He is not writing a biography here. He is making a case, and the case is that his credentials are not the credentials the Corinthians want, and that the credentials he has are the credentials of suffering.

There is a strange inversion in this. The Corinthians valued visible credentials — letters of recommendation, visible authority, a pedigree from the historical Jesus. Paul did not have those. What he had was the record of what had been done to him. He could not show the Corinthians his apostolic authority in the form they wanted. He could show them the scars. The scars were not what he had chosen. They were what had happened to him. And they were the credentials he offered because there was nothing else to offer that would mean anything to the people who were judging him.

This is one of the things that makes the list remarkable. It is not a list of achievements. It is a list of injuries. The apostle's resume is a list of beatings and shipwrecks and the daily pressure of caring for churches that were often difficult and often disappointing. It is the credential of a man who had been through things and who had not stopped. The power of the list is not in the suffering itself but in the fact of the suffering having been borne, and the fact of the ministry having continued through it.

The list also tells us something about the world Paul moved through. The dangers he lists are the dangers of travel in the first century, and of mission in the first century, and of faith in the first century in a world that was not uniformly friendly to either. The rivers, the robbers, the city, the wilderness, the sea — these are the categories of risk that a travelling preacher would encounter. The false brothers are the category of internal opposition, the people from within who would undermine the work. The persecution from his own people and from the Gentiles is the category of opposition from outside.

These are not abstractions. They are the concrete risks of Paul's life. Paul was a man who walked through the Roman world, who entered cities, who preached in synagogues and in houses, who made enemies, who was beaten, who was imprisoned, who was shipwrecked, who faced danger from every direction. The list is a record of a life that was dangerous in ways that most people in the Roman world did not live. It is a life on the edge of the system, a life that was not protected by the ordinary securities the system provided, a life that was exposed to the risks that the system generated and the risks that the movement generated.

The daily pressure of the churches is the most interesting item in the list, because it is the item that is least dramatic and most constant. Paul lists the dramatic things — beatings, shipwrecks — and then he says the pressure was daily, and it was for all the churches. The daily pressure was the cognitive load of caring for communities he had started or visited, the worry about how they were doing, the letters he had to write, the conflicts he had to intervene in, the people who wrote to him with problems, the problems he had created by the things he had said and the things he had not said. This was the pressure that did not let up, the pressure that was not dramatic in the way a beating was dramatic but that was constant and cumulative, the pressure of a man who was responsible for a network of churches spread across the eastern Mediterranean and who felt responsible for each one of them every day.

This is one of the places where Paul's letters give us access to a side of him that the dramatic list does not give us. The dramatic list is the public credential. The daily pressure is the private reality. The letters show the private reality in detail — the conflicts, the disappointments, the worry about the churches, the repeated interventions, the way Paul's life was run by the demands of the churches he had planted. The dramatic list is the summary. The letters are the daily record. Both are needed to understand the man, and both are present in what he wrote.

The thorn in the flesh is the passage at the end of the list, and it is the passage that has generated the most speculation and the least certainty. Paul describes it as a messenger of Satan to harass him, to keep him from being too elated. He asked the Lord three times to remove it. The Lord's answer was: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Paul then says that he will boast all the more gladly of his weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon him. He says that when he is weak, then he is strong.

This passage is the most human thing Paul wrote, and it is the most difficult to interpret. The reason is simple: Paul never says what the thorn was. He says it was a harassment, a thing that kept him from being too elated, a thing sent by a messenger of Satan. He does not say whether it was a physical illness, or a psychological condition, or an external opposition, or something else. He does not say whether it was chronic or intermittent. He does not say whether it was painful or merely annoying, whether it was disabling or merely burdensome. He does not say anything that would allow a reader to identify it, and he does not say anything that would allow a reader to diagnose him.

This silence has provoked centuries of speculation. Biographers and commentators have tried to identify the thorn, and they have proposed a range of candidates. Some have said it was a visual problem — Paul refers in other letters to people reading his letters in his absence and to his large letters, and some have speculated that his eyesight was poor. Some have said it was epilepsy, on the basis of the description of a messenger of Satan and the description of being caught up to the third heaven. Some have said it was malaria or some other chronic illness. Some have said it was a psychological condition — depression, anxiety, some form of trauma. Some have said it was the opposition of the rivals in Corinth, the ongoing harassment from people who were undermining his authority.

All of these guesses are guesses. None of them is supported by what Paul says in the passage. Paul does not give enough information to identify the thorn, and the passage is not designed to give enough information. The point of the passage is not the thorn itself but the response to the thorn — the asking and the not receiving, the grace being sufficient, the power being made perfect in weakness. The thorn is the occasion for that response, not the subject of the passage.

The right way to read the thorn is to read it as a man describing something he cannot name and cannot remove and that he has had to live with, and finding in that fact not a defeat but the shape of his power. Paul is saying, in effect: there is something in my life that is against me, something I have asked to be removed and have not been removed, something that is part of my weakness and my vulnerability, and God's answer to my asking was not to remove it but to tell me that grace is sufficient. This is not a theodicy. It is not a systematic account of why the thorn was allowed. It is a man in the situation, describing what happened when he asked for relief and did not get it, and describing what he made of the situation in the light of his faith.

The response — "My grace is sufficient for you" — is not a dismissal. It is a reframing. Paul asked for removal. God did not remove the thorn. God gave a different answer: the grace is sufficient, the power is made perfect in weakness. Paul takes this and runs with it. He says he will boast of the weaknesses. He says that when he is weak, then he is strong. This is a remarkable claim, and it is not a claim that weakness is good in itself. It is a claim that the power of Christ is made known in the context of weakness, not in the context of strength. The thorn is the weakness. The power is the grace that is sufficient in the weakness. The point is not that the thorn is good but that God's power does not require the removal of the thorn to be present.

This is one of the most important things Paul says about himself, because it tells us how he understood his suffering in relation to his authority. He did not claim that his suffering was a credential in the same way that the rivals' credentials were credentials. His suffering was the context in which his power was made known. His weakness was the place where Christ's power rested. This is not the same as saying that suffering is good. It is saying that the power Paul had was not the power of the strong man who never suffered. It was the power of the man who had suffered and who had not been delivered from the suffering, and who had found in that fact something about the nature of the power he served.

The thorn is also the place where Paul is most vulnerable in the letters. The dramatic list of beatings and shipwrecks is public. The thorn is personal. Paul does not talk about the thorn in other letters in the same way. He mentions it here, in the context of the rivals, and he describes his relationship to it in terms of asking and not being answered, of weakness and power. This is a man who is not hiding the fact that he has something he cannot get rid of. He is not pretending that his life is free of burden. He is describing the burden honestly and saying what he has made of it.

This is the most human passage Paul wrote because it is the passage where he is closest to the reader. The beatings and shipwrecks are not experiences most readers have had. They are dramatic, and they are distant. The thorn is something most readers can understand in a different way. It is the thing you have that will not go away. It is the thing you ask to be removed and is not. It is the thing that makes you weak in ways other people can see and in ways they cannot. It is the thing that you have to carry, and the carrying is the part that is not dramatic and is the part that is most like the lives most readers live.

The thorn is also the passage that is hardest to read without projecting onto it. Every reader wants to diagnose Paul. Every reader has a theory about what the thorn was, and the theory is usually the reader's own experience or the reader's own reading of medical literature or the reader's own sense of what would make sense. The guesses are interesting as a record of what readers have wanted Paul to have had. They are not interesting as history, because they are not supported by what Paul says. The right approach is the one this book has been given in the brief: list the guesses, note that they are guesses, move on. Do not diagnose. Do not make Paul into a medical case. Leave the thorn as Paul left it — unnamed, unremoved, the occasion for a response that is about grace and weakness and the shape of Christ's power.

The scars and the thorn together form the portrait of Paul at his most vulnerable and at his most powerful. The list of beatings and shipwrecks is the record of what had been done to him. The thorn is the record of what he had to carry and could not put down. Both are presented not as failures but as the context in which his authority was real. Paul did not claim authority on the basis of being unscarred. He claimed authority on the basis of having been through things and having continued, and on the basis of having found in his weakness the place where Christ's power was made perfect.

This is not a heroic portrait in the ordinary sense. It is not the portrait of a man who overcame everything. It is the portrait of a man who was wounded and who carried a wound he could not name and could not remove, and who made something of that fact in the light of his faith. It is the portrait of a man whose power was not the power of the unscarred man but the power of the man whose scars were the place where grace was sufficient. This is a strange kind of power, and it is the kind of power Paul had, and it is the kind of power the letters reveal.

The next chapter is about Philemon, and about the runaway slave Onesimus, and about what Paul says and does not say about slavery in a letter that is one of the shortest and one of the most constrained in the collection. It is a chapter that requires honest treatment of what is there and what is not, and of the limits Paul worked within and the limits that the letter itself imposes on what he could say.

Philemon is the shortest of Paul's letters, and one of the most constrained. It is a letter about a runaway slave. It is a letter about what the author of the letter does and does not say to the man who owns the slave. It is a letter that has been read for two thousand years as a profound act of moral courage and as a frustrating failure of moral nerve, and it is both, and it is neither, and the honest reading has to hold the contradiction without trying to resolve it into one thing or the other.

The letter is addressed to Philemon, a man Paul calls a fellow worker, whose house church meets in his home, and whose slave Onesimus has run away. Onesimus has met Paul somewhere — probably in prison, since several features of the letter suggest Paul is writing from custody — and has become useful to Paul. Paul is sending him back to Philemon, and he is sending him back with this letter, which asks Philemon to receive him not as a slave but as a brother, and which offers to pay any debt Onesimus owes. "If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account." Paul does not command. He asks. "I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that your good deed might not be forced but voluntary."

That is the whole letter. Eighteen verses. A greeting. A thanksgiving. A request. A promise. A closing. It is one of the most delicate pieces of writing Paul produced, and it is one of the most revealing, because it shows a man operating inside a system he did not challenge and trying to do something humane within it, and showing the reader — clearly, honestly — the limits of what he was willing to do.

The first thing to say about Philemon is what it is not. It is not an abolitionist document. It is not a letter that attacks slavery as an institution. It is not a letter that tells Philemon to free Onesimus. It does not say any of those things, and the reader who comes to it expecting Paul to take a stand against slavery will be confused and probably disappointed. Paul does not attack slavery. He does not call for its abolition. He does not say that the institution is wrong in the way a modern reader would want him to say it was wrong.

This is the source of the frustration that Philemon has generated for readers who want Paul to be the critic of slavery they would like him to be. The letter is about a specific situation — a runaway slave, a specific owner, a specific request that Philemon receive the slave back as a brother — and it does not rise above that situation to address the institution that produced it. Paul works within the terms of the situation. He appeals to Philemon's voluntary goodness. He asks him to receive Onesimus as a brother. He offers to pay any debt. He does not say: free this man, the institution is wrong, you should not own slaves.

That is the honest account of what the letter does and does not say, and it is the account that any reader has to start from before making a judgment about whether Paul did enough or whether the letter is a moral failure. You cannot evaluate the letter until you know what it says, and what it says is more constrained than many readers want it to be.

The second thing to say about Philemon is what it does say, and what it asks. Paul does not command Philemon to free Onesimus. He does not command Philemon to stop owning slaves. But he does ask Philemon to receive Onesimus back in a different way than Onesimus would normally be received. The normal way for a master to receive a runaway slave was as a slave — with anger, with punishment, with the reassertion of the master's authority. Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother. "No longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother." This is a request that reorders the relationship between the two men in a way that the institution of slavery does not normally allow. A slave and a master are not brothers in the normal understanding. Paul is asking Philemon to treat Onesimus as a brother in Christ, which is to say as someone who stands on the same level as himself in the community of faith.

This is a significant request. It is not a demand, and it does not attack the institution, but it does ask Philemon to treat a slave as an equal in Christ, and it does so in a way that the logic of the Christian community makes possible. Paul's argument is that the new relationship in Christ — the fellowship of the gospel — changes the terms on which people relate to one another, and that Philemon should let that new relationship show in the way he receives Onesimus. The request is for a change in practice, not a change in theory. Paul does not argue that slavery is wrong. He argues that Onesimus is now a brother, and that Philemon should receive him as a brother.

The request is also an appeal to Philemon's voluntary goodness. Paul says explicitly that he does not want to command, because he wants Philemon's good deed to be voluntary, not forced. This is the character of the letter — it is not a command. It is a request that leaves Philemon free to refuse. Paul could have commanded. He says he could have commanded, in the authority of Christ. He chose not to. He appealed instead. This is, in one sense, a mark of respect for Philemon's agency. In another sense, it is a constraint on Paul's own moral action. He did not do what he could have done. He did what he chose to do, and what he chose to do was to ask, not to command.

The third thing to say is that the letter is a document of a specific situation, and that it is constrained by that situation in ways that are visible in the text. The letter is short because the situation is narrow. The letter is delicate because the man being asked is a man Paul respects and a man who hosts a church in his house, and whose goodwill is necessary for the community. The letter is optimistic because Paul is sending Onesimus back and expects to be received well, and expects Philemon to do what Paul asks. The letter is hopeful, in the sense that Paul expects Philemon to respond generously.

What Paul does not say, and what the letter does not say, is what happened after the letter was sent. Did Philemon free Onesimus? Did he receive him as a brother? Did he punish him? Did he send him back to Paul? The letter does not tell us, and the sources do not tell us, and we do not know. This is part of the silence that surrounds the letter. We have the request. We do not have the response. We do not know whether the request was granted, whether it changed anything, whether the institution of slavery was bent in this one case or whether Onesimus went back to being a slave and the letter was a small act of humanity that did not change the system.

This silence is important, because it means the letter is not a success story. It is a request that may or may not have been fulfilled, and a moment of intervention that may or may not have changed anything. The letter is not evidence that Paul's method worked. It is evidence that Paul attempted something within the limits of what he was willing to attempt, and that the outcome is unknown.

The fourth thing to say is about the limits the letter reveals. Paul's approach to slavery in Philemon is the approach of a man who did not challenge the institution. He challenged the treatment of a specific slave. He asked for a specific man to be received as a brother. He did not challenge the system. This is not the same as saying that Paul approved of slavery. It is saying that Paul did not act against slavery as an institution, and that his engagement with it was at the level of the individual case, not the level of the system.

This is one of the places where the modern reader's expectations are going to come into conflict with the historical reality. Modern readers want Paul to have been more radical than he was. They want him to have opposed slavery in the way that a modern reader would oppose slavery. He did not. He worked within the system. He tried to do something humane within it. He did not try to overturn it. This is a constraint that the letter imposes on the reader, and it is a constraint that the honest reading has to accept.

It is also worth saying, in fairness to Paul, that the letter is one of the few documents from the ancient world that treats a slave as a person with a name and a voice and a future, and that asks the master to receive that person in a new way. This is not abolition, and it is not a modern human rights document, and it does not say what a modern reader would want it to say. But it is something, and it is something that the ancient world did not typically produce. A slave in the ancient world was property. Paul writes to a master and asks him to receive his property as a brother. This is not a revolution, but it is an interruption of the normal logic of the relationship, and it is a significant thing in the context of the ancient world.

The fifth thing to say is about the way the letter has been read. Philemon has been read in two modes, both of them inadequate on their own. In the first mode, it is read as a great anti-slavery document, as a letter in which Paul undermines slavery at its root by redefining the relationship between master and slave. In this reading, Paul is a radical who did not have to say the thing he did not say, because he said the thing that was more fundamental — that the slave is a brother, and that the master should receive him as a brother, and that this is the beginning of the end of the institution. In this reading, Paul's silence about the institution is not a failure but a strategic choice, and the letter is a document of quiet subversion.

In the second mode, Philemon is read as a moral failure, as a letter in which Paul missed the chance to speak against slavery and instead reinforced it by sending the slave back to the master. In this reading, Paul could have said something decisive and did not. He could have commanded freedom and did not. He could have attacked the institution and did not. He sent a runaway slave back to his owner, and that is a mark against him, whatever else he said in the letter.

Both readings capture something, and both miss something. The first reading is too generous to Paul, and it reads into the letter a subversion that the letter does not claim to be. Paul does not call himself a subverter of slavery. He calls himself a requester of a brotherly reception. The letter does not say that the institution is being undermined at its root. It says that Onesimus should be received as a brother. These are not the same thing, and the reader who conflates them is reading something into the letter that is not there.

The second reading is too harsh on Paul, and it judges him by a standard he did not have and could not have had. Paul was not a revolutionary in the modern sense. He did not have the conceptual resources to call for the abolition of slavery, and he did not have the social position to make such a call and have it heard. He was a Jewish preacher from Tarsus, writing to a man he knew, in a specific situation, constrained by the terms of the situation. The judgment that he should have done more is a judgment from outside his world, and it is a judgment that does not take into account the limits of what he could do.

The right reading is the honest one. The letter is a request that Onesimus be received as a brother. It is a request that does not challenge the institution of slavery. It is a request that is constrained by Paul's position and by the situation. It is a request that is humane in what it asks, and limited in what it does not ask. It is a letter that deserves to be read as it is, not as a hero document and not as a failure, but as a document of a man working within a system he did not challenge and trying to do something humane within it, and showing the reader — clearly, honestly — the limits of what he was willing to do.

Onesimus is the third character in the letter, and the one who is least present in it. He is the runaway slave, the man who ran away from Philemon, met Paul, became useful to Paul, and is now being sent back. The letter does not give him a voice. It tells us he was useful to Paul. It tells us he is being sent back. It tells us that Paul wishes he could keep him, to serve Paul in his place while Paul is in prison, but that Paul does not want to do anything without Philemon's consent. The letter does not tell us what Onesimus thinks, or what he wants, or what his situation is. He is the object of the request, not the subject of it, and the letter is structured around the relationship between Paul and Philemon, with Onesimus as the person who is being sent back and whose fate depends on Philemon's response.

This is an important limitation of the letter. Onesimus is a person, and the letter does not give him a voice. He is the reason for the letter, and he is the person whose fate is at stake, and he does not speak in it. This is consistent with the world the letter comes from, in which a slave did not have an independent voice in a letter to his master. But it is also a limitation that the modern reader should notice. The letter is about what Paul asks Philemon to do about Onesimus. It is not about what Onesimus wants. It is not about whether Onesimus wanted to go back. It is not about whether Onesimus was free to refuse the return. The letter is structured by the power of the master over the slave, and the slave does not have a voice in it. This is part of what the letter is, and part of what the honest reading has to acknowledge.

The relationship between Paul and Onesimus is also worth noting. Paul speaks of Onesimus as useful to him, and as a son begotten in the prison, and as someone Paul wishes to keep. There is a warmth in the way Paul describes Onesimus that is not present in the way slaves are typically described in the ancient world. Paul does not describe Onesimus as property or as a tool. He describes him as a son, as useful, as someone he cares about. This is not abolition, but it is a way of describing a slave that is different from the normal way, and it is part of the humaneness of the letter.

The letter also has a context in the broader relationship between Paul and Philemon. Paul calls Philemon a fellow worker, and he thanks God for Philemon's love and faith. He says that Philemon's love has given joy and encouragement to the saints. He says that he could command in the authority of Christ, but that he prefers to appeal on the basis of love. This is a letter written to a man Paul respects, in a relationship that is not adversarial. Paul is not confronting Philemon. He is appealing to him. The letter is made possible by the relationship, and the letter is shaped by it.

This matters for how the request is made. Paul does not command because he does not want to damage the relationship or make Philemon's action coerced. He wants Philemon's good deed to be voluntary. This is a strategic choice as well as a moral one. A command from Paul might have produced a result — Philemon might have freed Onesimus under a command from the apostle — but it would not have been the same as a voluntary action, and it would have been an act done under pressure, not an act of love. Paul wants the act to be an act of love, and he therefore chooses the form of appeal rather than command. This is a choice that respects Philemon's agency and that shapes the letter's form. It is also a choice that limits what Paul can achieve, because an appeal can be refused and a command, if it were made, might not be refused. The letter is the result of a choice between voluntariness and effectiveness, and Paul chooses voluntariness.

The letter ends with the offer to pay any debt. "Charge that to my account." This is a concrete gesture. Paul is not just asking Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother. He is offering to make the relationship financially neutral, to absorb any cost that Onesimus's flight has produced. This is the practical side of the request, and it is significant. Paul is not asking Philemon to absorb a loss. He is saying that he will make it right. This is the gesture of a man who wants the request to be easy for Philemon to grant, and who is willing to pay the cost himself. It is a mark of the seriousness of the request and of the respect Paul has for Philemon's position.

The ending is brief. Paul expects to be released from prison, and he hopes to visit Philemon, and he asks Philemon to prepare a guest room for him. This is the note of optimism that runs through the letter — Paul expects to be freed, he expects to visit, he expects Philemon to respond well to the letter. The optimism is part of the letter's character. It is not a desperate plea. It is a confident request, made by a man who expects to be heard. Whether that confidence was justified is one of the things we do not know.

The letter to Philemon is the most constrained of Paul's letters, and one of the most revealing. It is a letter about a system the author did not challenge, a request within that system that asked for something humane and did not ask for something decisive, and a silence about the outcome that leaves the reader with a request and no answer. It is a letter that wants to be read honestly, without the demand that Paul be more than he was or the relief that he was not what the modern reader fears he was.

What Paul says in the letter is clear. What he does not say is also clear. The letter asks for a brotherly reception. It does not ask for freedom. It does not attack slavery. It offers to pay a debt. It does not command. It is the letter of a man working within a system he did not challenge, doing what he could within it, and showing the reader the limits of what he was willing to do. That is what the letter is. It is enough to be something, and it is not enough to be what many readers want it to be. The honest reading holds both facts at once, without resolving them.

The next chapter is about Romans, and about the argument in chapters 9 through 11 that most readers skip and that is arguably the point of the whole letter — the thing Paul worked out over the longest and most careful letter he wrote, for a church he had never met, about the place of the Jewish people in the story he was telling, and about why the thing that had happened to Jesus did not mean the end of Israel.

Romans is the longest and most carefully constructed of Paul's letters, and it is addressed to a church he had never visited. Every other letter in the collection was written to a church Paul had founded or to a person he knew. Romans is different. Paul is writing to Christians in the capital of the empire whom he has not met, and he is writing as he plans to come, and he is writing at the end of his active career, and he is writing with an argument that he has worked out over the course of the letter and that most readers have never finished reading.

This is the chapter about Romans, and about the argument in chapters 9 through 11 that most readers skip, and about why that argument is arguably the point of the whole letter. The chapter is also about the letter as a document — its origin in Paul's plan to travel, its relationship to Jerusalem, its careful structure and its rhetorical force, and its place as the most influential letter ever written and the one that has been read in the most contradictory ways. The chapter will not solve the questions Romans generates. It will set them out honestly, and it will give the reader enough to understand what Paul was doing in the letter and why the chapters about Israel matter more than the chapters people argue about.

Romans is not a letter written to solve a crisis. It is a letter written to introduce Paul to a church he did not know, and to set out his gospel before he arrives. Acts says Paul was planning to go to Rome and to use the city as a base for going further west, to Spain. The letter is part of the preparation for that journey. Paul is writing to let the Roman Christians know what he believed, why he believed it, and what he hoped to do. He is also writing to let them know that he did not need to found a church in Rome, because there was already a church there, and because his gospel was for the non-Jews and the church in Rome was a mixed church, and because the mission to the non-Jews had reached a point where the apostle to the non-Jews needed to come to the capital.

The letter is, in this sense, a missionary document. It is Paul's statement of what he has been doing, why he has been doing it, and what he hopes to do next. It is the most complete statement of his gospel that survives, and it is the most careful. The structure is deliberate. The argument is worked through. The progression from the opening diagnosis of the human condition to the ending celebration of God's purpose is one of the most impressive things in the New Testament.

But the letter is also a letter written by a man who was in tension with Jerusalem and who was planning to take a collection to Jerusalem at the most dangerous moment of his life. The letter is framed around that journey. Paul says that he is hastening to Jerusalem with the aid of the saints, and that he does not know what will happen to him there, and that he is going to Jerusalem and then to Rome and then to Spain. The letter is written at the end of a long and difficult period, and it is written with the knowledge that the Jerusalem journey is imminent and dangerous. This is not incidental to the letter. It is part of the context in which the letter was written, and it is part of what the letter is.

The structure of Romans is the thing that makes it possible to read it as a working out of an argument. The letter moves through a sequence of moves, and each move prepares for the next. The standard outline runs like this:

Chapters 1 through 3 set out the problem. Paul argues that both the non-Jews and the Jews are under the power of sin, that the non-Jews have failed to live up to the knowledge of God available to them, and that the Jews have failed to live up to the covenant they received. The famous passage at the beginning of Romans 1 — the catalog of non-Jewish depravity — is only the first half of the argument. The second half, in chapters 2 and 3, turns on the Jews and argues that they are not exempt from the condemnation. The point is that everybody is in the same condition. The law does not put anyone in the right. The covenant does not put anyone in the right. The human condition is the same on both sides of the covenant boundary.

Chapters 3 through 5 set out the solution. Paul argues that God has acted in Christ to put people in the right — to justify them — through faith, and that this is the fulfillment of the covenant promises to Abraham. The argument is that Abraham was justified by faith before the law was given, and that the same thing is true for everyone who believes, Jew and non-Jew alike. The law was given, but it could not do what the covenant promised. Christ has done what the law could not do. The result is that the covenant promise is now available to everyone who believes, and it is available on the same terms — faith — for Jew and non-Jew.

Chapters 5 through 8 develop the consequences. Paul argues that the gift in Christ is greater than the trespass, that the gift brings life where the trespass brought death, that the believers are no longer under the power of sin, that the law's function was temporary and preparatory, and that the Spirit is the power of the new life. This is the most sustained treatment of the Christian life in the letters, and it is the section where Paul elaborates the relation between the old order and the new.

Chapters 9 through 11 address the most difficult question in the letter. If the covenant promise was made to Israel, and if Israel has failed, and if the non-Jews are now included in the promise, what happens to Israel? Does the failure of Israel mean the end of Israel? Does the inclusion of the non-Jews mean the replacement of Israel? Paul's answer is no. Israel has not been abandoned. Israel has failed, but the failure has served a purpose. The inclusion of the non-Jews is meant to make Israel jealous. The promise to Israel has not been revoked. God's gifts and calling are irrevocable. The chapter ends with a celebration of the depth of God's wisdom and the inscrutability of God's judgments and the ways of God's peace. This is the point of the letter for Paul, and it is the section most readers skip.

Chapters 12 through 15 apply the argument to the life of the community. Paul argues that the believers are to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, that they are to love their enemies, that they are to respect the consciences of the weak, that they are to live at peace with one another, and that the strong are to bear with the weak. This is the section where the argument becomes ethical, and where Paul addresses the specific problems of the Roman church — the weak and the strong, the vegetarians and the meat-eaters, the days and the observances.

Chapters 9 through 11 are the most difficult part of the letter, and the most important. The question they address is the question that hangs over the whole letter: what is God's relationship to Israel, and what does the gospel mean for the covenant people? The question is not a theoretical one for Paul. It is the question that arises from the tension between the promise to Israel and the failure of Israel, and between the inclusion of the non-Jews and the original scope of the promise. If the covenant was made with Israel, and if the covenant is now fulfilled in Christ, and if the non-Jews are now included as believers, then what has happened to Israel?

Paul's answer is one of the most remarkable things in the letters. He does not say that Israel has been replaced. He does not say that the covenant is over. He does not say that the Jewish people have forfeited their place in God's purpose. He says that Israel has failed, but that the failure has not meant the end of Israel. He says that a remnant has been saved, and that the rest have been hardened, and that the hardening is temporary, and that the full inclusion of Israel will come. He says that the non-Jews have been grafted into the olive tree, and that they should not be arrogant, and that they should remember that they are grafts and not the root. He says that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, and that the chapter ends with the conclusion that God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

This is not a rejection of Israel. It is a theology of Israel's failure and of Israel's future. Paul is saying that the failure of Israel is real, but that it is not final, and that the inclusion of the non-Jews is a stage in the story, not the end of the story. The story is not over. Israel has a future. The hardening is partial and temporary. The full number of the Gentiles will come in, and then all Israel will be saved. The deliverer will come from Zion. The covenant promises stand.

This is the argument that most readers skip, because it is difficult, and because it does not fit the picture of Paul that many readers bring to the letter. Many readers want Paul to be the apostle to the non-Jews who broke with Judaism and started something new. In Romans 9 through 11, Paul is the apostle to the non-Jews who is arguing that the story of Israel is not over, and that the non-Jews are included in the story of Israel, and that the story of Israel has a future that the reader does not yet see. This is not the Paul of the caricature. It is the Paul of the letter, and it is the Paul who is most careful about the place of the Jewish people in the story he is telling.

The argument is also the argument that makes the letter most relevant to the problem of anti-Judaism. If Paul is read as the author of a new religion that replaced Judaism, then Romans can be read as the document of the replacement — the document that says the old is over and the new has come. If Paul is read as the author of a letter that argues the story of Israel is not over, and that the non-Jews are included in the story of Israel, and that the covenant promises stand, then Romans is the corrective to the replacement reading. This book has been given the second reading from the start, and it is the reading that the brief has instructed the book to carry. Chapter 26 is the corrective to the oldest error, and it is the chapter that is supposed to keep that corrective live.

One of the things that is most striking about Romans is the way Paul handles the question of the law. In the earlier chapters, Paul argues that the law does not put anyone in the right, and that the law was a temporary measure, and that the law's function was to reveal the human condition and to confine the transgressions. In the later chapters, Paul argues that the law is holy and just and good, and that the problem is not the law but the flesh, and that the law is fulfilled in the life of the Spirit. This is not a contradiction. It is a careful argument about the function of the law in the story, and about the difference between the law as a system of covenant membership and the law as a moral guide for the life of the Spirit.

The point is that the law was given to Israel as the mark of covenant membership, and as the boundary between Israel and the non-Jews, and as the structure of the covenant life. The law could not give life. The law could not justify. The law's function was to reveal the condition of the people and to confine them under sin until the time of Christ. Christ has now come, and the promise is now fulfilled, and the believers — Jew and non-Jew — are justified by faith, and they live by the Spirit. The law is still holy, but its function as a system of justification and covenant boundary has passed. The believers do not live under the law as a system of justification. They live under the law as a moral guide, but the moral guide is now the law of Christ, the law of the Spirit, the law of love, and the specific observances that marked the covenant boundary — circumcision, food laws, the Sabbaths — are no longer required for covenant membership, because covenant membership is now by faith in Christ.

This is the argument that makes the letter most difficult, and the argument that makes the letter most significant. Paul is arguing that the covenant has been fulfilled and that the boundary markers have passed, and that the non-Jews can now be included in the covenant people without becoming Jews. This is the same argument that runs through Galatians and that was the source of the conflict with the rivals and with the Jerusalem leadership. In Romans, the argument is worked out in greater detail, with more care, and with more attention to the history of the covenant. The letter is the most complete statement of what Paul believed about the covenant and the law and the place of the non-Jews, and it is the letter that shows most clearly the shape of his thought.

Romans 1 and the question of sexuality is the passage that most readers will come to the letter looking for, and it is the passage that the book has been instructed to handle with care. The brief says: set out what the text says, the first-century categories it uses, the range of serious scholarly readings, and the fact that reasonable people land in different places. Do not campaign in either direction. Do not skip it either. This chapter will follow that instruction, and it will set out the passage and the questions it raises without trying to resolve them for the reader.

Romans 1:26–27 is the passage that has been the most argued over in recent decades. Paul describes the non-Jews as having turned away from God and as having given themselves over to dishonourable passions, and he describes women exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones, and men committing shameless acts with men and receiving the due penalty in themselves. The passage is part of the argument that the non-Jews have failed to live up to the knowledge of God available to them, and that their failure has produced a catalogue of vice.

The question is what Paul meant by the passions he describes, and what the passage is doing in the argument. There are a range of serious scholarly readings. Some read the passage as a condemnation of same-sex behaviour in the modern sense — as a rejection of homosexual acts as inherently wrong, on the basis of a natural law argument that the acts are contrary to the created order. Some read the passage as a condemnation of specific forms of same-sex behaviour — the exploitative, the idolatrous, the non-reciprocal — and as not addressing loving same-sex partnerships, which did not exist in the ancient world in the form they exist now. Some read the passage as part of a larger critique of idolatry and of the inversion of created order, and as an example of the general degradation Paul is describing, not a specific moral teaching about sexual orientation. Some read the passage as drawing on categories that are not the categories of modern sexuality — the ancients did not have the concept of sexual orientation, and their categories were about acts and roles and status, not about identity.

All of these readings have defenders. All of them are defended by serious scholars. The reader who comes to the passage will find a range of positions, and the honest thing to do is to describe the range and to say that reasonable people land in different places. The book is not the place to advocate for one reading over the others. The book is the place to set out what the text says and what the questions are, and to leave the reader with the range of readings and the fact that the passage has been read in different ways by people who are trying to be faithful to the text.

This is not a refusal to engage with the passage. It is an engagement with the passage that respects the complexity of the interpretive question and the range of serious positions. The book has already set the pattern for this in chapter 14, where the range of readings on the question of what Paul believed about the law and the non-Jews was set out without trying to resolve it for the reader. The same pattern applies here. The passage is set out. The categories are described. The range of readings is noted. The fact that reasonable people land in different places is stated. The chapter is not a campaign for one side or the other.

Romans is the most influential letter in the Christian tradition, and it has been read in the most contradictory ways. Augustine read it as the document of grace and the rejection of the law. Luther read it as the document of justification by faith and the rejection of the Jewish attempt to earn salvation. The Catholic and Protestant traditions read it in different ways, and the debate over justification that runs through the history of Christian theology is a debate over Romans. The letter has been used to build systems and to break them, to justify missions and to justify anti-Judaism, to argue for the replacement of Israel and to argue for the continuing place of Israel in God's purpose.

The book is not going to resolve the history of the interpretations of Romans. It is going to present the letter as Paul wrote it, and to show the reader what he was doing in it, and to set out the argument in a way that lets the reader see the shape of the thought. The book will argue, throughout, that the letters win over Acts and that the controlling question of the book is the gap between the letters and the story Acts tells. Romans is the clearest case of the letter winning. There is no Acts equivalent of the Romans argument about Israel and the covenant. There is no Acts account of the theology of chapters 9 through 11. The letter is the only source for the most carefully worked out thing Paul wrote, and it is the only source for the thing that most readers skip.

This is one of the reasons the book cares about the letters and about reading them as they are. The letters are the source of the most important things Paul wrote, and the letters are the source of the things that the later tradition has read in the most contradictory ways. The book is going to read the letters in their own terms, and to show the reader what they say and what they do not say, and to resist the tendency to read into them the things later generations wanted them to say.

Romans is also the letter that shows Paul at his most ambitious and his most hopeful. He is writing to a church he does not know, and he is writing to introduce himself, and he is writing to prepare the way for his visit. He is writing at the end of a long and difficult career, and he is writing with a sense of the urgency of the Jerusalem journey and the hope of the Roman visit and the dream of the Spanish mission. He is writing with the most complete argument he has ever made, and he is writing with the confidence that the argument is true and that the church in Rome will understand it and respond to it.

This is the Paul of the letter — the man who is confident in his gospel, and who is confident in his understanding of the covenant and the place of the non-Jews, and who is confident that the story of Israel is not over, and who is confident that the church in Rome will receive his argument and receive him. It is not the Paul of the caricature — the man who is angry and defensive and obsessed with guilt. It is the Paul of the letter — the man who is arguing, and who is hoping, and who is planning, and who is writing the most careful and the most influential document he will ever produce.

The letter is the end of the letters in the sense that it is the longest and the most careful and the most complete. It is the last of the undisputed letters in the sense of chronology, though the order of the letters is not perfectly certain. It is the letter that Paul wrote when he was at the height of his power as a thinker and a writer and a missionary, and it is the letter that makes the case for everything he believed in the most sustained form. It is the letter that most readers do not finish, and it is the letter that contains the most important argument most readers skip. The book is going to finish it, and it is going to make the case that the argument in chapters 9 through 11 is the point of the letter, and that it is worth the reading.

The next chapter is the beginning of Part Six, and it is the chapter about the journey to Jerusalem, and about the warning from the prophet, and about the friends who begged Paul not to go, and about the man who went anyway because he believed he had to, and because he believed that the collection had to be delivered, and because he believed that the death he faced was part of the story God was writing.