What kinds of letters is he writing? Is he writing scripture?
Now when we say that Paul writes letters we have to realize that Paul really doesn’t think of himself as writing scripture. He hasn’t yet thought of a New Testament. It didn’t exist yet. For Paul the Bible means the Hebrew Scriptures, or more precisely, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that we call the Septuagint. So when Paul quotes scripture he’s quoting from the Hebrew Bible in its Greek form. When Paul writes letters he’s writing everyday, ordinary letters to real people in real cities trying to deal with the circumstances in which they’re living. …[H]e does want to deal with theological issues, but Paul isn’t writing theological treatises as much as he’s giving advice and instruction and encouragement for living. Is he meeting any conflicts? Are there practical problems that he has to kind of worry about? The other thing that Paul’s letters show us is that these fledgling congregations are also facing enormous difficulties of social adjustment, and so when Paul wri
