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Letters of St. Paul Apart from Acts, the letters
of St. Paul to the churches he had founded or with which he was familiar
are the other main source for our knowledge of his apostolic work and of
course, for the Apostle himself. These letters also make up for the
compressed text of Acts and thus help us to understand what is missing
about his journeys. Written to his followers at virtually the same time as
events with which they deal, they are the earliest works of the New
Testament.
St. Paul’s surviving writings constitute a small corpus of nine letters
addressed to particular churches, one private letter, and three letters to
Timothy and Titus, known as the ‘pastoral letters’. Three of these letters
were written to communities in Anatolia: Galatians, Colossians and
Ephesians; whilst scholarly opinion is divided as to whether the latter
two are genuine, Galatians is indisputably so. Acts and the letters seem
to be independent of each other, even though the letters were in existence
when Acts was written.
St. Paul seems to have regarded himself as responsible, in addition to the
churches he established, for ‘all the churches’ he knew (2 Cor 11:28) and
corresponded with them. He may have also visited most of them once or more.
This was a period during which, except for the military postal service,
people had to rely on other people going in the direction of their letters
to correspond with others. In the social and commercial world of the first
century, which did the Roman, peace there seems to have been no shortage
of such people, make possible.
St. Paul wrote (dictated) his letters in Koine or common language, the
Hellenistic Greek of his day. This was the lingua franca, the
international language needed by any man in public life or one traveling
or writing, spread by the armies of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms,
which succeeded his empire. However, St. Paul’s Greek was not as
distinguished as that of St Luke, the author of Acts and in accordance
with the practice of the time professional scribes composed his letters.
St. Paul’s words that there was ‘a letter allegedly from us’ (2 Thes 2:2)
in circulation shows that even his letters were forged. This is the reason
that as he mentioned (2 Thes 3:17) he signed his letters by his ‘own hand’.
His drawing attention to the extra large script (Gal 6:11) to show the
authenticity of his letter, was mistakenly interpreted as his having bad
eyesight
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