The Letters of Paul in General
The author of the 2 Peter wasn't mistaken when he wrote that there are some things in the letter of Paul that are so hard to understand "which things uneducated and unbalanced people distort, in the same way as they distort the rest of scripture... (2 Peter 3:16)." I would suggest that the difficulty of beginners in understanding St. Paul derives from the failure to understand the nature of his writings. If one begins to read them without taking into account their original audience, the kind of relationship Paul had with that audience, and the concerns of Paul when he wrote to them, then a lot of those letters will seem to contain gibberish. Further, if one treats those letters AS IF they were written AFTER the four gospels have been written, then one will simply miss the point when Paul speaks of "my Gospel." Finally, if one tries to see in the letters of Paul a doctrine that is already complete, as if they were an integrated treatise distributed in different pamphlets, then one will really end up distorting Paul's message and his gospel.
The letters of Paul were the letters of a missionary to the fledgling Churches he has established or was intending to visit. They were therefore pastoral in intent, i.e. they answer specific questions or concerns. Only two of these can be considered doctrinal: the Letter to the Romans, and the Letter to the Hebrews (which is not really a letter, nor for Hebrews, and is NOT by Paul, although it is included in the Pauline corpus by way of tradition). Paul wrote the letters between the years 50 and 65 AD, years before the first Gospel was completed (Mark, c.70 AD). This is important to know since the word "Gospel" in Paul does not refer to any written material but to the memory of the Lord as it is proclaimed and preached by the apostles. Lastly, the letters were written to assemblies of the faithful that regularly met in households. The letters were read within the context of a formal gathering of the baptized composed mostly of converts from paganism. These were household "churches" (cf. Gal. 6:10, "households of faith") whose members knew one another and who lived together in the same neighborhood or in the same district.
The fact that Paul established these "churches" (see his missionary journeys in Acts) amidst controversies arising, not really from Christianity itself, but from the Jewish roots of Christianity, one can understand why Paul is so "jealous" of their welfare. He is after all, the mother (cf. Gal. 4:19), the nurse (1 Thess 2:7, the NIV translates this "as a mother", but the Gk uses the word trophos, a nurse), even the bridegroom of these assemblies whom he wishes to present as a bride to Christ (2 Cor. 11:2). At a time when Paul's missionary efforts among the Gentiles faced competition from the representatives of the apostles from Jerusalem (these were the missionaries with documentary credentials probably coming from the Mother Church1), Paul had to -- among others -- warn his assemblies of the notion that to be a Christian, one must first become a Jew. The Christian after all was not saved by the Law, but by the gratuitous love of God in Christ. But Paul's competition seemed to have better credentials than he had. Technically, he doesn't belong to the Twelve. Paul did not have the three qualities of an apostle, qualities that Luke enumerates in the Acts of the Apostles2. Hence Paul had to prove that he too was an apostle since he "saw" the Lord and that he has received the ministry from the apostles themselves, was exercising it based on an agreement previously had with the mother Church in Jerusalem and that he was doing his job as a witness of the resurrection should.
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