Cultural Codes and reading someone else's mail: the Apostle Paul’s epistles

Many read the Apostle Paul’s (Sha’ul) letters as providing ‘Systematic Theology’, (a branch of theology concerned with summarizing the doctrinal traditions of a religion). 

But there is a huge problem with being too definitive here, as these writings of Sha’ul are just some of his, possibly many letters, yet also today most biblical scholars acknowledge that not all of those letters deemed to be his epistles were actually written by him!

As letters they have a significant history of understanding. The communities he writes to are generally already familiar with both Sha’ul and the history and theology he is presenting. They also replied to these letters and much of this communication is lost to us. His readers would have shared a set of shared assumptions with a common cultural context (called ‘cultural codes’) which we have very limited access to.

Thus, there may be much humour, irony, sarcasm and knowledge of certain very significant language constructs that we are not familiar with when we read these letters almost two thousand years later (and in other languages as well).

To repeat, with the exception of the letter to the Romans there is much ‘insider knowledge’ that we are not privy to. We are reading a portion of someone else’s mail, and only one side of the discussion at that, and we don’t have all the correspondence either. We see in 1 Corinthians 5:9 “I wrote to you in an epistle not to keep company with fornicators …”, that there were other letters that have not survived.

We see for example from 1 Cor 7:1 “Now concerning the things about which you wrote to me: it is good for a man not to touch a woman.”, that this very letter is in response to a number of letter’s or oral reports. As there was no ‘postal service’ as such, these ‘letters’ were carried by people like Timothy travelling between the various regions, and either sharing verbally of via some written correspondence.

So the travelling disciple, even in the case where they transported a written letter, may well have been able to add meaning and context from their time spent with the various communities that had written to Sha’ul.

On top of these most significant barriers to a clear and unequivocal understanding of Sha’ul’s epistles, we possibly have a number of significant redactions and interpolations to factor in as well!

So it should come as no surprise that we have a great many different interpretations of what was actually intended by the words of Sha’ul. This also leads to a great many interpretations of who and what Sha’ul was.

This is compounded by the way that Sha’ul writes as well. There are many passages such as Galatians 3:19-22 which are not at all clear in their intent, at least when studied in depth.

I therefore think that all commentators on the writings of Sha’ul should recognize that their conclusions must be tentative to some degree.

Having in recent years written a lengthy article on Sha’ul, ‘The Apostle Paul: Disciple or Fraud’ (http://www.charismacomputers.com.au/TheApostlePaul_disciple_or_fraud.pdf) 

and a book ‘Defending the Apostle Paul: Weighing the Evidence’ (http://www.amazon.com/Defending-The-Apostle-Paul-Weighing-ebook/dp/B009TLLK0U) 

I still see a need to continue to seek further clarity on his vital message and to continue to seek further information and evidence.

What should be clear though is that it really is a mistake to base our doctrinal beliefs on these epistles. We instead need to go back to the foundational text of the Tanakh (OT) and to the very words of Yeshua, the greatest Jew of all history, and a man who it appears, knew the Almighty better than anyone else ever has!

We need to listen to him when he confirmed what the two greatest commandments were (Matt 22:35-40); and when he agreed with Micah (Micah 6:8) and Solomon (Ecc 12:13) as to what the duty of mankind is (see Matt 23:23b, Matt 12:50 and the brilliant Sermon on the Mount – Matt 5-7).

Or to sum it all up as the Talmud does so effectively, ‘Deeds matter more than creeds’.

 TBC