1 Corinthians 4:9-16
“Paul Obscured,” After Jesus: Before Christianity (Westar)
The apostle Paul is the star of our New Testament (after Jesus, of course). Well over half of the books in the New Testament are attributed to Paul as author, and half of the book of Acts tells the story of his missionary journeys. We can be forgiven for thinking Paul had an out-sized role in creating the first century church. For our scripture today I chose one of his own descriptions of how hard he worked to tell people about Jesus.
Today’s chapter gives us a dose of Paul reality. Let’s start with Paul’s writings. Scholars work hard to understand Paul’s theology and his understanding of Jesus across all his writings, a task that’s made harder by the fact that not every letter that bears Paul’s name is consistent with the others. How do we know what Paul really thought? That question is particularly interesting because some of what’s in those letters is out of sync with contemporary practice in the church. (Paul has a reputation for not valuing the ministry of women, even thought we know he worked in partnership with many women in his own ministry.) Over time scholars have come to consensus that Paul probably wrote, Galatians, Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians. Which means he probably didn’t write Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. (You don’t have to remember that; I have to look it up every time.) In our time borrowing the name of a famous author is frowned upon, but in the first and second centuries it was common. Those books on the “not probably Paul” list reflect issues addressed later in time, after Paul’s death, and used his name to borrow his reputation. If we were doing a deep dive into Paul rather than just one sermon, we’d find that most of the inconsistencies with Paul’s key ideas show up in these extra books.
There’s no doubt that Paul was extremely important to the gatherings of Jesus people in the towns where he founded Jesus clubs (which we now call churches). His letters were primarily about how those clubs should manage their daily affairs. They are practical because people were just figuring out how this Jesus association worked and they needed advice. They were never intended to be what we call a “systematic theology” or an explanation of every detail of how our relationship with God and Jesus works.
We think of Paul’s letters as a collection which we call scripture – the Bible. First and second century folks had no collection and no Bible. The scholar Marcion did write theology at the beginning of the second century and he was quite fond of Paul. He did make a collection of Paul’s letters and advocated for their prominence in the conversation about faith. His collection was circulated among people who agreed with him. Unfortunately, Marcion has been declared a heretic by those who came after him and his influence has been minimized.
Paul is important as the missionary to those who weren’t primarily Jewish, which was important, especially after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 CE which essentially eliminated Israel as a people. Paul is also important as someone who was himself a Judean and saw Jesus as the culmination of the Jewish faith. Since those are essentially opposite truths, it makes our understanding about Paul complicated. It also means that there are generations of Jesus followers at the end of the first century and beginning of the second who didn’t know much about Paul and didn’t care. They were part of Jesus communities in towns Paul didn’t visit and had their own favorite leaders.
We’ve been learning through this book that the beginning of Christianity, before it was Christianity, was diverse and complicated. That’s contrary to our Sunday school training that told us Paul started all the churches outside Jerusalem, heard from Jesus what was the “truth” about God, and wrote it down for us to follow. In our traditions that gets expanded because Martin Luther treasured the writings of Paul and based much of his own writings on them. This chapter isn’t meant to say that Paul isn’t important or wise or even enlightened about God. He is all those things. He’s also not the only game in town and when we are looking for ways to follow Jesus, he’s an important option but not the only option.
A word about the Bible might be important here. The Bible is our holy book. We call it scripture. We say it’s inspired by God. We don’t say (like some churches) that the Bible was dictated by God to people who wrote it down word for word. We can spend a lifetime studying the Bible and not scratch the surface of its complexity. It’s many books, gathered over millennia by many different editors. It’s a collection generally agreed on about the fifth century but varying even today among different denominations. It exists in many translations made from ancient manuscripts of individual books, and there is not one “correct” ancient copy of anything. So how can we trust it?
We trust the Bible because we trust the people over centuries who have done the work to gather it, preserve it, and translate it. They have done very careful scholarship.
We trust it because we read it for what it is: the story of people who wanted to know God recorded over time as they learned what it meant to live in relationship to God and each other. In the Bible thousands of people are telling us why God matters to them.
We trust the Bible because we read it together. We compare translations. We talk about what’s clear and what’s confusing. We keep each other on track, helped along by people who give their lives to this study so they can share their knowledge with us. We come back to passages over and over again and our understanding grows over time.
We trust the Bible because we read it in the presence of God. We bring our experience of God to the reading and the conversation – just like our spiritual ancestors have done for thousands of years. Sometimes we have an a-ha! moment and gain an important new insight. Sometimes we change our minds about what the Bible means, what it says or doesn’t say. God is in that process. We don’t do it alone.
When we say that the Bible is Holy, we’re saying that we meet God in the stories, through the stories, and as we compare the stories to the stories of our own lives. It’s not the book that’s sacred, it’s the process of reading it together and making it our own that’s sacred. Just like the church is evolving and our own faith is growing and changing, the Bible is a living work that’s becoming God’s word to us, new each time we encounter it. That is a holy thing.