The Letters of Paul: An Expanded Paraphrase

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INTRODUCTION

THIS WORK BEGAN HAPHAZARDLY . During easter weekend, 1955, I gave a series of Bible study talks on the Epistle to the Galatians to the North Midlands Young People’s Holiday Conference at Kingsmoor School, Glossop, and prepared a paraphrase of the epistle to be used along with the talks. Some time later, finding myself short of material for one number of The Evangelical Quarterly , I used this paraphrase to fill the gap. At Easter, 1957, I gave a series of talks to the same Conference on the Epistle to the Colossians, and prepared a similar paraphrase of that epistle, which was also published subsequently in The Evangelical Quarterly. At this point my friend and publisher, Mr. B. Howard Mudditt, assured me that this was the most important work I had ever done, and urged me to continue what I had begun. Under his friendly pressure I found myself producing paraphrase after paraphrase, until in the course of six years or so the whole Pauline corpus was paraphrased in successive numbers of The Evangelical Quarterly. This paraphrase in a revised form is now published in one volume.

I have called this an Expanded Paraphrase. The title may remind readers of other works which have appeared in recent years under similar titles. But this expansion is not designed to set side by side the various synonyms by which a Greek word may be rendered, or to bring out the finer nuances of Greek moods and tenses. It is designed, rather, to make the course of Paul’s argument as clear as possible. Of all English translations of the New Testament, the one which reproduces most accurately the nuances of Greek grammar and follows the idiom of the original as closely as possible without doing excessive violence to English literary usage – the translation which is therefore at the farthest remove from an expanded paraphrase – is the Revised Version of 1881. The Revised Version of the Pauline epistles is accordingly printed alongside the Expanded Paraphrase in the following pages, for the convenience and interest of readers who may care to compare and contrast two renderings produced on directly opposite principles.¹

Paul has his assured place among the illustrious letter writers of antiquity. Thirteen out of the twenty-one letters in the New Testament appear under his name – either alone, or in association with one or two of his companions. It was evidently Paul’s practice to dictate his letters and to authenticate them by signing his name at the end.² On one occasion the name of his amanuensis is given: Tertius, who wrote down the Epistle to the Romans at Paul’s dictation, sends his greetings to the readers in the first person.³ We can only guess at the identity of his other amanuenses.

When his letters are analysed in terms of those features of style and language in which the idiosyncrasies of individual amanuenses tend to be revealed – such features as the use and frequency of certain connecting particles and the comparative length of sentences – four groupings can be distinguished within the Pauline corpus. These are (a) Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians (or at least 2 Corinthians 10-13), and Romans; (b) 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Philippians and Colossians; (c) Ephesians; (d) 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (the Pastoral Epistles). Philemon is too short to yield significant data under this kind of analysis, but on internal evidence it goes closely with Colossians.

It is noteworthy that in the second of these four groups Timothy’s name is associated with Paul’s in the opening salutation. Was it Timothy who wrote down these letters? If so, he may have been allowed to use considerable stylistic discretion. In the first group we may take it that the style is more thoroughly Paul’s and that Tertius and the other amanuenses who took down the letters in this group reproduced his spoken words more or less verbatim, except that here and there, especially in Paul’s more impassioned moments, the reader feels that some of his words have fallen out because the writer could not keep up with him. In such places commentators and paraphrasts attempt to supply the missing words which are necessary to complete the sense.

The quite distinctive style of Ephesians may be due in part to the inspired mood of meditative adoration and prayer in which it was composed (in marked contrast to the swift, rugged, argumentative style of some of Paul’s other letters) and in part to the greater freedom allowed to Paul’s helper – Tychicus? – who wrote it down for him.

As for the three Pastoral Epistles, the reference to Luke in 2 Timothy 4:11, Luke alone is left with me, suggests that on this occasion, at any rate, Luke was the apostle’s amanuensis. For the rest, if there is any substance in the suggestion that these letters represent fragments of Paul’s correspondence and other notes collected and published after his death, one might expect the editor’s personality and style to be more prominent than the personality and the style of a simple amanuensis. But who could this editor have been? There are a few indications which have made some students of the New Testament think of Luke.⁴

Paul dictated, and the amanuensis would take his words down on wax tablets as best he could (probably using one of the systems of shorthand current in the first century A.D.), and then transcribe the text onto papyrus. Sometimes the scribe’s task would not be so difficult, where Paul develops a careful argument in a relatively calm mood – as, for example, in the greater part of the Epistle to the Romans. But at other times the impetuous torrent of Paul’s thought carried him swiftly on – the Epistle to the Galatians is a good example – and we can only try to imagine how the scribe fared. Paul’s mind ran on ahead of his tongue, and sometimes the words as we have them seem to have overleaped a gap in order to catch up with his thought. At such moments the scribe must have been a specially good shorthand writer if his stylus kept up with Paul’s words. Much of the expansion in this paraphrase is designed to fill in such gaps in the wording.

But there are gaps of another kind with which we have to reckon in the reading of Paul’s letters – gaps in our own knowledge. It is often said that in reading them today we are like people listening to one end of a telephone conversation. We miss the point of some of the things we hear because we cannot hear what is being said at the other end. Paul’s first readers were acquainted with the background of his letters in a way that is impossible for us, because it was their own background. For example, a good part of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians is his reply to a letter which he had recently received from them asking a number of questions on matters of practical importance. If that letter had been preserved, we should understand the last ten chapters of 1 Corinthians better than we do. As it is, we have to infer its contents from Paul’s reply.

In general the situations with which Paul’s letters deal, the people to whom he refers (sometimes not even by name, because that was unnecessary), the incidents which he briefly recalls – all these were matters of common knowledge to his readers and himself, and the merest allusion was sufficient to show them what he had in mind. But we have to reconstruct those situations as best we may, and we may often be mistaken because we have missed an important element in them. Commentators will continue for long to debate the question of the identity of the super-apostles of 2 Corinthians 11:5 and 12:11, and their relation to the false apostles of 11:13, without reaching any agreed conclusion, just because much of the original evidence for a conclusion has disappeared beyond recovery. Occasionally an attempt is made in the following pages to fill in a gap of this kind by means of an expansion. This is a further reason why this version is called a paraphrase, not a translation.

It is, of course, difficult to say where translation ends and paraphrase begins; much depends on one’s definition of the two words. But frequently the criticism has been urged against certain recent versions of the New Testament that in places they are not translations but paraphrases. Well, this one is a paraphrase. One feature of such a work probably is that the paraphrast includes much more of his own interpretation and exposition than a translator would deem proper. Where my own interpretation and exposition are incorporated in this paraphrase, they are based on careful consideration of the text, and I have tried not to represent Paul as saying anything which he did not intend to say.

Paul is not an easy writer to translate, although in practice it may be found more difficult to translate other New Testament writers whose diction might be thought much smoother than his. He has his own special locutions, or locutions which he uses in his own special sense. How, for example, is one to translate such a simple phrase as in Christ or in the Lord? One may translate it literally, but does a literal translation readily convey what Paul meant by it? Indeed, did the Greek phrase readily convey his meaning to his first readers? In this paraphrase it is variously rendered in the light of the context – sometimes literally, sometimes by such a circumlocution as by virtue of your incorporation into Christ or as fellow members of the body of Christ. That, it may be said, is paraphrase, not translation. Precisely so.

Again, Paul is prone to use we or us where modern English requires I or me. But – especially in those letters where he associates others with him in the superscription – it is not always clear when he uses the first person plural to include them, and when he uses it with reference only to himself. In this paraphrase the plural is usually left; for the most part it is changed to the singular only where the plural would be misleading to the English reader.

The critical problems of the Pauline corpus are touched as lightly as possible in the following pages. It may suffice to say here that the technique of translating or paraphrasing the three Pastoral Epistles has proved to be notably different from that which is called for by the other ten.

The familiar order of the Pauline letters in the New Testament is based on a twofold principle of classification: first, the letters to churches precede letters to individuals, and second, within these two groups the letters are arranged in descending order of length.⁵ In this work an attempt is made to arrange them in approximately chronological order. This cannot always be ascertained with complete confidence, but an order which endeavours to be chronological makes it easier to trace the progress of Paul’s apostolic activity and teaching. As the letters will be better understood if they are read in their historical setting, they are presented here in the framework of a narrative outline, based mainly on the Acts of the Apostles.

1 The original printed edition of The Letters of Paul: An Expanded Paraphrase was a diglot with the Revised Version printed alongside Bruce’s paraphrase. However, because the Revised Version of 1881 is not used as much today and because so many more translations have become available in the past fifty years, we have included only Bruce’s Expanded Paraphrase so that the reader can compare it with a favorite translation.

2 See Galatians 6:11; 2 Thessalonians 3:17; 1 Corinthians 16:21; Colossians 4:18; also Philemon 19.

3 Romans 16:22.

4 See C. F. D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (1962), pp. 220 f.

5 There is one minor exception to this principle. Galatians is slightly shorter than Ephesians, although it precedes Ephesians in the familiar sequence. The reason for this may lie in the very early history of the Pauline corpus.

CHAPTER ONE

THE EARLIER EPISTLES

Paul’s Early Career

S AUL, WHO IS ALSO CALLED P AUL , was born about the beginning of the Christian era in Tarsus, an ancient and highly cultured city of Cilicia, in Asia Minor, to Jewish parents who traced their ancestry to the tribe of Benjamin. It was perhaps their tribal association that moved them to give their son the name of the most illustrious Benjaminite in Israel’s history – Saul, the first king of Israel. They had maintained their Palestinian Aramaic speech in the Greek-speaking environment of Tarsus, and brought up their son to be proudly conscious of his heritage as a Hebrew son of Hebrew parents. But he was born to yet another heritage, and a very different one – he was born a Roman citizen. By what means his father or grandfather had aquired the rare honour of Roman citizenship we can only speculate, but it is as a Roman citizen that he bore the Latin cognomen Paul, by which he is best known.

Tarsus was one of the three great university cities of the world in that day, next to Athens and Alexandria, and was a centre of Stoic philosophy. But it was not to any of the schools of Tarsus that Paul’s parents sent him to be educated, but to the rabbinic academy of Gamaliel in Jerusalem. Gamaliel was the most eminent Jewish teacher of his generation, a distinguished leader of the party of the Pharisees. Paul embraced with self-sacrificing ardour the Pharisaic ideal of devotion to the divinely-given law of Israel, and set himself to outstrip his fellows in mastery of the ancestral traditions and obedience to the commandments of God. A career to match Gamaliel’s own seemed to he ahead of him.

In his devotion to the law he opposed implacably any movement which threatened its supremacy and abiding validity – and in particular he threw himself wholeheartedly into a campaign of repression against the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was executed in A.D. 30 on a charge of blasphemy against Israel’s God and Israel’s law, and, while many of His followers nevertheless lived as pious and observant Jews, Paul recognized that at the heart of Jesus’ teaching there was a principle that menaced all that he held most dear. This principle came to unambiguous expression in the teaching of Stephen, a follower of Jesus from the ranks of Jewish Hellenists.⁶ Stephen was convicted before the supreme Jewish court on a charge of blasphemy very similar to that on which his Master had been convicted. He taught that the temple order in Jerusalem was obsolete (in so far as it had ever been divinely sanctioned), and that Jesus had replaced the traditional religion by a new sanctuary and a new law. Stephen’s conviction and execution were followed by a violent attack on the followers of Jesus, especially on those who were Hellenists like Stephen and shared his outook. These were compelled to leave Jerusalem, but wherever they went they propagated their message.