Paul wrote like a man running out of time, because he thought he was. That’s the plainest way I can put what changed for me this year: a lyric I’d known for years clicked in a new way: “why do you write like you’re running out of time” from Hamilton is sung at a man racing to found a nation before someone else got there first. Hamilton wrote against a deadline that was political. Paul wrote against one he believed was cosmic. He expected Jesus to come back, within his own lifetime, and there wasn’t time to get it wrong.
The earliest letter we have, 1 Thessalonians, is written to people grieving. Some of the converts had died while everyone was still waiting, and their friends wanted to know whether that meant they’d missed it. Paul’s answer is that the dead in Christ rise, everyone arrives together. By the time he’s writing to Corinth a few years later, the urgency has hardened into something closer to advice: the time is short, so maybe don’t bother getting married. Two thousand years of theology got built on a man who thought the deadline was next week.
I spent a long stretch of my life reading Paul as though we had the whole conversation. We didn’t. What survives is only some of his letters, not the ones he was answering or what the churches wrote back. He’s responding to particular people about particular problems, and we have been reading one side of a correspondence and calling it a constitution.
That habit isn’t just mine. It’s most of the tradition that followed. The “Romans Road” I was taught to walk people down, all have sinned, the wages of sin is death, confess with your mouth, treats Romans as a legal transaction laid out in order. Paul’s actual target in those chapters is the exclusion of Gentiles from a family God had promised to include them in, not a catalogue of personal vice with your name on it. There’s a name for the reading that corrects this, the New Perspective on Paul, and it flips something Luther assumed onto its head: first-century Judaism wasn’t a religion of earning your way to God through law-keeping. “Works of the law”, the phrase the Reformation turned into a case against legalism, meant something narrower to Paul: the boundary markers, circumcision and food laws chief among them, that kept Gentile believers on the outside. He never stopped being a Pharisee. His argument was that those particular boundaries no longer applied to Gentiles, not that keeping the law was somehow beneath God’s people.
Galatians makes more sense once you notice what’s actually at stake in it. Jewish and Gentile believers had started eating at separate tables, and Paul is furious about it. His argument isn’t abstract. Being “in Christ” was something you did at a shared meal, not a private transaction settled between you and God alone. That’s where the letter’s most famous line lands: there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Not a slogan. The reason the Galatian church was supposed to be eating together in the first place.
I was taught that differently. I was taught the household codes and the “husband of one wife” instruction as the settled position, the one Galatians had got ahead of itself about, and I passed that reading on to other people with the same confidence it had been given to me. Except the letters that hand those instructions down, Ephesians and 1 Timothy among them, were most likely written after Paul was dead, by someone borrowing his name for a church settling into respectability. “Husband of one wife” reads less like a statement about gender once you remember what status looked like in a Greco-Roman household: wealthy men had wives and concubines, and having access to more than one body was one of the ways you displayed rank. The instruction restricts the powerful from exploiting that access. It isn’t a statement about gender hierarchy.
Now, I know how that sounds to anyone who’s spent years defending the plain reading of those verses. That’s not so! Even the plain reading has to explain why 1 Corinthians 14 tells women to be silent two chapters after Paul assumes they’re already praying and prophesying out loud in the same room. The best guess is that someone added the silencing line later. Both versions of Paul survive in the same letter. Which one a church chooses to hear says more about the church than it does about Paul.
The reason I keep coming back to this isn’t academic. I shared the household codes with people the same way they’d been shared with me, and some of them are still living inside a marriage they think Paul designed on purpose. That’s a heavier thing to have got wrong than a footnote.
I still don’t know what to do with most of what got built on top of Paul in the centuries after he died: the councils, the Reformation reading I absorbed before I ever questioned it. But the meal in Galatia, the one he was so angry about people walking away from, that I can imagine sitting down to.
