Gide. I'm Gary Stevens. And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast.

More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.

Episode 2.52. The many puzzles of Paul's epistles.

In the last episode, I introduced the great proselytiser Paul.

Paul would arrive in a town and preach the word of Jesus.

Some places he stayed a few weeks, others more than a year.

Once he had established a working Jesus club, Paul would pack up and move to the next town.

Paul took pains to stay in contact with his foundations.

He wrote letters.

Almost half of the documents in the New Testament,

13 of them are attributed to Paul.

With the exception of his letter to the slave owner Philemon,

Paul's letters are addressed to the leaders of the clubs, not to the members, but to the bosses. There's a good reason for that. With male literacy rates around 10% in the

Roman world, only the bosses could read Paul's letters. We have no idea how many letters Paul actually wrote.

Our New Testament includes 13 letters attributed to Paul, plus the anonymous letter to the Hebrews,

which was reluctantly endorsed as by Paul, three centuries after his death.

Paul was a smart and literate man, who loved to talk and write.

If Paul wrote just three letters a year, then we should have more like 90 letters.

Where are they?

Perhaps his recipients just threw them away.

Paul's clubs were expecting the return of Jesus any time now. They did not keep the letters for posterity, for there was not to be a posterity. The evidence we have is that by the year 140, 70 years

after his death, the Christian community knew of only a handful of Pauline epistles.

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