Letters from 2,000 years ago

This blog is another in a series on Ben Witherington's book called The Living Word of God, which examines the New Testament. Beside the four gospels covered in two previous blogs, Witherington talks about another portion of the New Testament--the letters that make up so much of it. It's obvious that they are written to specific audiences for specific purposes at a specific time using specific conventions popular during this time. We can gain much from them (and avoid misunderstandings) if we know more about these conventions.

Paul's letters are definitely oral documents meant to be read aloud in Greek to their intended audience. What does that mean for us today? We need to think about the kind of rhetorical devices we will encounter in them -- rhythm, parallelism, rhetorical questions, balanced sentences and phrases. You can see this in 1 Corinthians 13 if you read it aloud.

We need to also understand that these letters are attempts to persuade us. Paul, for example, uses all the tricks in his bag -- he tries to convince us, convict us, and even convert us to his points of view. Some may feel they are being manipulated, but he was simply conforming to the conventions of his own day. A good example of this is a lesser-known letter of Paul's called Philemon. In this letter he tries to convince a slave owner to free a slave who has run away from him. Read it sometime and notice the emotional appeals, the use of puns, the kind of pressure Paul puts on the slave owner.

Something else we need to consider when we read a letter is the fact that it is one long discourse. We tend to zoom in on a verse or a small passage rather than seeing the entire argument. Modern chapter and verse indications make it more difficult for us to see the big picture. It's often a mistake to isolate one chapter from the next when they both may be part of the same point. Look at Romans chapter 8 where the first word is "Therefore." We need to see what Paul covered in chapter 7 so we can understand why it is foundational to what he wants to express in the following chapter.

We must also distinguish between the purposes of these letters. Some attempt to solve a problem (Philemon and 1 Corinthians are examples). Others are there to report on progress, like Philippians, where Paul basically tells the people to keep going. Some letters are sermons meant to circulate through various churches, making them more generic in tone (Ephesians) while still others focus on specific problems in a specific church (Colossians and Galatians).

Probably the most difficult thing about these letters is determining what applies to us today. There's no doubt that much of the content dealt with specific situations in a specific culture two thousand years ago. For example, there are comments addressed to women telling them to have long hair. It would be useful to know that female worshippers of Dionysus often dressed like men and cut their hair very short. It appears that in this passage Paul simply wants the women of the early church to look different than pagan worshipers. We should be careful if we attempt to isolate a verse and apply it automatically to our world today.

We would have far fewer misconceptions if we treated the letters of the New Testament in a different way, acknowledging the style in which they were written.