The Letters of Saint Paul: A Short Guide to the Epistles

Before there were cathedrals or councils, there were letters. Carried by hand across the Roman world, read aloud in borrowed rooms and rented halls, the letters of the Apostle Paul are among the earliest Christian writings we possess, older than the four Gospels in their written form. They are not abstract treatises composed in a quiet study. They are living correspondence, addressed to real communities with real questions, real quarrels and real joys. To read them is to overhear the Church learning to be the Church.

Paul himself was well prepared for a life of words. Born in Tarsus of Cilicia, a Roman citizen (Acts 21:39; Acts 22:3), and schooled in the Scriptures of Israel, he brought together a Jewish heart, a Greek tongue and a Roman citizenship. After his encounter with the risen Christ near Damascus (Acts 9; Galatians 1), that whole formation was turned to a single purpose. His letters carry the marks of it: the argument of a trained mind, the tenderness of a pastor, and the urgency of a man who believed he had been given a message he could not keep to himself.

What is an epistle?

An *epistle* is simply a letter, though Paul's letters became something more. In the ancient world a letter followed a familiar shape: a greeting naming sender and recipients, a word of thanksgiving, the main body, and closing greetings. Paul keeps this form, then fills it with a depth the form had never carried before. A note of thanks becomes a hymn of praise; a practical instruction opens onto the mystery of Christ.

Most were written to be read aloud to a gathered community, not studied in private. That is why they still preach so well. They were meant for the ear and for the assembly, and they retain the warmth of a voice speaking to friends, sometimes correcting, sometimes pleading, always drawing the hearer back to Christ.

The great letters

The Pauline collection is traditionally counted as thirteen letters. A few carry particular weight in the life of the Church:

• Romans — Paul's fullest presentation of the Gospel, written to a community he had not yet visited. Here he unfolds the themes of sin, grace and justification, and the place of Israel in God's plan, rising to the great assurance that nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:39).
• 1 and 2 Corinthians — letters to a gifted, divided and turbulent congregation. In the midst of disputes over leadership, worship and morality, Paul writes the words the world still knows by heart: love is patient, love is kind (1 Corinthians 13).
• Galatians — a passionate defence of the freedom the Gospel brings, insisting that we are set right with God through faith in Christ, not by the works of the Law.
• Philippians — written from prison, yet radiant with joy, and containing the ancient hymn of Christ who "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:7).
• 1 and 2 Thessalonians — among the earliest of all, full of hope in the return of Christ and comfort for those who grieve.
• Ephesians, Colossians and Philemon — the "captivity" letters, contemplating the cosmic scope of Christ's reconciling work and, in Philemon, applying it to a single human relationship with striking gentleness.
• 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus — the "Pastoral" letters, concerned with sound teaching, the ordering of communities and the character of those who lead them.

Themes that still speak

For all their variety, certain great notes sound again and again.

Grace

At the heart of everything is grace — the conviction that God's favour comes as gift, not as wage. Paul, who had once striven to be blameless under the Law, discovered that he was loved before he had earned anything at all. "By grace you have been saved through faith," he tells the Ephesians, "and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). This is not a licence for indifference but the ground of a whole new life, lived in gratitude.

Love

If grace is the root, love is the fruit. Paul can catalogue the most dazzling spiritual gifts and then set them aside as nothing without charity. His hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13 has outlived the quarrel that prompted it and become the Church's own portrait of the heart of God. Love, for Paul, is not a feeling but a way of bearing with one another, patient and unwearying.

The body of Christ

Perhaps his most enduring image is the body of Christ. The Church is not a club of the like-minded but a living body, its members as different and as necessary as hand and eye and ear (1 Corinthians 12; Romans 12). Each has a gift; none can say to another, "I have no need of you." It is an image of unity that honours difference, and it has shaped Christian understanding of community ever since.

Around these run further themes: freedom, reconciliation, the hope of resurrection, and the call to imitate Christ in humility. Together they form not a system but a way of seeing the whole of life in the light of the Cross and the empty tomb.

A gentle word on authorship

Readers sometimes ask how all thirteen letters relate to Paul himself. The Church has always received them as the Pauline corpus and reads them as inspired Scripture. At the same time, scholars have long noted differences of style and vocabulary among them. Many distinguish a group of letters whose Pauline authorship is undisputed — such as Romans, the Corinthian letters, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon — from others, such as Ephesians and the Pastorals, where they discuss the possibility of a close disciple writing in Paul's name and spirit, a respected practice in the ancient world.

These are questions of history, not of faith, and they need not trouble the believing reader. Whether penned by Paul's own hand or by those he formed, the letters carry his Gospel and belong to the one apostolic witness the Church has always cherished. They are proclaimed in worship across the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions alike, a shared inheritance of the whole Christian family.

Why they still reach us

We are not the Romans or the Corinthians, yet their questions are ours. How do we live together when we disagree? What holds a community when its leaders fail? How do we grieve in hope? What does it mean to be free? Paul does not answer from a distance. He writes as one who has been forgiven much, and his confidence is never in himself but in the One who met him on the road.

To read these letters well is also to want to see where they began. The mind that shaped them was formed in Tarsus, and understanding that city, and the missionary journeys that carried the letters outward, brings the whole correspondence into sharper focus. You can explore who Paul was and where Tarsus is to see how deeply the man and his message were rooted in a real time and place.

It is in that spirit that pilgrims and friends from many nations will gather in Tarsus and Mersin for the inaugural St Paul Global Week, 28–30 June 2027, centred on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. Those days of prayer, reflection and encounter — with the Feast Day programme broadcast live for those who cannot travel — are simply an invitation to sit again with these ancient letters in the city where their author first drew breath, and to hear them, as their first hearers did, read aloud among friends. You are warmly welcome to learn more about the Feast of Saint Paul and the man whose words still gather us.