A Working Hypothesis on St Paul
Recently a church group that had gone through my UnClobber courses invited me to join them for a Zoom group session to do a Q&A.
One of the questions was about whether or not I’d uncovered or learned anything new on the Romans clobber passage since writing UnClobber. It’s a great question and, although nothing came to mind that specifically has to do with Romans 1, I have found myself lately thinking about the trajectory of Paul’s writings and how they (might?) reveal a maturing in his overall demeanor and spirit.
Here’s what I mean.
While there’s always going to be disagreement among scholars about when things happened in the Bible, here is a rough estimate of the timeline of Paul’s life.
~6 AD: Born
20-30 AD: Studies Torah in Jerusalem with Gamaliel; becomes a Pharisee
33 AD: Persecutes followers of the Way
36 AD: Conversion experience (changes from Saul to Paul)
36-48 AD: Studying, preparation, learning
49 AD: The Jerusalem Council (where it was determined that Gentiles didn’t have to get circumcised in order to convert to the Way)
49-67 AD: Three missionary journeys; imprisonment; death
During those later missionary years is when Paul wrote his 13 letters. Again, while there is no exact way to know, here is a decently reliable timeline of when Paul probably wrote which of his letters.
48 AD: Galatians
50/51 AD: 1 and 2 Thessalonians
54/57 AD: 1 and 2 Corinthians
58 AD: Romans
61/62 AD: Ephesians
61/62 AD: Philippians
61/62 AD: Colossians
61/62 AD: Philemon
63: 1 Timothy
64: Titus
66: 2 Timothy
A Trajectory within Paul’s Writings
Now, I’m going to make some generalizations here, and possibly do some inadvertent cherry picking, but I have a hypothesis:
