I think it is important to remind people every now and then that the Bible is not a real book.
We called it that because that’s what we decided, but we shouldn’t really commit to that idea.
When we do that, we start to think about it that way, trying to look at everything as if it belonged within the consistency and unity of a single volume. When we do that, we may miss the incredible diversity of the content.
I imagine it more like a library in your hand. There are stories that seem historical or biographical, there is also fiction and even fantasy, there are poems and songs, sayings and advice and there is even a correspondence section.
This section on correspondence can be especially useful for followers of Jesus. As long as you keep in mind that this is correspondence written by someone who is not Jesus of Nazareth to followers of Jesus and it is about how to become a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. For that is its real value.
The epistles or letters that have been included in Christian scripture are correspondences from Paul and others to the communities where the first followers of Jesus had settled.
There are twenty-one such letters, thirteen of which were originally attributed to Paul, but modern scholars believe that he was responsible for at most seven of them.
I would like to say that they were written for established “churches,” but they didn’t really exist back then, at least not as we know them. (And that wasn’t a bad thing.)
It’s just that these letters that we read as scripture weren’t intended as scripture at all. They were intended for people who probably knew – or at least had been taught – the stories and teachings of Jesus and were trying to build communities around them.
They were struggling to figure out how to practice being Jesus, and sometimes it didn’t go well. So Paul and others wrote to them. I suspect there were probably many more letters than the parts we have that were made into our letters in Scripture. Much, much more.
So here are the teachings of Jesus. Here are some communities that are studying leadership. And here are the written wisdom and encouragement from some of these leaders on how to do it, how to respond to problems that arise, how to encourage, how to share, how to, well, be Jesus. How to live.
What is special about the letters is that they respond to the application of Jesus’ teachings in the real world: to the questions, worries, struggles and trials of a radically new way of life.
They are the implementation of “Jesus applied” in the lives of people of that day, with the constant reminder that it’s not just about behavior, but about what’s in your heart and how you live it out. It’s about living in the transformative power of love, grace and relationship and bringing that power out into the world.
In many ways they show how difficult this can be, but also how incredibly rewarding.
