Misquoting Jesus Read Online Free PDF

his life. Paul ends the letter by saying, “Greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss; I strongly adjure you in the name of the Lord that you have this letter read to all the brothers and sisters” (1 Thess. 5:26–27). This was not a casual letter to be read simply by anyone who was mildly interested; the apostle insists that it be read, and that it be accepted as an authoritative statement by him, the founder of the community.
    Letters thus circulated throughout the Christian communities from the earliest of times. These letters bound together communities that lived in different places; they unified the faith and the practices of the Christians; they indicated what the Christians were supposed to believe and how they were supposed to behave. They were to be read aloud to the community at community gatherings—since, as I pointed out, most Christians, like most others, would not have been able to read the letters themselves.
    A number of these letters came to be included in the New Testament. In fact, the New Testament is largely made up of letters written by Paul and other Christian leaders to Christian communities (e.g., the Corinthians, the Galatians) and individuals (e.g., Philemon). Moreover, the letters that survive—there are twenty-one in the New Testament—are only a fraction of those written. Just with respect to Paul, we can assume that he wrote many more letters than the ones attributed to him in the New Testament. On occasion, he mentions other letters that no longer survive; in 1 Cor. 5:9, for example, he mentions aletter that he had earlier written the Corinthians (sometime before First Corinthians). And he mentions another letter that some of the Corinthians had sent him (1 Cor. 7:1). Elsewhere he refers to letters that his opponents had (2 Cor. 3:1). None of these letters survives.
    Scholars have long suspected that some of the letters found in the New Testament under Paul’s name were in fact written by his later followers, pseudonymously. 5 If this suspicion is correct, it would provide even more evidence of the importance of letters in the early Christian movement: in order to get one’s views heard, one would write a letter in the apostle’s name, on the assumption that this would carry a good deal of authority. One of these allegedly pseudonymous letters is Colossians, which itself emphasizes the importance of letters and mentions yet another one that no longer survives: “And when you have read this epistle, be sure that it is read in the church of the Laodiceans, and that you read the letter written to Laodicea” (Col. 4:16). Evidently Paul—either himself, or someone writing in his name—wrote a letter to the nearby town of Laodicea. This letter too has been lost. 6
    My point is that letters were important to the lives of the early Christian communities. These were written documents that were to guide them in their faith and practice. They bound these churches together. They helped make Christianity quite different from the other religions scattered throughout the empire, in that the various Christian communities, unified by this common literature that was being shared back and forth (cf. Col. 4:16), were adhering to instructions found in written documents or “books.”
    And it was not only letters that were important to these communities. There was, in fact, an extraordinarily wide range of literature being produced, disseminated, read, and followed by the early Christians, quite unlike anything else the Roman pagan world had ever seen. Rather than describe all this literature at great length, here I can simply mention some examples of the kinds of books that were being written and distributed.
    Early Gospels
    Christians, of course, were concerned to know more about the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of their Lord; and so numerous Gospels were written, which recorded the traditions associated with the life of Jesus. Four