Monthly Archives: May 2016

A large chunk of the New Testament is made up of someone else’s letters.
Most of the letters (or “Epistles”) of the New Testament were written to deal with an immediate situation – they were a response to a particular crisis or question. I’m sure they were written prayerfully and thoughtfully, but they were definitely not written to become timeless Scripture that would be read by many generations in many different circumstances.
St. Paul (and the other writers of the Epistles) were not thinking about us as they wrote, they were thinking about the Church in Corinth or Galatia, or Thessalonica or Phillipi or Rome.
That doesn’t decrease the value of the Epistles – it just gives them a context, and helps us understand the spirit in which we must read them. All the great love songs of the world were written for just one person, but they live on and touch the hearts of millions of people. James Taylor didn’t write “Fire and Rain” for Juliet and I, but yet for us it is “our song.”