Will Vaus

  Today, we are continuing our journey along Route 66, and we are stopping off to visit Paul’s letter to Philemon…   AUTHOR   Philemon is one of the uncontested letters of the Apostle Paul.   DATE   Paul mentions more than once in this brief letter that he is a prisoner. Thus, we conclude that this letter must have been written during one of Paul’s imprisonments. The question is: which one? Many scholars think this letter was written during Paul’s final imprisonment in Rome, so about AD 62 or perhaps a little later. Some scholars think this letter was written during Paul’s imprisonment in Ephesus, and so earlier than 62. I tend to think this is one of Paul’s later letters, written from Rome.    Onesimus, the slave about whom this letter is written, appears in one other letter of Paul, the letter to the Colossians. In his final greetings, beginning in Colossians 4:7, Paul says… Tychicus   will tell you all the news about me. He is a dear brother, a...

Today in our journey along Route 66 we come to Paul’s Letter to Titus. Author Over the last two Sundays we have talked about the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Were these letters written by Paul? Bible commentator Tom Wright has answered that question this way, Everybody in the early church seems to have taken it for granted that they [the Pastoral Epistles] were [written by Paul]. But in the last two hundred years many writers have pointed out several ways in which the letters sound and feel significantly different to the main letters (Romans, Galatians, and so on) which we know to have come from Paul himself. [1] So, what is the answer? Well, there are actually a few possibilities… There is still a strong argument for Paul having written the Pastoral Epistles, plain and simple. After all, as Tom Wright also says, there are some very personal details in these letters that would be strange for anyone else to have made up. Furthermore, the undoubted auth...