A book that tells the life story of Paul the Apostle raises one question from the start. Paul died about nineteen hundred years ago, after one of the most exciting, dangerous and influential lives ever lived. How, then, do we know so many details about what happened to him so long ago, about how he felt and what he did? The answer is twofold.
First, we have in the New Testament thirteen letters ascribed to Paul. While some scholars have doubted whether two or three of them were written by him, these letters furnish us with a great mass of first-hand, fascinating information. Then, second, we have in the New Testament The Acts of the Apostles, a book written by one of Paul's closest friends, Luke. Luke was a Gentile physician, and in our story of Paul we shall have much to say about him. His book, The Acts, is written partly in the first person. He says "we" did so and so, because he was Paul's companion on some of his most important journeys. Other parts contain information about Paul and the early church which Luke learned from other people. These two sources, Paul's own letters and Luke's book, furnish us with the facts that make it possible to tell Paul's life story.
Grateful as we are for the information we do have, we are often disappointed there are vacant places in the story. Again and again we fell like saying: "Please, Luke, tell us more about that!" To understand these omissions we must remember what it was like to write a book then. In Luke's time all books were written and copied by hand, and a book was not made up of printed leaves of paper bound together. Instead it was written on rolls of papyrus, a water plant that grew in the valley of the Nile River. Out of its stem thin strips were cut. The crushed strips were then matted into sheets about a foot square. Twenty or thirty of these sheets, joined together, would make a long roll. The reader held this roll on his knees or laid it on a table, unwinding as he read. Because of this the length of books was limited. Actually, Luke's book, The Acts, is one of the longest in the New Testament. Doubtless he often wanted to tell us more, but he had to compress his material to keep the long roll of papyrus from becoming unmanageable.
Nevertheless, we have a great deal of intimate, first-hand information about Paul's life, and it makes an interesting story.
H.E.F.
Author's Note excerpted from the book
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