Building Paul's Timeline #1

I mention a scholar frequently here at Reimagining Paul: Douglas Campbell, professor of New Testament at Duke University. I did not study under Dr. Campbell, unfortunately, but I certainly wish I had. I did my graduate studies at Emory University in Atlanta and my research was in Hebrew Bible, not New Testament.

I discovered Douglas Campbell completely by accident. I was at the Society for Biblical Literature annual meeting, possibly 2012 in Chicago or 2013 in Baltimore. My big interest at the time was Isaiah and I attended the Isaiah sessions faithfully.

In the vendor hall one day, I spotted a cool looking Isaiah book on a big table and thumbed through it. Beside it was a book with a strange title: Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Framing Paul? For what, murder?

I literally had no idea how to take that title until curiosity drove me to pick it up. I stood at the table for half an hour reading it while people bumped into me. I did not know at the time that scholars refer to some parts of the New Testament epistles as the frame. These are the sections which are not primarily theological or inspirational, but deal with the personalities and the more mundane issues of letter writing.

Most of the epistles have frame sections, where Paul greets specific people, expresses prayers and wishes, encourages specific persons to do specific things, and so on.

But "framing" for Campbell also comes from a thought expressed by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who said the way we frame a question has a lot to do with the answers we arrive at. And biases and methodologies tend to be unexpressed assumptions unless they are delineated and analyzed along the way.

The basic idea of Framing Paul is simple: make a timeline for Paul based solely on Paul's epistles (an epistle is a sort of formal letter).

Why base a timeline of Paul on the epistles? The answer is simple: almost all other biographies of Paul give primary credence to the book of Acts. But Acts is not necessarily chronological and plays some literary tricks with the raw data. This is not a criticism of Acts, but a reality that is widely understood.

Coming in the "Building Paul's Timeline" series . . . We will start with the question, "How can you determine in which order and at what times Paul wrote his epistles?"

We will begin with Campbell's adaptation of earlier work by John Knox (not the famous 16th century Reformer, but a formidable New Testament scholar from the 20th century). Then we will begin to add other bits to the timeline using carefully argued bits of historical data from within and without the New Testament itself. The evidence from Acts is not considered (although Campbell correlates it with the epistolary data in Paul: An Apostle's Journey).

For now, I leave us all with this thought from Paul about his writing style and motivation . . .

I myself feel confident about you,

my brothers and sisters,

that you yourselves are full of goodness,

filled with all knowledge,

and able to instruct one another.

Nevertheless, on some points I have written to you rather boldly

by way of reminder,

because of the grace given me by God

to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the gentiles

in the priestly service of the gospel of God,

so that the offering of the gentiles may be acceptable,

sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

Rom 15:14-16 NRSVUE