The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul the Apostle · the seven letters held to be Paul’s own: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon · sixty one chapters, 1,494 verses · written in Koine Greek between about 50 and the late 50s CE and gathered after his death · scored on the Greek, read from knowledge, with the King James Version (1611) for every English quotation
Mode
The Hellenistic letter stretched into argument, quarrel, hymn and plea: authority exercised in absence, read aloud before gathered communities
Mythos
Adam and Christ as the two heads of humanity; dying and rising undergone by each reader; the community as one body with many members; the seed that must die to be raised
Phase
A missionary’s correspondence across the 50s CE: instruction, crisis and quarrel with communities far away, written in part from prison
Presentation
Seven letters in the frame of sender, addressee, greeting, thanksgiving, body, travel plans and greetings; dictated to scribes, with the writer’s own hand marked at the close; diatribe with an imagined objector inside the letter
Register
Koine Greek, often rough, broken by anacolutha and interruption, rising into antithesis, triads, hymn and the catalogue of hardships; the irony of a fool’s speech; the tact of a private plea
Scale
Sixty one chapters to Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Philippi and Thessalonica and to one household; the self and its conscience, marriage, labour, slavery, money, the state, the election of a people, death and the whole creation
Governing Proposition
Seven occasional letters, dictated to scattered communities and to one slave owner, gathered by others after their writer’s death. The wager of the letters is that a single law, power found in weakness, the crucified made the measure of all things, can govern everything from a plea for a runaway slave to the groaning of the whole creation; that the covenant of Israel can be opened to every people from Israel’s own scriptures; and that a letter, authority exercised in absence, can carry an argument, a quarrel and a life at once.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The unit is seven letters: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon, the letters generally held to be Paul’s own, written in Koine Greek between about 50 and the late 50s CE, Romans probably the last of them. Together they run to sixty one chapters and 1,494 verses, and the two longest, Romans and 1 Corinthians, hold 870 of those verses, close to three fifths. Paul did not assemble them. They were gathered after his death, and the papyrus P46, an early and large witness, holds most of them. The later letters written in his name are not part of the unit.
They were dictated. A scribe, Tertius, names himself as the writer of Romans (16:22), and Paul marks the point where he takes the pen: “Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand” (Galatians 6:11; compare 1 Corinthians 16:21). Each letter keeps the Hellenistic frame, sender, addressee, greeting, thanksgiving, body, travel plans and greetings, and stretches it. The greeting becomes grace and peace. The thanksgiving is missing from Galatians alone, which opens in anger, because none could be given.
Three questions of composition run through the unit and are open. 2 Corinthians is widely held to join two or more letters, chapters 10 to 13 at least, and perhaps 8 and 9, as separate; Philippians may join two or three; Romans 16 may have travelled on its own; and two passages, 1 Corinthians 14:34 to 35 and 1 Thessalonians 2:14 to 16, are often argued to be later insertions. The letters are weighed here as transmitted, and scored on the Greek. The King James Version of 1611 gives every English quotation; its English is its translators’, and nothing in it is charged or credited to Paul.
Movement II
The governing law is stated in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, in a run of antitheses: “Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1:23), and “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1:25). Power is found in weakness; what the world counts strong is coming to nothing. Everything else in the letters, from the treatment of a slave to the fate of the creation, is measured by it.
The turn the letters make is the opening of the covenant of Israel to gentiles, without circumcision and without the law, argued from Israel’s own scriptures. Galatians stakes everything on it. It begins without thanks, lays a curse on any other gospel even if an angel from heaven should preach it, tells how Paul opposed Peter to his face at Antioch, and drives one claim through six chapters: from Paul’s own life (chapters 1 and 2), through Abraham (3 and 4), to the life of the spirit (5 and 6). At its centre is the end of the old divisions, between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female (3:28).
Paul does not claim to have invented it. In 1 Corinthians 15 he hands on what he himself received; the hymn of the self emptied in Philippians 2 may be older than he; the gentile mission was already under way at Antioch. What is his is the stake, and the letters record its price: “forty stripes save one” five times, the rods, the stoning, the shipwrecks (2 Corinthians 11:24 to 25), and letters written in chains. Galatians closes with the writer’s own body as evidence: he bears its marks.
Movement III
Romans 5 to 8 runs as one sequence. Adam and Christ are set as two heads of humanity (chapter 5); baptism is a dying and rising each reader undergoes (chapter 6); and in chapter 7 the law, holy, just and good, produces the very sin it forbids. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (7:19). The self is divided by its own conscience, and cries out: “talaipōros egō anthrōpos”
“O wretched man that I am!” (7:24).
Chapter 8 climbs from that cry to the whole created order, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (8:22), and ends in a cascade of everything that cannot separate the reader from the love it names: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth” (8:38 to 39). It is the height of the longest letter, and the sequence that leads to it has no spare step.
Then the argument turns to Israel. Romans 9 to 11 is dense with scripture, the olive tree grafted against nature, and ends by insisting that all Israel will be saved and breaking off in an exclamation at the depth of what it cannot fathom. Through the whole letter runs the diatribe: an imagined objector raises the obvious inference, and the writer refuses it. Romans is the nearest of the seven to a treatise, and the letter that Augustine, Luther and Barth were remade by.
Movement IV
The Corinthian letters are letters to a quarrelling church, and much of 1 Corinthians is business: food offered to idols, head coverings, lawsuits, marriage and celibacy, the order of worship. Inside the business the community becomes one body with many members (chapter 12), and then comes chapter 13, love as the measure without which knowledge, prophecy and sacrifice are nothing. What is known now is seen “through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (13:12).
Chapter 15 hands on what was received and builds on it: “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (15:22). The body that will be raised is a seed that must die (15:36 to 38); the change will come in a moment; and the chapter ends in taunt: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (15:55). Handel set it in Messiah.
2 Corinthians 10 to 13 is the fool’s speech: the writer, wounded by his hearers, boasts in the voice of a fool, and what he boasts of is weakness, the stripes, the shipwrecks, the thorn in the flesh, and the answer that strength is made perfect in weakness (12:9). It is the letters’ law turned on their author. Here too the letters strain against themselves: the law that Romans calls holy is in 2 Corinthians 3 a ministry of death, and the silence 1 Corinthians 14 asks of women, if it is Paul’s, stands against Galatians 3:28.
Movement V
Philemon is the shortest of the seven, a single chapter of twenty five verses, written to one man about one slave, the runaway Onesimus. It gives no command. It asks that Onesimus be received not as a slave but as a beloved brother, before a household church, and it can exist only as a letter. Set beside Romans 8, it is the other end of the same law: power that will not command, exercised in weakness and in absence.
The letters made the Christian letter a form of thought and gave a religion its vocabulary: grace, faith, justification, the body of Christ, flesh and spirit. Letters were soon written in Paul’s name, Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastorals, and Clement of Rome and Ignatius wrote on his model. Augustine’s conversion turned on Romans 13:13 to 14 and Luther’s on Romans 1:17; Calvin and the Reformation read Romans and Galatians; Wesley at Aldersgate heard Luther’s preface to Romans read. In Dante’s Inferno the pilgrim says: “Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono” (2.32). Donne preached on him; Brahms set 1 Corinthians 13 in the Four Serious Songs.
The reading did not stop with the church. Kierkegaard and Barth’s Römerbrief (1919, 1922) took the letters into existential crisis; E. P. Sanders and James Dunn reread Paul’s Judaism; Nietzsche attacked him as the inventor of Christianity; Taubes, Badiou and Agamben, none of them believers, read the letters as political philosophy. Each generation has found something different in them, grace, crisis, covenant, universalism, messianic time, and after nineteen centuries of weekly reading aloud they are not exhausted.
Act III · The Twelve
These are occasional letters, and much of them is business. Romans 16 is a list of greetings; 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 are two appeals for one collection; 1 Corinthians spends chapters on food offered to idols, head coverings and lawsuits; travel plans recur and are revised. A great deal could be removed and the core argument would stand. Yet the subtractive test must ask what the occasion is for, and the occasion is the form’s reason. Galatians is nearly all necessity, six chapters driving one claim from autobiography through Abraham to the life of the spirit, with no thanksgiving because none could be given; Philemon has not a spare clause; Romans 5 to 8 runs as one compelled sequence from Adam to the declaration that nothing can separate. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: necessity is high in the cores and slack at the edges of a collection no one designed.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds without the theology: the self divided by its own conscience. “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19) is set inside a law that is holy yet produces the sin it forbids, and ends in a cry, “talaipōros egō anthrōpos”
“O wretched man that I am!” (7:24). To it the letters add love as the measure that makes knowledge, prophecy and sacrifice nothing without it (1 Corinthians 13), strength made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), and the end of the old divisions of people in Galatians 3:28. Much else is doctrine asserted under apostolic authority, and that is not scored. Held a step below the top because the divided will was seen before: Ovid’s Medea says “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”
“I see the better and approve it; I follow the worse” (Metamorphoses 7.20 to 21).
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevations are islands in argument: Romans 9 to 11 is dense scriptural exegesis, Galatians 3 and 4 a run of rabbinic proofs and an allegory of Hagar and Sarah, and the Corinthian letters argue about meat and veils. But the islands are many and of the first height. Romans 8 climbs from “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (8:22) to the cascade of 8:38 to 39, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth”. Romans 11 breaks its own argument with an exclamation at the depth of what it describes. 1 Corinthians 13 and 15, the Philippians hymn of the self emptied, the catalogue of shipwreck and stripes in 2 Corinthians 11: the height is level with the summit pages. The frequency is below Four Quartets’ 9.2, because the rises come in set pieces.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is inherited, Adam, Abraham, Moses on Sinai, the crucified and risen Messiah of a community Paul joined, and much of what he does with it is allegory, which this axis distrusts. But he builds, and the build is load-bearing. Adam and Christ become the two heads of humanity, “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22; Romans 5); baptism becomes a dying and rising undergone by each reader (Romans 6); the community becomes one body with many members (1 Corinthians 12); the seed that must die to be raised carries the resurrected body (15:36 to 38). And it stays particular: the archetype passes through one man’s scarred body, his chains in Philippians, the runaway Onesimus. Dying and rising is the structure of the life the letters tell. Level with Anna Karenina’s 9.2.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Paul inherits more than he invents, and says so: in 1 Corinthians 15:3 he hands on what he himself received; the Philippians hymn may be older than he; the mission to the gentiles was under way before him, at Antioch. But the turn the letters make is the decisive one: the covenant of Israel opened to gentiles without circumcision or the law, argued from Israel’s own scriptures against the leaders of the movement. Galatians stakes everything on it, with a curse on any other gospel even from an angel, and the account of opposing Peter to his face at Antioch. The cost is written into the text: “forty stripes save one” five times, the rods, the stoning, the shipwrecks (2 Corinthians 11:24 to 25), letters written from prison. The received formulas cost a tenth, and hold it below The Waste Land’s 9.3.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Romans could almost be a treatise with an address at each end, and the collection is a form imposed by later hands. But the letter is the instrument of what most of the letters know. They are authority exercised in absence, the writer absent in body and present in spirit (1 Corinthians 5:3), and their knowledge is relational. Philemon’s plea, which turns a slave into a beloved brother without a command, can exist only as a letter to one man read before a household church. The fool’s speech of 2 Corinthians 10 to 13, a boast of weakness in a fool’s voice, needs a hearer who has wounded the writer. Romans’ diatribe, with its imagined objector and its refusals, is dialogue inside a letter. High where the form knows; middling in Romans’ long argument and in the frame of a collection the writer did not make.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The size of the commentary alone is a fact about the church, not the text; an institution reads its canon without end. The evidence here is of yield beyond the institution and against it. Augustine’s conversion turns on Romans 13:13 to 14; Luther’s on Romans 1:17; Barth’s Römerbrief (1919, 1922) remade theology from the same letter; E. P. Sanders and James Dunn reread Paul’s Judaism and changed what the works of the law are taken to mean; Nietzsche attacked him as the inventor of Christianity; Taubes, Badiou and Agamben, none reading as believers, made the letters a text for political philosophy in the 1990s and 2000s. Each generation finds something different: grace, existential crisis, covenant, universalism, messianic time. Two millennia without exhaustion is the evidence the axis asks for, at its fullest; a tenth above Anna Karenina’s 9.4 on the span.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is Greek writing of the first century and the Jewish scriptures and their interpretation; for reach, literature and thought both. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the letters create the Christian letter as a form of thought, and with it the founding vocabulary of a religion, grace, faith, justification, the body of Christ, flesh and spirit. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the later letters written in Paul’s name, Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastorals; Clement of Rome and Ignatius on his model; Augustine’s Confessions and his doctrine of grace; Luther, Calvin and the Reformation’s reading of Romans and Galatians; Wesley at Aldersgate hearing Luther’s preface to Romans; Dante’s “Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono” (Inferno 2.32); Donne’s sermons; Handel’s Messiah and Brahms’s Four Serious Songs; Kierkegaard; Barth. Discounted for the reach carried by an institution that made the letters scripture; above Anna Karenina’s 9.2.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Millennia, with the text whole and read without a break: the step for such survival runs from 9.5 to 9.7. Presence is the widest there is: read aloud weekly for nineteen centuries, in every language, taught and translated without interruption. Form is legible and complete, with an early and large manuscript witness in the papyrus P46 and continuous copying since. The charge on form is small and real: two of the seven are widely held to be composite, and the edges of the text are disputed, Romans 16 perhaps having travelled separately and two passages argued to be later insertions (1 Corinthians 14:34 to 35; 1 Thessalonians 2:14 to 16). Presence would carry the top of the step; form keeps it at the foot.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on Paul’s Greek; the sound of first century spoken Koine is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged, and the music of the King James English belongs to its translators. The Greek is often rough. Sentences break off, as in the anacolutha of Galatians 2:4 to 6; arguments are interrupted and resumed; metaphors are mixed, as in the olive tree of Romans 11 grafted against nature; the letters were dictated at speed, and an early reader within the canon calls them hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16). But the rhetorical command is great and often load-bearing: the diatribe of Romans; the antitheses of 1 Corinthians 1, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1:25); the rising triads of 1 Corinthians 13; the hardship catalogues and their rhythm; the irony of the fool’s speech; the tact of Philemon. Command at its peaks, uneven in its run; below The Great Gatsby’s 9.3.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant points: Philemon, a private plea about one slave, and Romans 8, the groaning of all creation. One law governs both, the logic of the cross, power through weakness, the old order passing within it, as 1 Corinthians 7:31 says the form of this world is passing away. The range is very wide. But the letters disagree with themselves where it matters. The law is holy in Romans 7:12 and a ministry of death in 2 Corinthians 3:7; Galatians 3:28 abolishes the division of male and female, and 1 Corinthians 14:34, if it is Paul’s, bids women keep silent in the churches; Galatians writes off the old covenant as Hagar’s slavery, and Romans 11 insists that all Israel will be saved; Romans 13 asks submission to the governing powers, while 1 Corinthians 2:6 has the rulers of this age coming to nothing. Some of this is development across occasions; it is still tension within the unit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Held, not listed, in seven letters: consciousness and conscience (Romans 7; 2 Corinthians 4 and 5); marriage, celibacy and sex (1 Corinthians 7); labour, in the instruction to work with one’s own hands (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and in Paul’s own trade; slavery (Philemon; 1 Corinthians 7:21 to 22); money, in the collection; the state (Romans 13); the history of a people and its election (Romans 9 to 11); death and the body after death (1 Corinthians 15); the natural order in its travail (Romans 8). They are bound in one structure, the body of Christ and the new creation. Held below Anna Karenina’s 9.5 and Infinite Jest’s 9.1 because many orders are touched as instruction, briefly and from above, not inhabited as a novel inhabits them: the household and the economy are present as rules.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable, each at 9.5. Two millennia of return without exhaustion, found new by Augustine, Luther, Barth and readers outside and against the church; the founding vocabulary of a religion and the Christian letter as a form of thought; and a text read aloud weekly for nineteen centuries in every language. Beside them The Archetypal Deep at 9.2: Adam and Christ, the one body and the seed built into a structure that passes through one scarred man.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: Galatians, Philemon and Romans 5 to 8 are compelled, but the edges of a collection no one designed, greetings, collections, travel plans and Corinthian business, could lose much without loss to the argument. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.4, one law of power in weakness held across the widest range but strained by the letters’ own tensions over the law, women and Israel; then The Made at 8.5, command of the rhetoric at its peaks over Greek that is often rough.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.1 and The Unconcealment at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the seven letters generally held to be Paul’s own, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon, in Koine Greek. The unit is the seven as transmitted, a collection gathered after Paul’s death; the later letters in his name (Ephesians, Colossians, the Pastorals) are not part of it. Questions of composition within the unit are stated as open: that 2 Corinthians joins two or more letters, that Philippians may join two or three, that Romans 16 may have travelled separately, and that 1 Corinthians 14:34 to 35 and 1 Thessalonians 2:14 to 16 may be later insertions. Every axis is judged on the Greek; the sound of first century spoken Koine is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Chapter and verse counts are the standard ones. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Translation · the King James Version (1611) for every English quotation, chosen as the English through which the letters have been most widely read; it is quoted only where its words are certain, and the Greek is given above it where the sense turns on the original. Its music belongs to its translators and is credited to no axis. Faith is neither credited nor charged: the letters are scored as a text, and the history of the church is weighed only as reading, use and reach of that text. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the Greek word counts of the letters, the dating of 1 Thessalonians and its place as the oldest Christian text, the date of P46, and the full roll of scholars who reread Paul’s Judaism.