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Paul.
I have never liked the apostle Paul.
There, I have said it. I realise that may be an unusual admission from someone who spent years as a parish priest and preached from Paul’s letters more times than I could possibly remember. I admire him enormously, and Christianity would be almost impossible to imagine without him, but I have never found him very easy to warm to.
At times, he can sound argumentative, stubborn and, if I am honest, a bit arrogant. He tells the Corinthians to imitate him, calls the Galatians foolish, publicly confronts Peter when he believes Peter is wrong, and occasionally writes with the sort of confidence that makes me wonder what it would have been like to disagree with him face to face. If I were choosing people from the New Testament to spend an evening with in the pub, Paul would not be one of them.
More recently, though, I have softened a little and begun to wonder whether I have been too harsh.
A large part of the problem is that we know Paul mainly through his letters, and letters are not necessarily a very good way of reconstructing someone’s entire personality. Many of Paul’s letters survive precisely because something needed sorting out. Churches were arguing, people were questioning his authority, Christians were behaving badly, or somebody was teaching something Paul believed threatened the gospel itself. His bluntness usually appears in the middle of a crisis rather than simply because he enjoys telling people off.
We hear him when he is arguing because arguments produce letters. In some ways, what survives is a rather distorted highlights reel: we do not hear the evenings around a table, the conversations while travelling, the jokes that were never written down or the ordinary friendships that didn’t require anyone to produce several pages of wordy, closely reasoned theology.
Every now and then, though, one of Paul’s letters seems to allow another part of him to slip through.
Galatians 4 is one of those moments.
