A letter. Who does not love receiving one? I had never met him. I discovered Jesus through someone that he had left behind. I had been completely bowled over by the discovery of Jesus the Christ. My life had changed more than I ever imagined. I had heard stories of Paul and longed to meet him. Who would not want to? After all, he was someone who had met Jesus in a dramatic way. He had tried to imprison those who followed Jesus and had succeeded. Then everything changed, and he had been sent to teach about Jesus to everyone. There are rumours that he did not look particularly impressive and was not a great orator. I can only judge by the fact that he seemed to form a community of people who followed the Christ wherever he went.

The letter was not a very comfortable read. He was a forceful writer. We were accused of abandoning the gospel, the good news. I am not sure that was completely fair. Like many of us in our churches, I was not Jewish. I did not really know much about Judaism and yet understood that I had begun to follow the Jewish Messiah; although many of Jesus’ people did not believe in him. I had tried to learn as much as I could. Sometime after I had started to follow the Way, some believers from Judaea arrived. They seemed to know James (Jacob), the brother of Jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem. Some of our number said that he had sent them, although they themselves never said that. They wanted us observe Torah as we followed Jesus. That seemed to make sense.

But then the letter. It was like a sagitta (a roman arrow) that split the argument apart. The gospel was based on grace the letter declared. It did more than declare. If Paul was not good at public speaking, and as I have said, I had never heard him, his words on the page were dynamic and challenging. He argued that grace seasoned everything, and he called Jewish figures like Moses and Abraham as his witnesses. It was provocative too, if you can keep the Law and that is enough, then the Messiah was killed for nothing.

It caused a bit of a rumpus the letter. Those from Judaea seemed to disappear. I am not sure where they went. I did wonder for a long while how much I needed to understand Judaism and try to follow Torah if only to try to understand some of the things that Jesus said and did. As time went on that seemed to be less of an issue. People still read Paul’s letter though. We were desperate not to follow another gospel. I wondered what prompted him to write to us and realised that he wrote to us because we had written to him, not on parchment but in the reports, he had of how we lived. That is in itself a letter, a letter to the apostle so we in turn received a letter from him.