There are seven ‘authentic’ letters of Paul: 1st Thessalonians, Galatians, 1st & 2nd Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans. Over the next five weeks, we will be taking a deeper look at these letters and finding out what Paul can tell us about some of the first communities of Christians, living just one or two decades after Jesus’ death and Resurrection.

The other letters assigned to Paul are known as either the Deutero-Pauline Letters (2 Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians) or Pastoral letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus). Tradition has assigned all of these letters to Paul, but scholars are only agreed that the first seven were actually written or dictated by Paul himself. The other letters are either in dispute between scholars or everyone agrees that Paul could not have written them.