How a letter becomes a scripture
Having finished a study of 1 Corinthians, my Sunday school class proposed as its next topic to focus on the question of how works like Paul’s letters ended up as scripture—what the process is, and also how it changes the way we read them.
Someone said it reminded them of the Schoolhouse Rock treatment of “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” And so I made the image at left. It would be interesting to give the entire process a cartoon treatment.
This discussion follows naturally from one we had just a couple of weeks earlier, when we read Paul’s analogy between the planting of a seed and the resurrection body. One member of my class asked, “How does Paul know this?”—is it something he believed had been revealed to him, or something that he was figuring out for himself? I would say definitely the latter, since the only place that Paul writes of his own words as bearing the Lord’s authority (other than when he directly cites the Lord’s teaching) is in 1 Corinthians 14:37. And there Paul seems to be engaging in a rhetorical strategy: the Corinthian prophets had only become Christians and experienced the Spirit as a result of Paul’s proclamation and their acceptance of his teachings. And so for them to challenge Paul’s trustworthiness would call their own experiences into question.
