The thirteen letters that carry Paul's name are occasional writings: each answers a particular situation — a quarrel, a postponed visit, a gift of money, questions sent on to him — and each follows the shape of a Greek letter of the period: who is writing, to whom, a greeting, the body, and a sign-off with errands and personal names. They are titled after their recipients rather than their author, the opposite of the Gospels. Paul dictated: in Romans the scribe introduces himself by name, and in several letters the closing greeting is flagged as written in Paul's own hand. Nor are these necessarily all he wrote: two of them mention letters of his that have not come down to us.
To communities
- Romans16 chapters · 9,433 words
To the Christians in Rome, a community Paul had neither founded nor visited: he sets out his message at length before turning up in person, on his way to Spain, as he announces in the closing chapters.
- 1 Corinthians16 chapters · 9,342 words
To the community in Corinth, a Greek port city. It works through, item by item, the reports and questions that reached him: rival factions, lawsuits, marriage, meat sold in the market, how the gatherings should run, and a collection.
- 2 Corinthians13 chapters · 6,070 words
The second surviving letter to the same city, and the most personal of the set: Paul defends the way he works against those criticising it, and organises the fund being gathered for Jerusalem. In passing it refers to further letters of his to Corinth that have not survived.
- Galatians6 chapters · 3,117 words
To a cluster of communities in Galatia, in Asia Minor, and the tensest in tone: it argues over whether believers of non-Jewish background were to keep the law of Moses. It is the only one that skips the thanksgiving these letters usually open with, and it includes a first-person account of his clash with Peter at Antioch.
- Ephesians6 chapters · 3,082 words
Addressed to the community at Ephesus, though some of the oldest manuscripts lack the words "in Ephesus" in the greeting, which has led to the suggestion that it circulated as an open letter to several churches in the region. The first half is expository; the second gives instructions on life together and in the household.
- Philippians4 chapters · 2,219 words
To the community at Philippi, a Roman colony in Macedonia and, according to Acts, the first he founded on European soil. He writes it in custody — the letter never says in which city — to thank them for a gift they sent and to report how he is.
- Colossians4 chapters · 1,990 words
To the community at Colossae, in the Lycus valley, which the letter itself says has never met him face to face. It asks explicitly that the letter be swapped with another one sent to Laodicea, a few miles away — a text that has not survived.
- 1 Thessalonians5 chapters · 1,833 words
To the community in Thessalonica, capital of the province of Macedonia. It is a follow-up after a short stay: how they are getting on since he left, and an answer to what they were asking about their own dead. It is often cited as the oldest of the thirteen, though the dating is disputed.
- 2 Thessalonians3 chapters · 1,036 words
A second letter to the same city, far shorter. It returns to what they were expecting there, presses that nobody drop out of daily work, and warns that writings are circulating under his name: hence the closing greeting, in his own hand, flagged as the mark that the letter is his.
To individuals
- 1 Timothy6 chapters · 2,267 words
To Timothy, a long-time co-worker whom the letter places in charge at Ephesus. It is mostly organisation: who teaches, what is expected of those in charge, how widows are looked after, how to address each group.
- 2 Timothy4 chapters · 1,611 words
A second letter to Timothy, written from prison and in the tone of a farewell. It alternates very concrete errands — bring the cloak and the books he left behind — with a long roll of names: who is still with him and who has gone.
- Titus3 chapters · 904 words
To Titus, whom the letter places on Crete with the job of getting the island's communities organised. It sets out criteria for choosing those in charge and guidance on how to deal with each group in the household.
- Philemon1 chapters · 444 words
To Philemon, a private individual, along with two other people and the community that meets in his house. It is the shortest of the thirteen, a single chapter, on a single matter: Onesimus, Philemon's slave, is going back with the letter, and Paul asks that he be received differently.
They are arranged by length, not by date
The New Testament does not print them in the order they were written, but roughly by length, in two blocks. First those addressed to communities, from Romans to 2 Thessalonians; then those addressed to individuals, from 1 Timothy to Philemon. Within each block they run from longest to shortest, and where two letters share a recipient they stay together and numbered, so the pair sits where the first one's length puts it. The fit is not exact: among neighbours of similar size the order can flip depending on whether you measure the Greek or a translation. Which letter came first is disputed; 1 Thessalonians and Galatians are the candidates named most often.
That all thirteen came from Paul's own hand is not a settled point among specialists: the authorship of the three so-called Pastorals — 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus — and of a few others has been debated for centuries on grounds of vocabulary, style and the situations they take for granted, and the argument is still live. Two things worth holding alongside it: several of the letters name a further sender beside Paul in the greeting (Timothy, Silvanus, Sosthenes), and all thirteen stand in the New Testament canon of Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox alike, wherever that debate lands.
Hebrews is not part of the count because it does not carry his name: it is the only writing in the New Testament that opens with no sender, no addressee and no greeting, even though it ends like a letter. The manuscript tradition grouped it with Paul's early on all the same — in P46, the oldest surviving collection, it sits directly after Romans — and many older editions titled it "The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews". Current editions call it simply "To the Hebrews"; the Greek East treated it as Pauline well before the Latin West, which hesitated for centuries, and most scholars today regard its author as unknown.