The letters of Paul take up roughly a third of the New Testament and intimidate most readers who try them. The sentences are long, the theology is dense, and the arguments turn on Greek-loaded words like justification and propitiation and election that most people never encounter anywhere else. It is easy to come away thinking Paul is for advanced students.
He is not. He wrote these letters to ordinary first-century congregations that were brand new to the faith, most of them mid-crisis, none of them in possession of anything that looked like a seminary education. Read his letters the way they were meant to be read and the difficulty drops away surprisingly fast.
They are letters
The first thing to remember is the simplest. Paul’s epistles are real letters, sent by a real travelling missionary to real congregations he had founded or visited, with real and often quite specific problems. 1 Corinthians is written to a church that was dividing itself into fan clubs around competing preachers and tolerating, in chapter five, a man who was sleeping with his father’s wife. Galatians is a sharp letter to converts who, within a few years of being saved by grace, were being talked into adding religious works as the price of admission. Philippians is a thank-you note from prison.
When you start a chapter, ask what the church Paul was writing to was actually struggling with. Half of his arguments make immediate sense the moment you can hear them as responses. A short footnote in a study Bible can give you the situation in two sentences.
The shape of his arguments
Most of Paul’s letters follow a particular shape. He begins by laying out what God has done in Christ — the news, the indicative, the way things now are. Around two-thirds of the way through, he pivots to how Christians live in response — the implications, the imperative.
The pivot word, in many of his letters, is therefore. In Romans, the first eleven chapters argue at length that God has acted decisively in Christ to save sinners. Then chapter twelve opens:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship. (Romans 12:1, NIV)
That therefore is doing an enormous amount of work. Everything that follows it rests on everything that came before. Paul does not start by telling the Romans to be holy and then justify the instruction. He spends eleven chapters explaining what God has done about sin, and only then says: given all that, here is how to live.
You can find the same shape in Ephesians 4:1, which arrives after three chapters about who the Ephesian Christians now are in Christ. You can find it in Colossians 3:1, after two chapters on the supremacy of Christ. Once you start watching for the therefore, the letters stop feeling like a stream of disconnected commands. They feel like responses to news.
Read a whole letter at once
Most of Paul’s letters are short enough that you can read one straight through in twenty minutes if you sit down and decide to. This is, somewhat surprisingly, the best way in. Start with the gentlest one. Philippians is four chapters, full of warmth, written from chains to a church Paul plainly loves. Read it in one sitting, start to finish.
Listen for the tone. Watch the recurring words — the word joy appears more than a dozen times in this short letter, which is striking from a man writing in a Roman prison. Watch for the personal asides where Paul tips his hand: news about Epaphroditus, who had nearly died of an illness while bringing Paul a gift; the named dispute between Euodia and Syntyche in chapter four; the great hymn of Christ’s humility in Philippians 2:5–11, which Paul slips in almost without warning in the middle of a paragraph.
After Philippians, try Galatians (six chapters of urgent argument from the earliest part of Paul’s writing career), then Ephesians, then Romans, the longest and deepest of his letters. By the time you arrive at Romans, the shapes will be familiar enough that the difficulty stops feeling like a wall.
A practical pattern
A simple plan if you want to dive in. Pick the shortest letter you have not read recently — Philippians is the gentlest landing. Read it in one sitting without stopping to look anything up. Let the whole arc land. The next day, read it again, more slowly, watching for the therefore and the structure. Then, on day three, sit with whichever passage felt hardest. That is the one to study, with a study Bible alongside and a footnote or commentary at hand.
Paul is not difficult because his thinking is muddy. He is difficult because his thinking is compressed. Every sentence is doing work, and the weight of any single sentence is felt only when you have read the whole letter through.
Read him slowly. He repays the time.