What if the Apostle Paul, near the end of his life, had been given one final opportunity to write - not to a single church facing a local crisis, but to the whole Christian community across time?
Two thousand years after his death, the Apostle Paul still speaks. His thirteen letters have shaped Christian thought for twenty centuries. Yet Paul never wrote a final letter - a single synthesis addressed not to one congregation in one crisis, but to every believer who would come after him, across the centuries he could not see.
This book imagines what such a letter might have looked like.
At the heart of If Paul Were Speaking is a reconstructed final epistle, composed almost entirely from phrases drawn from Paul's authentic letters and gathered into a synthesis the apostle never had the occasion to write. Around the letter, in three parts, Arthur Tiger walks the reader through:
- The life of Paul - from his birth in Tarsus, through his encounter on the Damascus road, to his final imprisonment in Rome
- The reconstructed letter itself, presented in full, followed by ten chapters of meditation walking through it section by section
- The hardest questions any project like this must face - Is this really Paul? What would he say to today's Church? What does holiness look like in a lukewarm age? And what can a book like this not do?
This is not Scripture. It is not a claim to revelation. It is one reader's long meditation on a man whose voice has shaped the Christian movement for two thousand years - and whose pastoral concerns, as the book shows, have lost none of their force.
Whether you are a long-time reader of Paul or coming to him for the first time, this book will send you back to the canonical letters with new attention - to Romans, to Galatians, to Philippians, to the second letter to the Corinthians - with the voice of the apostle in your ear and the warmth of his pastoral concern in your heart.
