The New Testament has twenty-seven books. Thirteen of them open the same way.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,
Romans 1:1
Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon. Nearly half the New Testament under one name. For most of Christian history that settled it: thirteen letters, one author.
Scholars today sort those thirteen into two piles, and the sorting is one of the clearest examples you will find of how biblical scholarship actually works. It is also one of the places where it stays genuinely unsettled.
The seven nobody seriously doubts
Across the spectrum, from conservative to skeptical, scholars agree that Paul wrote seven of the letters: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.
The reasons are the kind you would use to recognize a friend's email. The voice is the same. The vocabulary is the same. The flashes of temper are the same. The situations the letters answer, the fights and the fundraising and the travel plans, all hang together as one man working in the middle of the first century.
Paul even shows up on the page as a writer. In Galatians he takes the pen from his scribe to finish the letter himself.
See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!
Galatians 6:11
And in Romans the scribe steps out from behind him for one sentence: "I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you" (Romans 16:22). Paul dictated. Tertius wrote it down. Using a trained scribe was normal in the ancient world, and it already makes "who wrote this" a more interesting question than a signature can answer.
The six where the argument lives
The other six are disputed: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and most sharply 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. Every one of them opens with Paul's name, just like the seven.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus:
Ephesians 1:1
So what is different? Three things, mostly. The Greek style shifts. Rare words pile up that the seven never use. And the churches these letters address sound more organized than the ones the seven know, with settled offices and job descriptions.
The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher,
1 Timothy 3:1-2
In the ancient world, followers sometimes wrote in a revered teacher's name. They saw it as carrying his teaching forward into a new situation, not as forgery in our sense. Many scholars read the disputed six that way: letters from Paul's circle, written after him, in his voice. Others defend Paul's own authorship of some or all of them, and point to things like the closing of 2 Thessalonians.
I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.
2 Thessalonians 3:17
Readers on both sides point to that verse. One side hears Paul authenticating his letter. The other notes that a letter insisting on its own genuineness is exactly what a later writer might include. Serious people argue it both ways in print, and the argument is sharpest over the three letters to Timothy and Titus.
Where the two piles touch familiar verses
This is the part worth slowing down for. Several of the verses most often quoted about church leadership, household order, and the roles of women sit in the disputed pile, 1 Timothy and Ephesians among them.
Meanwhile Romans, which nobody disputes, closes with a list of greetings.
I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae,
Romans 16:1
Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Israelites who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.
Romans 16:7
A deacon named Phoebe and an apostle named Junia, in a letter everyone agrees Paul wrote. Both verses are in every Bible printed. So are the verses in 1 Timothy. Nothing here tells you what to do with that. It tells you where the seam falls, which is what the scholars are arguing about.
The fourteenth letter
For centuries English Bibles printed a fourteenth: "The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews." The King James Version gave it that title in 1611.
Hebrews itself names nobody. Every letter in Paul's name begins with "Paul" as its first word. Hebrews begins like a sermon already underway.
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets,
Hebrews 1:1
The doubt is not modern. Around 250 AD the scholar Origen weighed the question and concluded that who wrote the letter, in truth, God knows. Most modern Bibles now print simply "The Letter to the Hebrews." The book did not change. The confidence of the title did.
What is agreed
The doubt is about authorship, not membership. All thirteen letters are in every Bible, and so is Hebrews. Their place in the canon never depended on settling who held the pen.
What the sorting gives you is a map. When you read a verse from Paul, you can know which pile it comes from, how confident the field is, and why. That is a different thing from being told what to conclude about it.
For further exploration
Three things to read with the text open:
- Read the first verse of Romans, then the first verse of 1 Timothy, then the first verse of Hebrews. Two say Paul. One says nothing. Notice how much of the question is already visible in the opening lines.
- Read Galatians 6:11 and Romans 16:22. Ask who held the pen, and what "Paul wrote it" means when a scribe did the writing.
- Read Romans 16:1-7 beside 1 Timothy 3:1-2. Notice which pile each sits in. Then decide for yourself what, if anything, that changes.
Sources
- Romans 1:1, 16:1, 16:7, 16:22; Galatians 6:11; Ephesians 1:1; 1 Timothy 3:1-2; 2 Thessalonians 3:17; Hebrews 1:1 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, introductions to the Pauline letters and to Hebrews
- Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Méndez, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, on the undisputed and disputed letters
- Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, on the Pastoral Epistles and on Hebrews