Summary
The first thirteen letters in the New Testament are, or purport to be, from the correspondence of Paul. They tell us, as letters should, who was the writer and to whom they were written. In Acts, we possess a brief biography of Paul which (as we can see from Paul's own letters) tells us only some of the facts and is not always easy to reconcile with what Paul says himself. But from this biography, and from occasional pieces of information scattered in the letters themselves, we can make a rough outline of Paul's travels and gain some picture of the circumstances which caused him to stay a relatively short time in each of the churches which he founded and to keep in touch with them afterwards by correspondence. In the case of the letters to Corinth, we can be more specific: these letters were written while Paul was in Ephesus between 51 and 54 ce. For the rest, we do not know for certain where and when they were written, beyond the fact that none of them is likely to have been written earlier than 45 or later than 65 (the probable date of Paul's martyrdom in Rome). Nor do we know when and how they were collected and how far, if at all, they were rearranged by a subsequent editor. Some of them may even have been written by his followers after his lifetime. But these questions are relatively unimportant.
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- A Companion to the New Testament , pp. 486 - 487Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004