between Paul (or “Paul”) and his stated addressees is eclipsed by a communicative event between the risen Christ and ourselves; the Pauline text is transposed into direct address to later readers of the sixteenth or twentieth or twenty-first century. Can we and should we so easily efface the first-century textual artifact and its explicit communicative context? We might imagine a question to that effect posed by the elder Barth to his remarkable son. First-century historical roots may be theologically