only a few substantial problems in deciding what he wrote and the circumstances in which he wrote it. Paul dictated to a scribe, whom we would call a secretary, but his letters seem to have been sent off unrevised, with occasional broken sentences or jarring syntax. We probably have pretty well what he himself actually dictated. The secretary played a minor role—far, far less than the authors of the Gospels.2 The consequence is that we are reading Paul’s own words, whereas we have nothing that Jesus