Readers of Solomon Says (Amazon) will notice that there is a lot of discussion of the New Testament in it for a book that is supposed to introduce Proverbs. That’s because reading Proverbs and meditating on it a bit changed the way I read the Gospels and especially the Epistles. I haven’t had time to list all the correlations but much of the material in the letters of Paul and Peter and James seems now like commentary on Proverbs or (this is probably closer to the original intent) applications of Proverbs.
Writing my book caused me to think about Christian living and human maturity in ways I hadn’t before. And while I think that is noticeable in my book, I might use this website to post some more direct reflections and questions on the subject.
These thoughts have especially triggered questions about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. I did a bit of writing and teaching on that book of the Bible a few years ago and was reminded of it recently by friends.
One of the things that stands out about Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes is that it is relatively abstract. To show what I mean, here’s something I wrote for TownHall.com:
Consider this essay by Susan Neiman, which begins with this sentence: “I am a philosopher who believes that Western philosophy begins not with Plato, but elsewhere, and earlier, with the Book of Job.” Neiman’s driving reason is the way the book deals with the problem of evil. But I think certain features of the book lend itself to be classified as a philosophy text, or at least a proto-philosophy text.
You may not know this, but most of the Bible presents itself as a history. Either it narrates past events (the patriarchs, the history of Israel, the story of Jesus and the start of the church in the Roman Empire) or it gives us documents that only make sense in a historic context (the prophets and the epistles). Job has some historical indicators, but it doesn’t seem to be as essential to that overarching narrative. It reads like a story designed to deal with an abstract problem.
To some degree, all “wisdom literature” that came from Solomon and others seems to be less interested in the narrative history. Authorship is established in Proverbs and there are a few references to Israel’s situation with the hereditary land and the sacrificial system. But it’s not as much as the rest of the Bible.
This led me to think about what could qualify as the most general of Paul’s letters. What epistle would be the closest as a “Christian handbook” or a Christians “Manual for Life.”
There’s a lot of ways in which this question could be misleading. I think really the whole Bible, as written, is arguably THE Christian handbook. It’s not that long, after all.
But there are, arguably, books among the 66 books of the Bible that tie them and their themes together more effectively than others. Arguably, for life and wisdom, that’s what is special about Proverbs. In another sense, the four Gospels (in which I would include Acts as “Luke, Part Two”), function as the climax for everything written before and the reason for everything written after.
Paul’s letters don’t read like handbooks of anything. They are letters written to address specific situations. But they are not equally so. The letters to the Corinthians is much more specific content, leaving interpreters to deduce (and guess) what has been going on in Corinth that Paul is addressing. Romans is sent to Rome in part at least because Paul wants to make Rome his base of operations for missions to western Europe. If you read Romans 1:1-15 and then jump all the way to 15:14 and following it seems like an almost seamless short letter about their role in his new plan to go to Spain.
But Ephesians is notable in missing such specific references and also Paul’s usual personal greetings. Some have claimed it was a “circular letter” to the Asian churches. The evidence for that is scant, but it does show that people find it uniquely generic.
Perhaps Paul wrote a letter to the Ephesians to connect with them but had no other reason to write; so, he wrote a general introduction to the Christian faith and life. He wanted to send his agent Tychius to them (6:21) and didn’t want to send him empty-handed.