Issue 15 Vulnerability in PreachingBlog | The Late Greats – Paul the Apostle
The Late Greats – Paul the Apostle
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 26.06.18
‘Paul was due to leave the next day, and he preached a sermon that went on till the middle of the night. A number of lamps were lit in the upstairs room where we were assembled, and as Paul went on and on a young man called Eutychus who was sitting by the window grew drowsy...’.2 This, a rare eyewitness account of what it was like to listen to Paul’s preaching, does not seem a promising place to begin, but it encapsulates the difficulty of discussing Paul the preacher.
A s OC Edwards notes, it is unlikely ‘that any of Paul’s sermons as such have survived’.3 The Acts of the Apostles contains accounts of Paul’s preaching and includes a number of passages that purport to record what he said, two of which we might count as sermons, but the focus of Acts is not on Paul’s homiletical method.4 Moreover, we cannot assume that what Acts records is what Paul preached; as James Dunn argues, Luke was working with the conventions of his time which required the historian not to report verbatim what the subject said but ‘what the writer thought he was likely to have said (or should have said).’5 That Luke was Paul’s companion might mean that what we have in Acts is closer to an actual account of the words spoken than in other first century histories, but the brevity of the sermons in Acts suggests that Luke was not pretending to record all the content of Paul’s homilies.
