Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry his name, and we believe Hebrews is his fourteenth. Some are debated, and at least two of his letters never survived.
Ask how many books did Paul write and our answer is fourteen. Thirteen New Testament letters open with his name, from Romans to Philemon, and we believe Hebrews is his fourteenth. That is just over half of the twenty-seven books.
That number comes with three honest footnotes. Scholars debate whether Paul personally wrote six of the thirteen, some count only thirteen because Hebrews does not carry his name, and Paul himself mentions letters we no longer have.
So the real answer is fourteen that we have, more than fourteen that he sent, and none that he wrote as a book in the way we use the word. Every one of them was a letter to real people with a real problem, and that shapes how they should be read.
Your Bible prints Paul's letters roughly by length, Romans at the front and Philemon at the back. That order is tidy, and it hides the story. Put them in the order he most likely wrote them and you watch a church planter become a pastor, then a prisoner, then an older man handing the work on. Hebrews, the fourteenth, gets its own section below.
Galatians, 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians. Short, urgent letters to brand new churches. 1 Thessalonians is usually dated around AD 50, which makes it older than any of the Gospels. The date of Galatians is argued, with some placing it in the late forties and others in the mid fifties.
1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians and Romans. The long ones. Corinth needed correcting on almost everything, and Romans is Paul introducing his gospel to a church he had not yet visited, written before he carried the collection to Jerusalem (Romans 15:25).
Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon. Each one mentions his chains. Tradition places them in Rome, and some scholars argue for an earlier imprisonment in Ephesus or Caesarea. Either way, Philippians is the most joyful letter he wrote, and he wrote it under guard.
1 Timothy, Titus and 2 Timothy. Written to two coworkers rather than to churches, about leadership and endurance. 2 Timothy reads like a farewell, with Paul saying the time of his departure has come (2 Timothy 4:6). It is the last word we have from him before his death in Rome.
Add that up and every letter falls between about AD 50 and the mid sixties. All of them were written before AD 70, before the temple fell, to churches living inside the covenant transition Paul kept describing. When he told the Corinthians that the end of the ages had arrived on them (1 Corinthians 10:11), he meant their generation, and it did.
Read in writing order, Paul's letters are a life story. A church planter, then a pastor to troubled congregations, then a prisoner, then a mentor passing the work to the next generation.
Here is the part a lot of church bookshelves leave out. Nearly every scholar, conservative or critical, agrees Paul wrote seven of the thirteen. The other six are argued over, and you deserve to hear both sides at full strength.
Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Essentially nobody across the spectrum questions these.
Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus. A good number of scholars accept Colossians or 2 Thessalonians, so you will also see lists of eight or nine.
Differences in vocabulary and style, especially in the Pastorals. Church leadership that looks more settled than in the early letters. Ephesians overlapping heavily with Colossians. And writing in a famous teacher's name was a known practice in the ancient world.
All six claim to be from Paul, and the early church received them as his. He worked with secretaries and co-senders. Different situations call for different words. And the Pastorals carry small personal details, like a cloak left at Troas (2 Timothy 4:13), that a forger had little reason to invent.
The critical side is not a fringe. Dale Martin, in his Yale lecture on Paul's disciples, describes the Pastorals as letters that “almost all scholars, critical scholars, believe are pseudepigraphic,” meaning written in Paul's name by someone else. On Colossians and Ephesians he is more open: “Some people, like me, say that they're not written by Paul, but they're pseudepigrapha. And some people say they are written by Paul.”
We count fourteen letters from Paul, the thirteen under his name and Hebrews, and we receive all fourteen as Scripture. For the wider story of his life, see who Paul was in the Bible.
On the six debated letters we lean toward Paul, writing with secretaries and coworkers, over the forgery theory. The style differences are real. We think a man writing across fifteen years, to different people, through different hands, explains them better than a later writer borrowing his name. That is a judgment, not a proof, and the vocabulary argument is the strongest point on the other side.
What we refuse to do is hang anyone's faith on the authorship question in either direction. The claim that anyone who doubts Pauline authorship has abandoned the Bible is wrong, and it gets used to shame honest students into silence. The claim that disputed means worthless is also wrong. The church read these letters as Scripture long before anyone counted their vocabulary, and Jesus remains the lens for every one of them.
Which of these is one of Paul's undisputed seven?
Philemon is a single page, and almost nobody doubts it. Ephesians and 1 Timothy are both among the six whose authorship is debated.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Picture a man alone at a desk with a pen and you will misread him. Ancient letters were usually dictated, and Paul's own letters show us how his were made.
Romans 16:22. A man named Tertius adds his own greeting and identifies himself as the one who wrote the letter down.
1 Corinthians 16:21, Galatians 6:11, Colossians 4:18 and 2 Thessalonians 3:17. Paul takes the pen at the end to sign, so the church knows the letter is really from him.
Sosthenes in 1 Corinthians. Timothy in 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon. Silas and Timothy in both letters to Thessalonica. Many of these letters come from a team.
1 Thessalonians 5:27 and Colossians 4:16. The letters were meant to be read to the gathered church and then passed along to others.
That matters for the debate above. A letter written down by Tertius, or shaped alongside Timothy, will not sound exactly like one Paul drafted alone. It also matters for how you read him. These are not textbooks. They are one side of a conversation, and we are reading someone else's mail.
“His letters contain some things that are hard to understand”
2 Peter 3:16That line cuts in a comforting direction. If you have found Paul hard going, you are in apostolic company. It also shows his letters were already gathered and read as a set within the New Testament itself.
Hebrews is the one letter of Paul's that does not open with his name, and that is why some modern lists stop at thirteen. We believe Paul wrote it, and so did a large part of the early church. Older English Bibles, the King James among them, printed a title crediting him. Here is why we land there.
Hebrews 13:23 tells the readers that “our brother Timothy has been released” and that the writer hopes to come with him. Timothy was Paul's closest coworker, named as co-sender on six of his letters.
In 2 Peter 3:15 to 16, Peter tells his readers that Paul “also wrote you” and sets that alongside all his other letters. Peter wrote to God's scattered people (1 Peter 1:1, 2 Peter 3:1), and Hebrews is the letter from Paul that best fits that audience. That is an inference, not a proof, but it is an old one.
Clement of Alexandria, as Eusebius records, said the letter “is the work of Paul,” written to Hebrews in their own language and carefully translated by Luke for Greek readers. The Greek speaking churches of the East received it as Paul's from early on.
P46, the earliest surviving collection of Paul's letters, usually dated around AD 200, places Hebrews among them. The University of Michigan, which holds part of the manuscript, notes that it puts Hebrews “directly after Romans.”
Some scholars count thirteen, and their case deserves a fair hearing. Hebrews has no greeting with Paul's name, its writer says the message was confirmed by those who heard the Lord (Hebrews 2:3), and the Greek is more polished than his other letters. Even Origen, who said “the thoughts are those of the apostle,” thought the wording came from another hand. We think a letter to Jewish believers, who had heard plenty against Paul, explains why he led with Jesus instead of his own name, and Clement's answer, that Luke put it into Greek, explains the style.
So we count fourteen, and the full case is in who wrote Hebrews. Whatever list you use, the letter stands in the canon on its own witness to Jesus as God's final word.
Paul wrote more than the fourteen we have. We know because he tells us.
“After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea.”
Colossians 4:161 Corinthians 5:9 says, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.” So 1 Corinthians is at least his second letter to that church, and the first one is gone.
Some scholars think it was Ephesians traveling as a general letter, since several early manuscripts lack the words “in Ephesus” in Ephesians 1:1. Others think it is lost. Nobody knows for certain.
2 Corinthians 2:4 mentions a letter written in great distress and with many tears. Some identify it with 1 Corinthians, some with part of 2 Corinthians, and some with a letter that did not survive.
A short Latin letter to the Laodiceans and a so-called Third Corinthians circulated centuries later to fill the gap. They are later works, and the church at large never received them as Paul's.
Does a lost letter mean a missing piece of Scripture? We do not think so. Paul sent plenty of ordinary correspondence, and the churches kept and copied what spoke to every church. The earlier Corinthian letter was plainly misunderstood (1 Corinthians 5:10 to 11), which is part of why the next one exists. Nothing we need went missing, and the church in Laodicea shows up again in Revelation, so we know a little about the people who read that missing letter.
Count them however you like, seven or thirteen or fourteen, and they all end up in the same place. Paul could not stop talking about Jesus.
The man who wrote them had been the church's most determined enemy. He did not change his name to mark the turn, as the Saul and Paul question shows, and he never stopped mentioning what he had been. His letters are what happens when a persecutor meets the risen Christ and spends the rest of his life working out what that means for Jews and Gentiles, households and cities, grief and money and marriage.
That is why the authorship debate, worth having as it is, is never the main thing. The letters point past their author, to a Kingdom already here, a Spirit already given and a Savior who shows us exactly what the Father is like.
For related ground, see what the epistles are, Timothy, Titus, whether Paul was married and what we believe.
Paul wrote fourteen New Testament letters, the thirteen that carry his name and Hebrews, all between about AD 50 and the mid sixties, and at least two more of his letters were lost along the way.
If a passage in Romans or Timothy has tripped you up, you are not the first. Send it in and somebody at Sound of Heaven will read it with you.
Paul wrote fourteen New Testament letters. Thirteen carry his name: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon. The fourteenth is Hebrews, which does not carry his name but which we believe Paul wrote. Some scholars count thirteen for that reason, and they debate six of the named letters as well. Paul also mentions letters of his that did not survive.
Six: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus. The arguments concern vocabulary, writing style, church structure and how each letter fits Paul's life. Many critical scholars think some or all of them were written in his name after his death. Others argue that secretaries, co-senders and different situations explain the differences. The undisputed seven are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Sound of Heaven receives all of them as Scripture.
We believe he did. Hebrews closes with news that Timothy, Paul's closest coworker, has been released (13:23). Peter tells his readers that Paul also wrote to them (2 Peter 3:15 to 16). Clement of Alexandria called it the work of Paul, and P46, the oldest surviving copy of Paul's letters, places it right after Romans. Some scholars disagree because it has no greeting with his name and its Greek style differs. We think the audience and a translator explain both, and we count it as his fourteenth letter.
Most scholars point to 1 Thessalonians, usually dated around AD 50 and written to a young church Paul had been forced to leave early. Some argue that Galatians came first, depending on which Galatian churches it was sent to and how it fits with the council in Acts 15. Either way, Paul's earliest letters are older than any of the four Gospels, which makes them the earliest Christian writing we have.
Yes. In 1 Corinthians 5:9 Paul refers to an earlier letter he had already sent to Corinth, and it has not survived. Colossians 4:16 mentions a letter from Laodicea, which may be lost or may be Ephesians circulating between churches. 2 Corinthians 2:4 mentions a tearful letter that some think is also lost. A later work called the Letter to the Laodiceans exists, but it was written long after Paul and is not considered his.