It's obvious that the Gospels tell stories. They report on Jesus's life, his encounters, relay his parables, and bear witness to his death and resurrection. But Paul? The apostle is typically perceived as a combative thinker, as an architect of church dogmas. Accordingly, his letters are generally considered theological arguments, peppered with abstract concepts and complex trains of thought. However, in my new book, "Paul the Storyteller" (available on Amazon now) I show that Paul is also a gifted storyteller - just in his own unique way.
Contrary to what many have claimed, upon closer inspection, we find numerous small narratives in Paul's letters. Sometimes he reports on dramatic turning points in his life, sometimes about his interactions with the early Christian communities. These "miniature narratives" might seem unremarkable at first glance. Yet Paul employs them with great sophistication.
Unlike the evangelist Matthew, who unfolds his stories step by step, using what we today might consider an unbearable "then"-style, Paul usually narrates very concisely, often omitting chronological details, merely hinting at events rather than explicitly stating them. He can afford this conciseness because his readers already know the context. What might seem cryptic to us today was perfectly clear to the original recipients of his letters – because they already knew the (hi)story behind the letters.
This narrative style makes us ask why Paul then used narration at all. Obviously, he does not tell stories merely for entertainment. They are part of his communication strategy. He rarely aims to inform his addressees about new developments – as we might expect from storytellers in our daily lives. This might be why in the perception of some the apostle appears not to tell stories at all. But he does, just with different purposes. Sometimes he wants to move his readers to reconsider their assumptions, to view familiar events through a new lens, to adopt a new perspective on the world. Sometimes he tells stories that are meant to directly motivate specific actions. The small stories scattered throughout Paul's letters thus serve as powerful tools for the apostle to convey his message and achieve his communicative intentions.
My analysis reveals even more: Beyond explicit stories, Paul also employs many "implicit narratives." These are background stories that resonate and shape the text without being directly told – stories that could be told under certain circumstances, but which the apostle only hints at. Sometimes these references to events are almost anti-narratives: Paul doesn't tell them, he un-tells them, disnarrates them, states what has not happened, refers to a counterfactual plot - and, thus, for example, gets his readers to think about how their situation might look if God had acted differently in the past.
Communicatively particularly significant is the grey area between the absolute denial of events and unrestricted affirmation of certain sequences – the reference to situations that might possibly correspond to facts. Here, the letters' recipients are often challenged to tell stories in their minds, to consider which plot they want to locate themselves in – only to realize whether they're heading toward a happy ending or should quickly adjust their actions to modify the story's action, its plot.
This example also shows: The "proto-narratives" evoked by Paul often point to the future, are often only potential because they cannot yet be told. For them to be told as success stories in retrospect, something still needs to happen, a commandment must still be followed, behavior must still change. By mentally simulating the future narrative, readers place themselves in the position of people who have already done what Paul is currently asking of them. And again we see: Even Paul's "almost-narratives" don't simply aim to inform; they want to stimulate new perspectives, motivate action.
What does this mean for our understanding of the apostle? Paul appears here not as the distant theologian he is often portrayed as. He is a master of targeted communication who knows exactly how stories can touch and change people. His letters are not dry treatises but living communication with real people in specific situations.
Theologically, these insights are highly significant. There is, on one hand, a negative consequence. It becomes apparent that one cannot simply cobble together a theology by assembling scattered statements from the apostle. This tears apart stories that belong together, picks out events that only make sense in conjunction with other events and within their intended contexts. Paul would not be satisfied with such handling of his writings and would resist such crude retelling.
Yes, sometimes he might even object to this retelling itself! According to the apostle, not everything that is true should be said as such. It seems that Paul believes that there is something like self-defeating storytelling. For him, storytelling isn't just about factually correct statements; how the story is told must also be considered. Those who boastfully share their own experience of God's grace, for instance, reveal an attitude that places them outside this story line. Hence, such a story cannot be told, at least not in that way, because then it ceases to be an accurate narrative.
But there is also a constructive theological yield. The implicit stories that Paul envisioned provide a framework for his arguments in numerous places. Why certain things follow from others can only be understood when one recognizes the narrative framework within which the apostle operates. These "narrative substructures" therefore lend coherence to numerous, also non-narrative, passages in Paul's letters. Reconstructing them helps us better understand these highly dense and complex writings. And they point to something like a worldview-narrative in the background of all these situational letters, a story that Paul tells himself to situate himself and his actions in a world that he reinterprets in light of his experience with Jesus and God's Spirit. It is precisely through carefully assembling these fragments of story that surface here and there in the text that we can reconstruct the apostle's true theology.
Is all this even relevant – outside the ivory tower of academic theology? I think so. On one hand, people working in the church would certainly do well to take a second look at exactly how Paul conveys the Christian faith – not as an abstract system of doctrine, but by mapping out possible paths for living. His proto-narratives make clear how closely theology and concrete life are interwoven for him. When he speaks about God's patience, for instance, he doesn't do so through philosophical definitions but by guiding his readers through a mental simulation of various scenarios. This also means: conveying the Christian message today requires sensitivity to the concrete life circumstances of those one wants to reach – and creativity (including literary creativity)!
But even those who find little use for the Bible can learn something from this new perspective on the apostle. For my analysis shows exemplarily how people make decisions and initiate changes – often not through purely rational arguments, but through mentally working through various possible plots. And those who want to understand our present and shape our future would do well to comprehend these dynamics. Not just to learn from them, to imitate them. Even just to gain an understanding of their own starting point.
For the narrative fabric that the Apostle Paul created runs through our society like an invisible net, often spun further in various directions in the course of centuries of retelling. Implicit narratives about loyal state subjects and taxpayers (Romans 13) and petit-bourgeois work ethic (2 Thessalonians 3) haunt the minds of even secular politicians – and often have little to nothing to do with what the apostle himself had on his mind. We may have dismissed the Bible from public discourse. Yet this same public discourse is fundamentally shaped by how these once-sacred texts have been interpreted – and misinterpreted – throughout history, with these assumptions becoming part of our cultural heritage.
This isn't just about a prologue to our own story; it's about how we naturally create connections in our societal narratives, how we determine good and bad, how we recognize consequences and causes. We cannot understand ourselves as storytellers if we don't understand that Paul, as one of the most influential storytellers in human history, still speaks through us. And we can only become better, more self-reflective storytellers when we first hear his voice.