This is my first Shovelation letter. I wrote it as if Paul himself gave us a visit and then decided to rewrite his letter to the Galatians to bring it back into a better understanding. Jim

Hello, my name is Paul. I suspect you've heard of me. I'm sure you're familiar with my writings. But what I'm not sure of is whether you have the faintest idea what it was that I wrote. Hey, I picked up a printed copy and read my own translated letters and I have to say I had a hard time following it. I mean, what are all those numbers for? It looks more like a law document or something. For crying out loud, it was a letter! I asked somebody about it and he told me it was easier to study it that way. What did he mean by that?!? And something else: those things called chapters are most distracting to the flow, if you can even follow my original thought with all those verse numbers breaking the whole thing up.

Hey, I went into a Bible Study group recently where they were examining one of my letters (yeah, I get around on a rare occasion). I was asking the teacher a few questions about his opinions but he kept evading me. I think he thought he was answering the questions, but all he did was quote some other verses from some other places and make a few unrelated comments. He finally got frustrated and told me that I had no idea what the "apostle Paul" taught and that I needed to learn the original Greek and learn how to exegete scripture. Imagine that!! Oh man, do I remember that kind of fruitless study. Also, I was told that I would never have any kind of true understanding of Scripture (he pronounced it with a capital S) if I didn't learn Systematic Theology! I've heard this kind of stuff before. Different words, same trash!

Anyway, I decided to rewrite it a little so that you could catch the sense of not only what I said but how I said it. Now, I was told I would catch a lot of flack for that and probably be called a blasphemer, heretic or something like that, but it sure wouldn't be the first time. Hey, do me a favor, don't subdivide it this time, okay?