St. Paul's writings comprise a large part of the New Testament. The Letter to the Romans is considered the most central and comprehensive of all of his writing. He was the most dynamic and peripatetic of all of the first interpreters of the Christian message. Whereas the Gospel writers were careful to relate theological meanings to the detailed events of the life of Jesus and his sayings, Paul took the opposite approach. He extracted the theological meaning of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and elaborated it into the foundational understanding of the Christian experience not only of the first century A.D. but for every Christian since then.