Galatians in a Nutshell   Paul’s letter to the Galatians is one of the most important and intriguing books of the New Testament, in parts not difficult to understand and in other parts densely packed with meaning, and therefore heavily disputed (check out Galatians 2:17-19 or 3:19-20 some time; if you think either is obvious, I can assure you your obvious interpretation is very much disputed!).  It is only six chapters long, but there’s a lot in there.   I had a friend in graduate school who wrote an entire dissertation to unpack just one verse (3:1). How to summarize it in one sentence of 50 words?  If you’re familiar with the book, give it a shot.  Here’s one attempt at it: Paul’s letter to the Galatians strenuously argues that being right with God comes to all people, Jew and gentile, only by faith in Christ, not by doing what the laws of Moses requires of Jews as the people of God, such as circumcision and observing sabbath and Jewish holy days.    I can now [...]

I've mentioned several times in these posts on 2 Corinthians that scholars are reasonably confident that it is made up of two letters of Paul that have been cut and spliced together (chs. 10-13 was the first chronologically; chs. 1-9 later), and I've pointed out that some think it is made up of four or five letters.  It seems that since I'm on the topic, and will not be again for a long while, I should repost a blog that I've done within living memory (as opposed to twelve years ago) since it deals directly with the topic. Before explaining the situation, I should say that when I first heard in graduate school that 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together, it struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense. I should also say that if what is now one letter is actually parts of five letters, written at different times [...]

Now that I’ve given a 50-word summary of the book of 2 Corinthians and a fuller discussion of its contents “in a nutshell,” I can turn to the questions of “Who, When, and Why.” As with Romans and 1 Corinthians there is not a lot of debate about who wrote the letter: it is one of Paul’s undisputed epistles and there are no real doubts about its authorship among the majority of critical scholars. As to when: the letter dates to some time not long after 1 Corinthians – maybe a matter of months?  And so it too is usually dated to the mid 50s. But the issue is complicated by the fact that we appear to have at least two letters that have been spliced together, and these were written at different times.  They were written for very different reasons.  And so to make sense of the “why” of 2 Corinthians, I’ve decided to give the play-by-play of the sequence of events that we can reconstruct of Paul’s history of the community – from [...]

Now that I have summarized the major themes and emphases of 1 Corinthians in the previous post, I can address the more specific questions of authorship, date, and purpose. 1 Corinthians is one of the seven undisputed Pauline letters – which, of course, does not mean that no one has ever disputed its authorship, only that the solid critical consensus is that Paul wrote it.  Its writing style, themes, mode of argumentation, presupposed historical context, theological views, and most everything else cohere well with what we can establish as Pauline, so in this case (unlike letters such as Ephesians or 1 Timothy) there is little reason to doubt its authorial claim. As is true of all of Paul’s letters (and the ones forged in his name!) 1 Corinthians begins (as did nearly all ancient personal correspondence), with the writer stating his name and indicating to whom he is writing: Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God that is in [...]

I continue now in my thread of providing “nutshell” overviews of each of the books of the New Testament by moving on to one of the favorite Pauline letters for many readers, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians Paul deals with a number of ethical issues confronting the Christian community.  Among its many gems is one of the favorite passages of the entire Bible, the “love” chapter of 1 Corinthians 13, which has been read at roughly 99.9% of all weddings in the history of humanity.  One of the big surprises of actually studying the book is that what this chapter is not discussing anything about a wedded couple having many years of marital bliss.  In fact, it’s not about marriage but, well, using one’s spiritual gifts in the church.  Go figure. 1 Corinthians is Paul’s second longest surviving letter (next to Romans) and is difficult to summarize briefly, in part because it deals with so many issues, one-by-one.  Have you read it?  Ever think about it?  If not, no problem.  Keep [...]