In this nutshell series on the books of the New Testament, I've been discussing, in part, when each of Paul's letters were written, and some readers have wanted to know, well, how we know?  What kind of evidence do scholars look for? It seems like that ought to be an easy question to answer, a real softball. But it’s not; it’s a tough one, a hard curve. As I've pointed out (and I guess is rather obvious) different scholars have different likes and dislikes within their own fields. Most New Testament scholars, for example, do not enjoy doing textual criticism – the reconstruction of the oldest attainable form of the text based on our surviving manuscripts. In fact, most are not trained in it and want nothing to do with it. When I started in my career, on the other hand, that was the one thing I was completely passionate about. Different strokes for different folks. There are some scholars who want nothing to do with the Synoptic Problem, and others who have worked on [...]

I continue to receive very good questions from blog readers and would like to devote a couple of posts to ones that I get repeatedly (in different words) for broader distribution.  Here are three I've received recently and my posted responses to them, all on the apostle Paul. QUESTION:  [This one will be about whether the Cephas, James and other apostles in Jerusalem agreed with Paul on every point when he went to visit them in the course of his missionary work] I was wondering how scholars look at situations like Galatians 2:6-10 , specially the part of the text that states “they added nothing to my message” or “all they asked is we should continue remembering the poor”. My primary question is do scholars like yourself believe that the early disciples & James/Jerusalem Church saw eye to eye with Paul on all matters? As a secondary, why does Paul go into disputes later in Galatians 2 if they agreed on everything as mentioned in Gal 2 earlier? The passage of “adding nothing to my [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Here now is a final post about an interesting feature of Paul's letter to the Romans.  as you may know, Paul is often considered one of the real misogynists of Christian antiquity.  But I'm not sure that's right.  Most of the antipathy toward his views are based on 1 Timothy 2:11-15, a book he didn't write, and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, a passage that was probably inserted into his letter by someone else. No one can deny (well, at least I can't deny) that there are yet other passages in Paul that are completely unacceptable to modern proponents of women's rights, including, rather forcefully, me.  BUT  there are other passages that show that Paul not only allowed, but encouraged, women to be leaders of the church, in a world where women's leadership of most anything outside the private space of the home was both unusual and frowned upon. A key passage comes at the very end of Paul's letter to the Romans. It involves a woman he acknowledges as one of the most [...]