Now that I have given an overview of the major themes and emphases of 1 Thessalonians, I can say a few more things about what we know about its authorship, when it was written, and why. The book, of course, is always called “Paul’s” first letter to the Thessalonians but as you’ll notice, the opening verse indicates that it comes from “Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy.”  And throughout the letter the first-person plural pronoun predominates “WE give thanks” “WE know” “OUR visit” and so on. So, was this a letter written by committee?  If so…how does that work exactly? Aspects of the letter make it pretty clear that the three named authors did not take turns writing (Silvanus writing one passage, Timothy another, Paul yet another) but that it comes from one hand, and the hand was Paul’s.   Timothy in particular does not appear to be involved in the writing of the letter, since in chapter 3 the author(s) indicate that when they were in Athens they were distressed not knowing what was [...]

Here is an annotated list of books on Colossians, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles (that is, the letters that are assigned a “secondary” standing in the New Testament collection of Paul’s letters because scholars doubt they were actually composed by Paul himself) with a couple of commentaries specifically on Colossians.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on. ****************************** Beker, J. Christiaan. The Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1991. A clear assessment of the theology of the Deutero-Pauline, especially in light of the views embodied in the undisputed Paulines. Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Biblical Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. San Francisco: Harper One, 2010. An account of the phenomenon of literary forgery (pseudepigraphy) throughout the early Christian tradition that asks how and why a Christian author would [...]

We continue in this series that explains each book of the New Testament “in a nutshell” by turning to the letter to the Colossians.  This is a book that claims to be written by Paul, but as we will see in the next post, there are very good reasons for thinking Paul himself did not write it, but that it was written in his name by a later follower claiming to be Paul. For now, we are interested in the letter itself, it’s major themes and emphases. I begin by trying to explain the book in 50 words. The letter to the Colossians, allegedly written by Paul from prison, praises the Christians in Colossae and warns them against false teachers who urge them to follow the Jewish law, live strictly ascetic lives, and worship angels; for this author, Christ alone represents the godhead and deserves to be worshiped. Here now is a fuller account of the main features of the book. ****************************** “Paul” is in prison for preaching the gospel (Col 4:3). While there, he [...]

QUESTION: 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 message” makes it seem like Paul had some gospel and read every single point to the disciples of which they agree with it all, large and small, and then lived happily ever after. What is the historical context?   RESPONSE: We obviously have only Paul's side of the story. But it seems pretty clear that he is speaking about his main concern/issue connected with his gospel, that gentile converts do not have to convert as well to Judaism, [...]

Now that I have provided a nutshell summary of the letter to the Philippians in my previous post, I can move into the questions of authorship, date, and motivating purpose (who, when, and why). Philippians is almost always considered a Pauline letter, one of the seven “undisputed” epistles.  There seems very little reason to doubt it.  The letter is filled with Pauline themes and thoughts; it uses his typical kind of writing style; its concerns line up with what we find in others of his writings; and the presupposed historical circumstances are perfectly in line with what we would expect. As I’ve indicated, the letter claims to be written from prison, but we do not know where.  The “where” matters a good bit for the “when,” since if it was written, as many have argued, from Rome, then it must be toward the end of Paul’s life (since he went there after all his other known journeys and was apparently martyred there), so in the early 60s.  If it was written from somewhere else – [...]

In this thread summarizing each book of he New Testament, I come now to the book of Philippians, one of my favorite Pauline epistles since I first started reading the New Testament seriously when I was 17!  The first biblical verse I memorized (apart from the Lord’s Prayer!) was Philippians 1:21:  “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”    I memorized it because it was oh, so short. But once I did that, I realized I could maybe memorize some other favorites from the NT.  And started doing that.  Philippians was the first book I memorized in its entirety (again, as a teenager).  (It too is short!) I’ve never tried to summarize it in 50 words, so here’s my first attempt.  If you know it well yourself, give it a shot.  For now, here’s what I’ve come up with:   Paul writes the gentile Christians in Philippi from prison (we don’t know where), thanking them for sending much needed funds, urging them to remain joyful in their faith whatever the circumstances, exhorting [...]

The goal of this long “nutshell” thread on the New Testament is to introduce each of the twenty-seven books and summarize its major themes and emphases; to discuss what we can know about who wrote it, when, and why; to provide suggestions for further reading for anyone who is interested; and to give an additional post or two on some specific interesting feature of it. We are now up to book # 10 (!), the Letter to the Ephesians; it is the fifth letter in the “Pauline corpus” (that is, the collection of NT writings attributed to the apostle Paul) and is the first that is widely considered among scholars to be pseudonymous – that is, even though it clearly claims to be written by Paul, it appears to have been written instead by one of his later followers.  Today we would call that a forgery (few of us use the term “pseudonymous” these days), even though lots of people are reluctant to use that term for a book of Scripture.  Fair enough.  In the [...]

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 [...]