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 [...]

In my initial post on Romans that gave a “nutshell” view of its overarching message, I indicated that Paul explained his Gospel by means of a “bad news/good news” schema, that in the shortest hand possible explained that all humans, whether Jew or Gentile, were doomed because of “sin” (bad news) but could have “salvation” through the death and resurrection of Jesus (good news).  I also indicated that in Romans Paul expressed this bad news/good news scenario in two major ways.  In this post I want to explicate the matter further. Elsewhere on the blog I’ve called these two ways of understanding sin and salvation as “models” of Paul’s understanding of how Christ can bring reconciliation with God.  Both models involve “sin” but mean something different by it; both show that Christ can bring deliverance from salvation but express how it works in a different way.  I normally call these two ways of understanding it all as the “judicial” and the “participationist” models. In very rough terms, the “judicial” model is principally laid out in [...]

In my previous post I summarized the major themes of the letter to the Romans; in that context I mentioned already some of the key aspects of both authorship and purpose.  But in this post I want to dig deeper into who wrote it, when, and at particular length, why. ****************************** Romans is the sixth book of the New Testament and the first for which we are virtually certain as to the authorship.  The Gospels and Acts are anonymous, only later attributed to their eponymous authors (eponymous being one of those words I love).  Romans, however, names its author -- in the first word!  "Paul."  Lots of other writings claim to be by the apostle Paul but were actually written by other people claiming to be Paul, as I've mentioned; six of those are in the NT (at least six that are debated) and there are more than that outside it (none of which are debated). But in this case there is little doubt about the matter.  This letter claims to be by Paul, is [...]

I will now move to a nutshell mini-thread on the individual Pauline letters in the New Testament.  I will be covering them in canonical sequence, including both the so-called undisputed Pauline letters, which I’m saying are “so-called” simply because scholars in every field dispute flippin’ everything (well, almost everything), and the disputed epistles, which, as it turns out are undisputably disputed! The thirteen letters are arranged not in chronological (or alphabetical!) sequence, but by length: with Romans as the longest and Philemon the shortest.  Note: in this arrangement, letters to the SAME audience (two each to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians) are combined in order to determine their length. And so, the sequence (with U meaning undisputed and D disputed) is Romans (U) 1 Corinthians (U) 2 Corinthians (U) Galatians (U) Ephesians (D) Philippians (U) Colossians (D) 1 Thessalonians (U) 2 Thessalonians (D) 1 Timothy (D) 2 Timothy (D) Titus (D) Philemon (U) In this four-post mini-thread, I deal with the letter to the Romans.  I begin by giving a 50-word summary.  If you know [...]

Now that I have provided nutshell summaries of Paul’s life, letters, and significance, I can provide some suggestions for further reading.  Here is an annotated list of some of the books you may find useful.  These are taken from my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press) in which I devote six chapters to Paul.    Another resource not listed in the textbook would be the (different!) six chapters I devote to discussing Paul's biography in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magadalene (HarperOne). ****************************** Aune, David. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987. Includes a superb discussion of the practices of letter writing in Greco-Roman antiquity as the social context for Paul’s epistles. Beker, J. Christiaan. Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. A sophisticated and astute discussion of the apocalyptic character of Paul’s theology and its various forms of expression in different situations that the apostle confronted. For advanced students. Bruce, F. F. [...]

Now that I have covered the Gospels and Acts in this “Nutshell” series, it is time to move on to the writings of Paul.  Rather than start with his first letter in the New Testament, Romans, I’ve decided to devote a couple of posts to Paul himself, one to his significance and surviving letters and one to a biographical sketch. I start by giving a 50 word summary his writings, the “seven undisputed letters” in a nutshell: Paul wrote seven of the letters attributed to him, addressing problems of churches he had established (five letters), of a church he planned to visit (Romans), and of an individual convert (Philemon), resolving their issues by explaining the implications of his law-free Gospel of Christ for faith and communal life. I found this 50-worder especially difficult.  See if you can do better!  But for now I will provide a short introduction to Paul and his letters. ****************************** By any metric you choose, Paul was the most important figure in the history of Christianity apart from Jesus himself.  This [...]

In my previous post I started to show that most Jews rejected Christian claims about Jesus because Jesus was just the *opposite* of what the messiah was expected to be.  The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow God’s enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth in which God’s will would prevail.  Jesus was and did none of that.  He was a lower-class peasant who was arrested, humiliated, tortured, and executed.  He didn’t destroy God’s enemies.  He was crushed by them. Paul is the first Jewish persecutor of the Christians that we know by name; there is really no doubt that he was bent on wiping out the followers of Jesus – since he himself says so (and says so to his own shame [Gal 1:13); he did not gain any glory for this rather despicable past--despicable in both his eyes and the eyes of the Christians).  Presumably his reasons for hating and opposing the followers of Jesus were comparable to those of other Jewish persecutors. But [...]