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 [...]