This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 546: Read the Bible for Yourself 13: How to Read the Church Epistles by Sean Finnegan

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

00:08
Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity.

00:16
Live it out today.

00:24
Before getting to the church epistles, we'll begin with an overview of how letters were written, read, and performed.

00:32
Then we'll see how they are arranged in our Bibles. We'll spend a good deal of time talking about occasion. Why did Paul write each letter? What was going on that prompted him to initiate the expensive and elaborate process of writing to them? Lastly, we'll briefly consider how to apply what we read to our lives.

00:52
Here now is Episode 546 part 13 of read the Bible for yourself, how to read the church epistles.

01:07
I want to begin by talking about letters, letters in the 1st century. Letters were written on a substance called Papyrus. The earliest copies of all of our letters from the New Testament are on this substance called Papyrus, and that's made from.

01:26
The Reed that grows along the Nile River.

01:30
That basically they would strip and they lay crosswise, press and then allowed to dry, and it was their ancient form of paper.

01:39
Papyrus is not quite as smooth as our paper, but it's much more durable and incredibly, this is incredible. 130 papyri have survived with bits and pieces of the New Testament on them. They're still in the museums around the world today and.

01:59
Yet the New Testament letters are different than most of the other letters that have survived from the ancient world. In fact, the best place that this is getting a little off topic. But the best place to look for.

02:14
Ancient papyrus documents and letters from the ancient world, not necessarily New Testament, but just in general, is a place called Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, because archaeologists found a dump in ancient landfill. With all of these papers. And so the archaeologists and the paleographers.

02:34
Crazy. And they they're still categorizing them. They just found so many hundreds and thousands, even though they found this. Like, I think in the late 1800s, they're still working on it and digitizing it, making it available. So we actually have really good knowledge of what ancient letters were like. They were overwhelmingly brief and to the point.

02:53
Because papyrus is expensive.

02:58
Ink is expensive.

03:01
And more expensive than either of those is the cost of hiring a scribe to write the actual letter out, because writing was a specialized skill. It wasn't common in the ancient world, maybe 5 to 10% of the people would be able to read and write, but then a smaller percentage would have the.

03:22
The skill required to neatly write, and we have lots of papyri from the ancient world that show not so neat writing as well.

03:32
Including some New Testament manuscripts that are difficult for us to read.

03:37
Paul's epistles, however, are extremely long. They are oddballs from the ancient world. It's almost as if with him and the other apostles who wrote these epistles that we have in our Bibles. It's almost like they invented a new genre because we have some kind of similar things.

03:57
But again, most of these things are about the length of a post. It note not a New Testament epistle.

04:03
One more complication. There's no postal system, so the government does have kind of like a a horse system that they can use. But Christians were not. We were not allowed to use it. So if you wanted to write a letter, a long letter, you had to buy papyrus, you had to buy ink, you had to hire a scribe.

04:25
Then you had to get somebody to carry the letter to your destination, and then there's still one more step they have to read it publicly. They have to orate the letter because you can't just hand it to somebody and say, hey, here's a letter.

04:42
And it's not like they can make copies right away either. Communities could pool resources to make copies, and that's how we ended up with so many copies of the Bible but not individuals, unless that was a fabulously wealthy individual.

04:55
Now originally I want to talk about this whole part of Orating, the letter performing the letter.

05:01
Originally there were no.

05:03
Chapters there were no verses. There was no punctuation, and there was no space between the words.

05:14
Just think about this in English for.

05:15
A.

05:15
Moment. Let's say I give you a page of text and it was just letter after letter after letter, a whole page, and now I'm asking you to read that before the congregation. You couldn't just do that.

05:29
You first have to sit down and say, OK, where are the words, you know, kind of like a word search, you know, like, this word ends here and and so forth. And then you have to figure out, well, where are the sentences?

05:40
Is.

05:41
To end, where do I breathe? And then you have to figure out tone. You know, there would be a lot of preparation, so I'll show you an example and I'll want to demonstrate as well just because I don't have enough stress in my life. So this is an ancient papyrus of First Corinthians, chapter one, verse 15.

06:01
The following and I'm going to read it to you.

06:05
In Greek and then I'm going to read it to you in English and I want you to see what it's like just to get a little bit of a sense of it. OK, you ready?

06:15
Alright, so this is EPI OT ES Toto emon onama E Baptiste E Baptista de Keto tone stefana icon Lipon uke. Eva E Tina alone. I'm just trying to figure out where the words stop.

06:36
That's that's what I'm struggling with, and Baptista? That's an easy one, UAR pasti Lin.

06:44
Mayor.

06:46
Ohh, and now here's something interesting. There's a what looks to be an X&AP next to each other. You see where I am. And then there's a line above it. That's the word. Christ.

06:55
They abbreviate it just the 1st 2 letters of his name and then they put a line on top Christos.

07:00
Is how you say it in Greek.

07:02
Then baptizein Allah.

07:05
Evangelize zeste.

07:06
Nice big Greek word there.

07:09
UK en Sophia, you know Sophia's wisdom.

07:09
OK.

07:14
Lohu ina, MI kenosi. Oh. And then here we have another abbreviated word. You can tell by the line on top. This is the word cross, Stavros. That's how we say that. Oh, Stavros Christu or logos.

07:33
Two staff rule. All right. Now I'll read.

07:35
It to you.

07:36
In English may say this is the word. Means may say that into.

07:42
No.

07:43
The my name.

07:45
I baptized or you were baptized. Excuse me, but I baptized also.

07:52
The stefana household.

07:56
You guys know this passage? Some of you already like. Know what I'm gonna say next? But so he's saying like I you you say I baptize these other people, but you know, I I just baptized Stephanie's household and then he goes on the rest not I know if OK. So not I know then we have to skip over here. I baptize.

08:17
Exist.

08:18
Any others? Did you see how much I'm struggling? I don't have to keep doing this, but I just want you to see how much I'm struggling now listen.

08:28
I did not come into this cold.

08:30
I know what this says, OK, I practiced reading this document multiple times before I got up here. I've got years upon years upon years of Greek under my belt. If you have this typed out for me, it's just like the newspaper. This is not a hard section of Greek. If people who read Greek understand. But it's so hard.

08:50
Why? Because I'm dealing with these.

08:53
This letter here in the top left is an E it's an epsilon, but it looks like a a Theta to me.

09:00
Right, it's handwriting like I'm. I'm stumbling on his handwriting. I'm stumbling on where the word separators are. And this is all part of the picture for these epistles because I want you to think of these church epistles as not emails that are personally written to someone, but as publicly orated documents that required.

09:21
A professional, which I am obviously not to be able to get the tone right and to be able to do it in front of a group because nobody's reading, they're listening.

09:31
And that's something to keep in mind while you're reading.

09:34
That they would have been listening.

09:37
And for that reason, it's a good idea for you to read out loud so you can hear.

09:42
What you're reading or, hey, we live in the 21st century. Have your phone read you the Bible. You could do it for free. Reading the Epistles presents some unique challenges.

09:52
Yes.

09:54
Now the Gospels were evangelistic. The Gospels were specifically written. We looked at the Gospels already. They're specifically written to persuade people to believe in Jesus. They're written with a broad audience in view. The Epistles are not written with a broad audience. In view, the Epistles are written to a.

10:14
Group of levers in a city.

10:17
Now I think there is some evidence that Paul had in mind that they would swap epistles with each other and that there would be some interchange. But the fact of the matter is, there are sometimes when you're reading the Church of Epistles where you're going to say to yourself, I feel like I'm only hearing one side of a phone call.

10:37
I hear what he's saying to them, but I don't know what they did that is making him say this to them specifically, and that's part of what you have to figure out as you are reading along in the church epistles.

10:51
As I mentioned before, the New Testament has 27 books. I'm going to show you this over and over again. The New Testament has 27 books. It has five historical books. We've already talked about them. It has one book of prophecy. At the end, we're going to talk about that later. And in the middle 21 epistles.

11:11
This is a big portion of the New Testament. Now. There are 9 church epistles, 4 pastoral epistles, and eight general epistles. We're just looking at the Church of epistles, right?

11:24
Now.

11:25
That's it. These first nine church epistles. They are Romans, First Corinthians, second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, first Thessalonians, second Thessalonians, and these epistles are arranged in our Bibles in a particular order. Can you guess?

11:46
How they're arranged. It's not alpha. I'll give you a.

11:48
Hint it's not alphabetically.

11:51
They're arranged by length.

11:54
There is one exception should be Ephesians and Galatians. If this, if the scribes who order you know this. This is just like not inspired by God, the ordering is just like somebody was like oh OK well the the the long ones and then the shorter ones. And you know if you describe that makes perfect sense.

12:11
Because you want to make sure you have enough material, enough papyrus to write things out, and so you can squeeze more shorter thing on the same document on the same papyrus that you can longer one. So it makes sense. Just like from a a practical point of view to do longer to shorter.

12:32
They didn't have the book for a little while. It would just be the Epistles of Paul. Early on, got collected together, and then you have the Gospels collected together. They didn't have the technology really to do a whole New Testament until a couple of centuries after Christ. It took time.

12:48
Yeah.

12:49
Although it is probable that we Christians invented the book.

12:54
Feel like we should have some some credit for that. Like before us, they were scrolls.

13:01
We invented this idea of the codex, where you take these leaves and you sew them together in a binding. We can't be sure that as a Christian adventure, but we definitely dominated at it and I don't think there's evidence of others before.

13:13
For us or?

13:14
Let me show you a chronological arrangement. Here's a chronological arrangement of the church epistles. You notice is different than the canonical arrangement. Canonical means the order in the Bible. The chronological arrangement has Galatians first, although some scholars debate that they will put Galatians a little later.

13:33
I don't really have a horse in that race. You have Galatians about the year 48 and then first that's only second. That's aliens, first Corinthians, second Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians, ending about the year 62. So all of these epistles written between 48 and 62.

13:50
Now these letters were written to Christians living in cities.

13:54
There's one exception to that, and that's the book of Galatians. Galatia is not the name of the city, it's the name of a region. It includes multiple cities.

14:04
But all the rest of these are cities, as we'll see in just a moment. So it's helpful for you if you're reading the church epistles to get yourself a map.

14:15
So you know what you're reading where you're reading? I guess I should say so. Geography is actually really helpful. There will be sometimes in the epistles where Paul will talk about different places and if you can spot them on a map, it will enhance your understanding.

14:31
As you go.

14:32
Christianity began in a rural context. Jesus spoke mostly to farmers.

14:38
And fishermen.

14:40
But then, before long it spread to an urban context, and by the time Paul's writing these epistles, these are all major cities.

14:50
Galatia once again is a region that includes multiple cities, but all the other ones are cities that people would.

14:56
Know.

14:58
The more you can learn about these cities.

15:02
The better you'll be able to understand the church exists.

15:06
Not in modern times necessarily, but like the the the way they were in the ancient times.

15:12
Christians have put together books that can give you background information, such as the world of the New Testament by Green and McDonald.

15:19
Or the Zondervan Illustrated Bible background commentary, the first book here that I mentioned, the world of the New Testament, has little articles on different aspects of the ancient world that just gives you background information.

15:33
Education. Architecture.

15:37
Economics. What was a household like these kinds of articles and entries? OK, whereas the ZBC it's not of an illustrated Bible background commentary. It's a commentary. So you'll be reading through some part of the Bible and then you can refer based on that verse to the commentary and see if they have any insight.

15:56
Into those verses. So that's a little bit different. I'll talk about these kind of things more later. Also, we have a staggering, A staggering amount of literature that has survived from the ancient world.

16:11
World.

16:12
One collection of this literature is known as the lobe Classical Library, a collection of over 500 volumes where you have the original language on one page and then English on the opposite page.

16:26
There's also a French version called Source christienne Christian sources.

16:31
And the source credit is a little more prestigious than the lobe classical library, LCL, but also more expensive. So my point is when it comes to ancient sources, we have.

16:44
Too much. Nobody could ever read at all, you know, like it's it's just, like, incredible how blessed we are to know how these ancient people thought the green volumes are from Greek. The red volumes are from Latin. When I say to you, Greco, Roman worlds, what I mean is the world at the time the apostle Paul is writing these church epistles.

17:04
These people mostly spoke Greek, but they're living under the Roman Empire, which is a Latin world. OK, so they're they're still kind of thinking in Greek and a lot. So a lot of these Greek ancient literature is, is relevant to them, and it's how they think they all know, Homer, they all know certain.

17:24
Classics at least educated people do like Plato, things like that. But then they're living under the Roman Empire and and the Romans have their own literature, and they and they have survived. And you know, they have their plays and their poems and their novels and their histories.

17:39
All of this is helpful.

17:42
Understand the church epistles. I'm not saying you have to learn all this on your own, but I'm just showing you where this stuff comes from. When you see a A like a in a study Bible, they're like, oh, such and such set. You know, your rickety says, well, this is how you get.

17:55
To Euripides, if you want to read them for yourself.

17:58
Alright then, there's archaeological digs. This is the library of Celsus.

18:05
Which is an ancient site. I think it was not quite there at the time of Paul the apostle yet, but it's a side I've been to. It's in Ephesus.

18:14
And that was a library in downtown Ephesus. Just the facade is standing. It's actually reconstructed using mostly original pieces and you can see they had all these little statues at the bottom of it and you can't really see this too clearly. But there was writing all over it, both in Latin and in Greek. And then.

18:34
To the right, there's this massive gate that was constructed by freed slaves of the emperor.

18:43
So that tells you something about the ancient world and slavery, right? Slavery is not necessarily what we have in mind. If these guys are bragging about how they were the Emperor slaves.

18:56
There were obviously some forms of slavery that were a little bit better off because when you got freed you got hooked up financially. Not all forms of slavery were like that, obviously, but it's really helpful for you if you can actually go to these places. So I'm going to recommend to you again.

19:15
That you go, that you go to these places. They still exist. If you can get there and obviously not everybody can. But if you can get there to these places in the Bible lands in Greece and Turkey or Israel right now, Israel's into wars. I would not recommend going to Israel, but like Greece and Turkey and then it calibrates your imagination. So while you're reading the Bible.

19:37
You're imagining the way it actually is, rather than based on some Star Wars movie you saw that you're actually importing into Scripture, which has nothing to do with anything. Let's talk about occasion. Occasion is really big when it comes to reading the church epistles. The question is.

19:52
Considering the enormous amount of expense and time required to write a document, the length of First Corinthians or Romans.

20:02
Paul is not writing that to say hi. He's not writing it to, say, thinking of you, I mean, this is deep. This is serious. This is big. This is expensive. What's going on here? Each letter of the nine church epistles arose from a specific occasion or reason.

20:23
If I can put it.

20:24
That way.

20:25
A circumstance.

20:27
And the question you should ask yourself is what was going on among the Christians in that city that caused Paul to write this big, long, expensive letter that would take a long time to get to them and then be publicly performed.

20:42
What is the occasion? What is the inspiration for why he's writing?

20:48
So you can discern the background story because it's not like he gives you this in verse one, I mean.

20:55
Maybe once in a while you get some clues right there, but generally you just have to pick it up as you're reading through the church epistle.

21:04
And also the history in the book of Acts can help you.

21:07
So that's something to look for. Now I'm gonna give you some examples. So you know what I'm talking about. Oftentimes we have the answers.

21:14
If we just read the Epistles, but not always.

21:18
So I'll give you an example. Galatians what was going on that caused Paul to write the letter to the Galatians.

21:26
Judaizers had visited churches Paul founded telling everyone they needed to follow the law of Moses.

21:34
So Paul wrote Galatians and you can see when you read Galatians his tone, he's amped up. This is Paul. Galatians. I mean he's he's ready to punch. He's ready to fight. Not physically. But like, you know, his words are edgy. He's irritated.

21:51
These people are are doing this bad thing. They're they're they're bringing this false teaching to these churches trying to put these people under the law.

21:58
And that tone comes through in Galatians as you read what he's writing.

22:03
First Corinthians, a lady named Chloe, sent word of divisions in Corinth.

22:11
Paul also received a letter asking specific questions.

22:15
And he talks about this in the Epistle. He's like, well, when people from Chloe came, they gave me this. And some of you knuckleheads are saying you follow apollus and some of you are saying you follow me and others you say you follow Christ, it's like, what's?

22:30
What's all this division?

22:31
Well, how does he know there's division? Chloe has sent a met and he talks about it later on in the Epistle. So when?

22:37
You find these.

22:37
Little clues. They tell you the back story of why is he writing? And then when you read what he wrote in light of why he's writing it, it's just easier to understand because it's not some ethereal thing. It's like, OK, there was an incident.

22:52
And and he's responding to that.

22:55
And then as far as like his letter goes.

22:58
The letter they sent him.

23:01
As far as that letter goes, he will quote it in First Corinthians and he said you wrote to me and then he'll quote it and then he'll respond for like a chapter.

23:11
And be like, OK, that's what he's doing now. I get what he's doing in first Corinthians 7. You wrote to me. It's good for.

23:15
A man not to touch a woman.

23:18
That will now, if you're going to read that verse and put it on your refrigerator by itself.

23:24
Now you're going to be a monk and you're going to. You're going to be a nun and you're going to say I should never touch a man that never touch a woman.

23:33
You didn't realize that, he said. You wrote.

23:37
That's what Dave wrote.

23:39
He responds back and he gives a full chapter detailing all the different kinds of single people, married people, divorced people and widowed people. He goes through all of it. It's a very long chapter and he says, basically you can serve God in any one of those situations.

23:58
But if you're married, you better touch your woman and she better touch your man. But that's only for the.

24:03
Married people, obviously.

24:05
Anyhow, I'm getting myself in trouble. Alright, second Corinthians, second Corinthians. There were false teachers that had ensconced themselves in Corinth who criticized and undermined Paul.

24:17
So second Corinthians is super combative and he's he's fighting for their loyalty and these people are talking trash about Paul, and Paul is responding to it. He's trying to establish reestablish credibility in the church that he had already been to and had already had such an influence on.

24:37
And then Philippians, Philippians is a thank you letter aphrodites brought Paul financial assistance from Philippi.

24:45
That's the occasion. So now Paul writes a letter to say thank you. That's not all he says in the letter. He also does some other stuff. Encouragement teaching, as you read on, you see there is a basically a sense of gratitude. And, you know, once you understand that about Philippians, then it is a a thank you for receiving money from them.

25:05
Once you get to the part where he talks about grace, you know the grace that you share with me, like you get what's going on. He's talking about like.

25:12
Really.

25:14
And but he has a he has a great way of talking about it. You know, it's very gracious. It's very eloquent. It's not crass.

25:23
Like, I think our culture is very grass. Some when it comes to money. Alright. So when you're first time through reading the church epistles, if you can do it. This is my #1 recommendation for you.

25:37
If you could possibly do it, read the whole Epistle in one sitting and I think for Romans, first, second Corinthians might be that might be too much, but now you know they get shorter as you go, right, so who couldn't read Philemon and one sitting? It's it's less than a page in most Bibles, right? That's the.

25:57
Rest of the business of Paul, but you know Ephesians, you can read in one setting.

26:02
Ciceronian escalations so that would be my thing because if if you can read it in one sitting and even if possible speak it as you read it or listen as you read it in one sitting, that gives you the overall scope of the church epistle.

26:18
A fun way to do that is if you try to perform it as if you're the orator.

26:23
Speaking to this group of people has never heard this before, so when you get to certain parts and pulse sarcastic, which is sometimes you inject a sarcastic tone. If you ask a question, you inject an interrogative tone.

26:39
Get into it a little bit, you know.

26:40
Like perform it.

26:42
Don't just be like, read it all monotone, right? That's just a thought. The goal of the first time is to get the big picture.

26:49
With letters to cities, once again I you want to do whatever you can to reconstruct in your mind what was going on that he's responding to. Then you understand his response a lot better. A lot of times it's very easy too. It's just a matter of putting your brain into that gear and then you're like, OK, I get it.

27:06
What's going on in that church? Ask yourself that question. What's going on in that city? What's going on in the Roman Empire? Does he talk about Caesar? Does he talk about a famine? Try to find out what's going on. What are their concerns?

27:20
You know the letter is going to tell you what Paul's saying to them. But like, can you figure out what their concerns are? Like, take first Corinthians 15.

27:27
The whole chapter is about resurrection.

27:30
He's trying to convince them to believe in the resurrection of the dead.

27:35
So what's their concern?

27:37
When they didn't believe in the resurrection.

27:40
You know, you do a little bit of digging, a little bit of research you find out because the resurrection idea was ridiculous in the ancient world, everybody knew.

27:50
That you didn't want your body back.

27:52
Once you've escaped it.

27:55
So now you start to like, ask certain questions about, OK.

27:58
But Paul is saying this is a non-negotiable if you don't believe in resurrection, then guess what? Jesus isn't raised from the dead if Jesus isn't raised from the you see, you can start following his argument. If Jesus isn't raised from the dead, you're still in your sins. If and if that's true, then I'm a false preacher. And what are we doing here, people? You know, you can really appreciate his rhetoric, his persuasive speech.

28:19
If you can follow the flow of argument.

28:24
It's especially important to think in paragraphs.

28:28
If I could take the verses out of your church epistles, I would. I'll leave you the chapters, but I'll take the verses.

28:37
Out.

28:38
Because the verses they kind of train your mind to think in sentences, what your mind should think of is in sections chunks, some Bibles insert paragraph markers or whatever. Because you read the whole thing and then it's like alright, now how do the parts relate to the whole? That's really the question.

28:58
Look, I know it's a pain to do this.

29:00
Especially if it's early in the morning and you haven't had your coffee yet. OK, but what I'm saying to you is really going to help you to understand what you're reading so much better. If when you are going along, you say to yourself rather, I like this one verse, I think I'll post this on Facebook. I do that too. OK. I'm not going to. I'm not going to hate on you.

29:20
So that we can encourage each other with just one verse, but what really matters much more than the single verse is understanding what is going on.

29:29
How is that verse being used? And I want to give you an example.

29:33
Of.

29:34
A difficult verse. First Corinthians 1529 says otherwise.

29:40
What will those people do who receive baptism on behalf of the dead?

29:46
If the debt are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

29:53
The whole group called the Mormons.

29:55
That took this verse and said, well, I guess we're supposed to baptize on behalf of the dead. So I got a dead grandma. So why don't you dunk me? And then she'll get saved.

30:05
And they have this whole elaborate theology and pursuit of genealogies and ancestry so they can get all of their ancestors as far back as they can. And this this one person getting baptized 50 times for all their dead relatives, right? All from this one verse. It's just incredible. No other Christians do that.

30:25
Just the Mormons is is something right? And and look, I'll be honest with you. I have read the commentaries on this first multiple commentaries, nobody knows what the.

30:34
That means nobody does. Like we're all pretty sure the Mormons are wrong, but we don't know what was going on in Corinth, and here's what I'm saying to you.

30:43
That's going to happen. You're going to occasionally come across a verse or a phrase where you're reading the church epistles that you just don't understand. And you know what? That's OK. Maybe you get understanding down the line. Maybe some scholar finds some new insight that explains it to the rest of us, or maybe not.

31:03
But what really matters here for this verse? First Corinthians 1529. What really matters is that we understand what Paul is doing. Why is he referencing their practice of getting baptized on behalf of the dead?

31:17
Which probably, by the way, was this is my #1 theory on it, just in case you're curious, let's imagine this scenario that a mother had had been a Christian, had an adult son, and she died.

31:31
And now he's grieving. And, you know, he starts meeting her Christian friends and says, you know, I I want to see my mom again. I, you know, I wanna I wanna be with her and they say to her well she she really wish.

31:44
That you would become a Christian too.

31:46
And so he's he's doing it on her behalf, not in her place, but because she wanted him to do it. That's that's, I think, a much more likely scenario than what the Mormons are doing. Regardless, that's not my point. My point is this. You don't need to know what this is to get the main point. What's the main point? The Corinthians are doing something. And Paul is using.

32:08
That as evidence for his argument about the resurrection.

32:12
His argument about the resurrection goes like this. If there's no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not raised from the dead, and our faith is empty.

32:22
Otherwise, what were those people who do receive baptism on behalf of the dead? You know, what about this?

32:29
If the debt are not raised at all, why are the people baptized on their behalf? You know, it just kind of he just kind of picks up something they're doing and says, why are you doing that if?

32:37
This.

32:38
Isn't true. That's all that's always using it for. And then he moves on to the next thing. There's no explanation about what this means, and there's no other verse in the whole Bible that talks about it.

32:46
Yeah.

32:47
So don't stress about it. Let me show you.

32:49
Another one.

32:51
Second example, first Corinthians 11/10. For this reason, a woman ought to have authority over her head because of the angels.

33:01
Is that on your refrigerator? Does somebody have that as a bumper sticker? Is that a tattoo on your arm? No. Nobody's got this verse singled out as the verse of the day. Right? Because it's like, what in the world have we been talking about here as far as the authority on her head that's talking about a head covering for praying and processing. You could read about that in First Corinthians Chapter 11.

33:21
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this juicy little bit, right?

33:25
There.

33:26
Because of the angels.

33:29
What does that mean? Does that mean that if she doesn't wear a hat in church, the angels are gonna get tempted sexually?

33:37
I I don't think so. I mean, maybe I will.

33:40
Or what does it mean that there have to be these authority symbols in our congregation? Because the Angels have their own congregation and and and they have their authority structures and and ours is an imitation of a heavenly get together.

33:54
I don't know.

33:55
No.

33:56
Nobody knows.

33:58
I was in school and my Greek teacher.

34:02
Pointed this out. First of all, he said he has no idea what it means, and neither is anybody else.

34:07
But he listed out like a, you know, three or four theories because he's a good scholar. And then he said he and his wife used this to great effect in parenting.

34:15
Because sometimes a kid will ask their parent.

34:17
Why? Why? Why?

34:21
Why do I have to go to bed on time? You know you're gonna go to.

34:24
School in the morning? Why?

34:27
Well, because if you don't go to school in the morning, then you know the Child Protective Services are gonna come and take you away. Why? I don't know. The the United States set it up that way. Why? Because of the angels.

34:39
And that's how they.

34:40
That's how they.

34:41
Used it in their parenting, so at least there's that practical application. Feel free to steal that, especially if you've got kids in that.

34:50
Category, yeah, but my point is, don't stress if there's something you don't understand, there's stuff that all of us don't understand, and that's OK what really matters is getting the big picture, getting how this relates to what's around it, getting the big thought. OK, let's talk about form.

35:06
The form of ancient letters. This is according to C and Stewart, Gordon Fee and Douglas Stewart in the book how to read the Bible for all it's worth. They say that the ancient letters have these six components to them.

35:21
They start with the authors and then they mention the recipients, and then there's a greeting, and then there's a prayer or Thanksgiving, and then #5 is content and then number six is final greetings and farewell. So when you're reading Ephesians or or Philippians or Colossians or whatever.

35:41
Of the 9.

35:42
They're generally going to follow this form not because this form is inspired by God, but because this is just how letters are written in their world, and so Paul's writing a letter now polls letters I do believe are inspired by God, but they're following the standard form, just like you would follow standard form if you were writing a certain kind of letter in our.

36:03
World.

36:04
OK, So what really matters here? Well, it's the content, right? 90% the lion's share of the letter, whatever percentage is going to be the content of the letter itself, but you always do have this stuff in the beginning of the letters and you have this stuff at the end of the letters and sometimes that stuff is really helpful for figuring things out as far as chronology.

36:25
Location and other interesting stuff that matters for Super Bible nerds, for you probably doesn't matter. But if you want to be a super Bible nerd, then.

36:35
And you're going to be loving those final greetings. I love the part at the end of romance you guys ever see this? You're at the end of romance, and you're it's magnum opus. You know, it's just like.

36:45
Just the best of Paul. It gets to the very end and this dude named Hersheys just pops out of nowhere. Did you see that? He says I tertius. Who wrote this letter salutes you. He gives him, he gives, he takes a little shout out and then just go straight back. He was described. He was the man. You winces the guy who actually wrote the letter.

37:06
Called in and write the letter. Paul spoke the letter and this guy wrote it down.

37:10
And so he.

37:10
Gets some little shout out at the end of Romans.

37:13
All right, as far as these epistles go, they're loaded with theology and practical application. A lot of times these two things are mixed together. Sometimes they're separated like anesthesia. And just three chapters of Theology, 3 chapters of practical application doesn't get better than that.

37:29
But more often than not, he doesn't present his theology in a systematic way. He presents it in a way that makes sense to the people he's talking to and the situations he's addressing in their congregation.

37:44
It takes a little effort to get verses together to develop a a doctrine or practice. Romans and Ephesians come the closest though to being systematic.

37:55
Application.

37:57
For application ask these questions. One what does Paul asking them to do? Look if you can just start with this question, you will avoid 90% of the mistakes that we Christians make when it comes to application. Always we ask the question what does this mean to me?

38:13
OK, don't do that. What did it mean to them? Start there. And then #2, are my particulars similar enough to say this instruction applies to me as well?

38:26
How much of what he said is culturally conditioned? We live in a different kind of society than the Greco-roman period, very different in many ways. So there are some situations that are going to line up. You know, we're still humans. We still have marriage. We still have kids. We still have jobs, a lot of stuff is going to line up.

38:46
Some stuff is not going to line up.

38:49
So you have to ask, is it culturally conditioned and #4? Can I derive a principle that applies in general today, even if your situation doesn't line up exactly, you can derive a principle from his instructions to a a particular situation that then would apply to you today. Let's review.

39:08
Sending long letters in the Roman world was expensive and difficult due to the cost of materials. The skill required to write, and the need to have someone carry and read your letter aloud to the recipients.

39:22
Paul sent the church epistles to Christian churches living in Major Greco Roman cities.

39:29
We know much about the culture, politics and geography of these cities due to surviving literature, archaeological discoveries, and the ability to travel to.

39:39
Them.

39:41
Deciphering the occasion for which Paul wrote is the single most beneficial piece of information to help you understand and epistles overarching purpose.

39:52
As you read through an epistle the first time, try to get the big picture. Then as you read through it again, try to figure out how each section relates to the hole. And that's a pain, but it's gonna it's worth his weight in gold, if you will force yourself to do it.

40:08
It's OK not to understand a particular verse. It's more important to understand the point Paul is making rather than the particulars. And last of all, when applying the Epistles to your life, look for comparable circumstances and general principles.

40:25
Next time we'll look at the pastoral epistles. We'll cover first Timothy, second Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. We just went over 9, so four should be just easy breezy. No big deal, right. And we'll do that as we continue through our class. Read the Bible for yourself.

40:47
Well, that brings this session to an end. What did you think? Come on over to restitutio.org and find Episode 546 how to read the church epistles and leave your feedback there.

41:00
On our last episode, how to read acts, someone asked what's a good version of the Bible to get, and this is a question I get honestly all the time and I've decided to delay talking about Bible translation until later in this class. And that's because with translations it's easy to get technical and before long.

41:20
People get overwhelmed, their eyes glaze over, hearing all the details. They don't have the language skills, so they get frustrated.

41:30
But it's still important so I have reserved that discussion for episode 17 now. Today we're on episode 13, so all I can say is I'll get to it. My short answer is to use a standard translation such as the Inter ESV, ESV, nasb, LSB, or CSB.

41:50
Just to name the more popular ones, these translations prioritize transparency over readability, which I think is safer for all of us, though it requires us to do more work.

42:04
I would say if English is your second language, probably a standard version would be too difficult for you. But if you're a native English speaker, then standard versions are fine. If you have a high school education then you would be able to understand and read on your own. I'm using the inner SV.

42:25
The new revised standard version updated edition of 2021 for this class.

42:30
And you'll just have to wait for episode 17 to find out why. Also, I wanted to mention that I've got a good collection of articles on Restitutio Borg.

42:40
I don't know how many people are familiar with this, but I figured I'd mention it. I write a scholarly paper each year and have done so for more than a decade, and you can get these all for free at restitutio.org under articles. I have a menu there with articles on it, and I've got let's see 12345 on Bible.

43:00
Translate.

43:01
So you can look at my article Bible translation sources and theory, and this one was a bit of an overachievement in the sense of length turned out to be 62 pages long. I know that's just ridiculous, but hey, sometimes I'd like to go in detail. That's definitely my longest article on the site.

43:22
By the.

43:24
Others are 10 or 20 pages long. I've got one on is Matthew 2819 of forgery. I've got one on 1st John, 57. The story behind the comma Johanneum. I have two on translating the spirit. Then I have articles on theology. I have articles on Christian ethics.

43:43
On the Kingdom of God on biblical Unitarianism and on church history, all and there are 23 articles. These are properly footnoted and.

43:55
Helpful if you are looking to go deeper in research. When I teach a class or preach A sermon, I often can't go fully into the details of a particular issue because of the nature of the format. Whereas in in a scholarly paper I am afforded the freedom to dig deeper than any.

44:16
Lecture service. So check them out today if you're interested. If you're a reader, if you're writing your own essay or looking for sources to help you in conversations with others, take a look at those at restitutio.org.

44:29
Work.

44:30
Well, that's it for today. Thanks for tuning in. You can support this ministry at restitutio.org on our website. Thanks to all of you who are doing that. We'll catch you next week. And remember, the truth has nothing to fear.