FREE LESSON

Reading Other People’s Mail: The Challenges of Paul’s Letters 

This free lesson is one in a 27-lecture course of mine, The New Testament: Exploring the Christian Bible, which I did for Paths in Biblical Studies.  You can see the entire lesson and Q&A below and download all accompanying resources below.  If you'd like to take the full course, please click here.

Overview:

Most of the texts in the New Testament aren’t narratives. They are (more or less) letters—private letters, open letters, long letters, short letters. But reading letters imposes a different set of challenges than reading narratives such as the Gospels. How do scholars grapple with this very different genre of literary works? How can we make sense of works that were not originally addressed to us? Is there a way to recover their lost contexts?

Lesson Resources:

If you'd like to take all 27 lessons of my course, please click here.