BIBL 306 — Acts and the Pauline Epistles

BIBL 306 takes up the second movement of the New Testament: the church that grew out of Easter and the apostle whose letters gave that church its theology. Its texts are the Acts of the Apostles and the thirteen letters that bear Paul's name. Acts is the second half of Luke's work, tracing how a gathering of disciples in Jerusalem became a faith proclaimed in the heart of the empire, carried there by the Spirit poured out at Pentecost and by a mission that kept crossing the next boundary. The letters do something different. They are working documents, written into the life of particular congregations facing particular trouble, and they preserve the gospel Paul preached as he was preaching it. Read side by side, Acts supplies the narrative of his life and the letters supply its content. The course is built in that order: Acts first, then the letters gathered by period. Acts earns a full hearing on its own terms as Luke's account of the whole early church, organized by the charge of Acts 1:8 to bear witness in Jerusalem, then through Judea and Samaria, then to the ends of the earth. The letters follow in four groups that track Paul's growing ministry: the early letters (Galatians and the Thessalonian correspondence), the major letters (Romans and 1–2 Corinthians), the prison letters (Philippians, Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians), and the Pastorals (1–2 Timothy and Titus). That grouping carries the chronology and the question of authorship at once, since the letters scholars debate fall along the same seam as the later ones. The skill the course trains is reading an occasional letter, which survives as only one side of a conversation. A five-step method runs through every reading: reconstruct the situation that prompted the letter, follow its argument, listen for its theology, place its genre and moment, and keep three registers distinct (what the text says in its own setting, what scholars observe, and what the church confesses). Paul has long been argued over, and the course keeps its hardest questions open from both sides without ruling: the new perspective and the meaning of justification, the authorship of the contested letters, Israel's place in Romans 9–11, the household codes and the standing of women, Philemon and slavery, law and gospel. Every passage is read in English from the World English Bible inside the scripture viewer, and tapping any word opens a Greek study popover for readers who want the original wording. The course assumes no Greek.