This course approaches the New Testament not as scripture, or a piece of authoritative holy writing, but as a collect...

The Christian faith is based upon a canon of texts considered to be holy scripture. How did this canon come to be? Di...

Knowledge of historical context is crucial to understanding the New Testament. Alexander the Great, in his conquests,...

Of the four kingdoms that arose after Alexander's death, those of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies are most pertinent ...

The accounts of Paul's travels in The Acts of the Apostles and Galatians seem to contradict each other at many points...

The Gospels of the New Testament are not biographies, and, in this class, they are read through a historical critical...

The Gospel of Matthew contains some of the most famous passages that both Christians and non-Christians are familiar ...

We have known of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas from ancient writers, but it was only after the discovery of t...

Luke and Acts, a two-volume work, are structured very carefully by the author to outline the ministry of Jesus and th...

The speech that Stephen gives before his accusers in Acts shows how the author of Luke-Acts used and edited his sourc...

The Gospel of John is a gospel dramatically different from the Synoptic Gospels. It is full of long dialogues, it spe...

The Jesus of the Gospel of John often speaks in riddles so that his dialogues with characters such as Nicodemus appea...

It is obvious that certain narratives in the New Testament contradict each other and cannot be woven into a historica...

The New Testament and other texts provide us with many accounts of the Apostle Paul, some that contradict each other....

1 Corinthian and 2 Corinthians give us several snapshots of the development of the Corinthian church and Paul's relat...

The Apostle Paul's description of the Jewish Law in his letter to the Galatians demotes from being an expression of J...

In ancient times, documents that were falsely attributed to an author, called pseudepigrapha, were a common phenomeno...

Early Christianity presents us with a wide diversity in attitudes towards the law. There were also many different Chr...

In the undisputed Pauline epistles, marriage is seen as a way to extirpate sexual desire - neither as a means for pro...

The Acts of Paul and Thecla has a narrative quite similar to those in ancient Greco-Roman novels: Thecla becomes enam...

There are many ways of interpreting the text, and ancient methods of interpretation may seem bizarre to our modern se...

The principles of interpreting the New Testament in this course assume a historical critical perspective. The histori...

The Apocalypse, or the Revelation of John, shares many of the traits found in apocalyptic literature: it operates in ...

The Apocalypse of John showed an anti-Roman, politically revolutionary perspective. This is in contrast with Paul's w...

The Epistle of Jude can be dated to somewhere during post-apostolic Christianity and before the formation of the Cano...

How did a small group following an apocalyptic prophet in Palestine become Christianity - what is now called a "world...