New Testament History and Literature with Dale B. Martin

This course approaches the New Testament not as scripture, or a piece of authoritative holy writing, but as a collection of historical documents. Ther...

The Christian faith is based upon a canon of texts considered to be holy scripture. How did this canon come to be? Different factors, such as competin...

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

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

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

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

The Gospel of Matthew contains some of the most famous passages that both Christians and non-Christians are familiar with. However, Matthew also prese...

We have known of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas from ancient writers, but it was only after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices that the a...

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

The speech that Stephen gives before his accusers in Acts shows how the author of Luke-Acts used and edited his sources. So, also, does the descriptio...

The Gospel of John is a gospel dramatically different from the Synoptic Gospels. It is full of long dialogues, it speaks of "signs" rather than exorci...

The Jesus of the Gospel of John often speaks in riddles so that his dialogues with characters such as Nicodemus appear confusing, rather than clarifyi...

It is obvious that certain narratives in the New Testament contradict each other and cannot be woven into a historically coherent whole. How, then, do...

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

1 Corinthian and 2 Corinthians give us several snapshots of the development of the Corinthian church and Paul's relationship to it. In 1 Corinthians P...

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

In ancient times, documents that were falsely attributed to an author, called pseudepigrapha, were a common phenomenon. Both the Letters to the Coloss...

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

In the undisputed Pauline epistles, marriage is seen as a way to extirpate sexual desire - neither as a means for procreation nor as the preferred soc...

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

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

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

The Apocalypse, or the Revelation of John, shares many of the traits found in apocalyptic literature: it operates in dualisms--earthly events contrast...

The Apocalypse of John showed an anti-Roman, politically revolutionary perspective. This is in contrast with Paul's writing in Romans 13, which calls...

The Epistle of Jude can be dated to somewhere during post-apostolic Christianity and before the formation of the Canon. It refers to the apostles as r...

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