To learn more about any of the books listed, click on the name of the book, and you will be directed to a discussion of its text.
The Book of Genesis: The word “Genesis” means “beginnings,” and “beginnings” are the subject of this book.
There is the beginning of creation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” With the creation of Adam and Eve, the human race begins. With their disobedience, human sin begins. Cain is the first human being to murder another human being. For the first time, humanity becomes so evil that God decides to destroy what he has made. With Noah, there is the first salvation and later the first sacrifice, and God makes the first decision never to destroy humanity again. But we don’t learn. We try to build a tower that reaches to the heavens, and God has to disperse us throughout the earth.
There is a new beginning with Abraham. God calls him to be the father of a people that will bless, instead of curse, all the peoples. A second “patriarch” is called, Isaac, then a third, Jacob. This time, through human evil, the people of Israel are brought to Egypt, where through the intervention of God, they are saved from drought and famine. There seems to be a new beginning for Israel in the person of Joseph.
We have to note that every person we read about in Genesis is a flawed human being. Adam and Eve disobey God’s one command. Cain kills his brother. (Well, perhaps Enoch [5:21-24] is an exception; he “walked with God,” and then God took him.) All the other people sin and have to be destroyed in the flood. Even Noah, whom God saved from the flood, became drunk when it was over and shamelessly revealed himself to his sons. Abraham tried to kill his son, Isaac, thinking that God wanted him to do it. Isaac preferred one son over another. Jacob was a perpetual deceiver. The brothers of Joseph sold him into slavery. Even Joseph, for all his good qualities, was arrogant and conceited and insulted his family with his dreams. No wonder Reformers like John Calvin, in reading the book of Genesis, began to talk about “original sin,” the sin at the origin of things that rolled through the generations and infected everything it touched.
Perhaps Joseph is the one “role model” in the book of Genesis. His conceit and arrogance is overcome by what he has suffered, and he becomes the model of good governance for later Israel to follow. He too is the one who recognizes that “humanity seeks to do evil, but God seeks to do good” (50:20), and this is certainly a theme that Genesis develops. In the midst of all his human folly and tragedy, God seeks to being good from the evil.
Such a God. God is the creating one, the caring one, the covenanting one, the chastising one, the one who constantly brings good out of human evil. God is the one who is the center of the story of Genesis; we do not read Genesis well if we do not become better acquainted with this amazing God. This may be the “blessing” that God keeps promising people in Genesis, the “blessing” of becoming acquainted with this astonishing God.
God is also the tragic figure in the book of Genesis. God keeps trying to “get it right.” Humanity keeps “getting it wrong.” What is God to do? God will keep trying until God does “get it right” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The book of Genesis finally finds it fulfillment in the person of the Christ.
This book is not all of one piece. Many generations, many voices contributed to it. We can identify at least three of these.
One is called by the letter “E.” “E” represents the oldest strand of Genesis. These stories and accounts call God “el” (from which the name E derives), and that is usually translated as simply “God.” When we see that generic name, we are probably reading material that comes from E. E also emphasizes that the People of God are always being tested. Abraham was “tested” when he was about to sacrifice Isaac, and that story probably comes from E. Joseph was “tested” by the wife of Potiphar when he was brought to Egypt, and that part of the story also comes from E. E was put into its form, most likely, during the days after the Exodus from Egypt when Israel was a confederation of tribes in Canaan and in the days before David became king.
The second strand of material is called “J.” This stands for the name of God “Jehovah,” that name that combined “Yahweh” and “Adonai.” “Yahweh” was the name the unknown God gave to reveal himself to Moses, and it means “I AM,” or “I am about to do what I decide to do.” “Adonai” was the name for the one who is Lord of the people. But instead of saying either word (each was too sacred, too awesome to be spoken), the two were joined together in the one word “Jehovah,” the first letter of which became the name by which these cycles of stories were written.
J also stands for Judah, the tribe from which David and Solomon came and a leading tribe in the establishment of the kingdom of Israel and later Judah. This indicates the time of writing of the J material: it comes from the days when David and Solomon were kings over the people.
Much, perhaps most, of the material in Genesis comes to us from J. The account of Adam and Eve is from J. Most of the stories of the patriarchs are from J. As much as we can recover it from the midst of Genesis, it is a remarkable writing. Its accounts continue through Exodus, through some of Leviticus and Numbers, and on into Joshua, Judges, the Samuels and the Kings.
The third set of writings come from a source called “P.” These are the writings that tell us about matters that were important to the priests of Israel. By the time the stories were written down, the leading priestly family in Israel was that of Zadok, who was high priest in Jerusalem when David conquered that city. The priestly family had their own concerns, and they incorporated them into Genesis. They were concerned about keeping the sabbath, so in their story of creation, they picture the climax of that story as that of God keeping the sabbath. They were concerned about sacrifice, so they pictured Noah performing the first sacrifice as he alights from the ark. They were concerned about who could rightly claim the title of priest, an hereditary title, so they introduced many genealogies into the story.
We are indebted to them for two things above all. The account of creation given in Genesis One comes from them, and all of us are enriched by their telling of their majestic story of God creating the heavens and the earth. They were also the ones who edited Genesis into its final form. They did this while the people of Judah were in exile in Babylon.
So Genesis comes to us from many times and through many voices. Its story were first written down in the years between 1150 and 1000 BC, though many of the stories that are told go back to the years 2000 to 1500 BC. The stories were brought up to date during the time of David and Solomon, and that is roughly 1000 to 925 BC. There were put into their final form in the years from 580 to 540 BC, while the people were exiled in Babylon.
The stories in Genesis five through eleven come from an earlier time than any of the above. Except for the story of Noah, told by all three writers, they are mostly genealogies, which means they were the possession of the priests as they tried to trace their lineage as far into the past as it was possible to go. They could best be called “pre-histories,” accounts reaching back to a time before Abraham, and they are the least reliable when we are looking for historical and verifiable facts.
Yet the amazing thing about Genesis is that its whole is greater than its parts. It is good to know that the stories come from times that we can identify, for that helps us in our interpretation of them. It is good to know the interests and concerns that caused E to write, and J, and P. But when we know of this, we still read the book as a whole without breaking it down into its parts. The whole of it tells how God deals with humanity in the persons of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and Joseph and his brothers. When we read this book over and again, we come to know better and better how God deals with us yet today.
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The Book of Exodus: The story of the book of Exodus is the account of God bringing the people out of slavery in Egypt. The word “exodus” means precisely that. It is “ex,” “out of” and “odos,” road. Exodus is “the road out.” To lead the people out of Egypt, God chose the man Moses, and Moses’ became God’s agent of delivery.
The first fourteen and one-half chapters of Exodus tell of Hebrews in Egypt and of God’s attempts through Moses to get them out of the land of their slavery. From 15:22 to the end of chapter eighteen, we trace the movement of the tribes as they fled through the wilderness from Egypt to the mountain of God. 19:1-20:21 tell of the establishment of the covenant between God and God’s people; this is continued in 24:1-11. In 20:22-23:33 there is a code of ancient law to which scholars have given the name “The Book of the Covenant.” The remainder of the Book of Exodus, 24:12-40:38,is largely concerned with matters of Israelite worship.
But the main story in Exodus is the story of God and Moses, and to that story we turn.
Moses lived during the period when the people of Israel were enslaved in Egypt. These tribes, who traced their lineage to Jacob, son of Isaac son of Abraham, had come into Egypt during a time of famine some generations earlier. Having flourished while Joseph, Jacob's son, was prime minister of Egypt, their position had deteriorated steadily until under Ramses II, whose long reign covered the years 1290 to 1224 BC, they had become mere slaves of the powerful Pharaoh.
One of Ramses' first acts when he came to the throne was to relocate his capital to a site in the Nile delta. He chose this location partly because his family had had long associations with this territory but primarily because it commanded the entrance to both Egypt and Canaan. Here he could defend his country against hostile incursions from the east, and from here he could send out his own armies to re-establish Egyptian control over Canaan and the lands beyond. Ramses -- one of Egypt's abler rulers and certainly its most vain; he placed statues depicting his royal presence at every crucial point throughout Egypt, numbers of which are standing still today in Cairo, Luxor and Abu Simbul -- used slaves to build his cities, and since the alien Israelites were already living in nearby Goshen, they were incorporated into the slave-gangs engaged in Ramses' construction projects.
In or near this newly-built capital city, at some undated time in the reign of Ramses, Moses was born. His mother was not able to keep the child, however; the Israelite population was increasing so rapidly that the Pharaoh had ordered all male Israelite babies to be exterminated at birth. His mother placed the infant in a rush basket, sealed it tight with clay and tar, and hid him among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. He was rescued from the river by an Egyptian princess, who reared him in the court of Pharaoh himself. Moses, however, continued to think of himself as an Israelite; and when as a young man he saw an Egyptian overseer mistreating Hebrew slaves, he struck out at the overseer and killed him. The deed became known, and Moses was forced to leave Egypt. He fled into the nearby wilderness where he lived with a tribe of Kenites, a clan who may have considered Cain to be their founder.
In his lifetime, Moses was to make three original contributions to the faiths of Judaism and Christianity. The first came while he was in exile among the Kenites. While there he received a new understanding of the divine name of God.
It happened when Moses was in the field tending sheep. His attention was drawn to a bush that appeared to be burning but was not consumed by the fire. In the Old Testament, fire was frequently a symbol for some revelation of God, and Moses immediately recognized it as such. He stood before the bush and received directions for the mission he was about to perform for God and God's people. Moses at once wanted to know whether his call was from God so he asked a question common to Egypt in that day; among no other people of antiquity was the search for a hidden divine name as intense as it was among the Egyptians. Moses said to God, "What is your name?" God replied in an enigmatic manner: "I am who I am. Tell them, I am has sent you."
In the Old Testament this strange phrase, "I am who I am," is the self-designation of God. By so naming himself, God was giving an insight into his character: "I will do what I will do." In other words, God controls his own destiny; he is the one who can say of himself, "I will put into practice the plans I conceive." Can any other than God say this? No human is able to make this assertion; no one has such complete control over his own life as to support this claim. Each is always bounded by other people, other events, by his own place, his own personality, by the conditions of the time in which he lives; these place limits upon all human actions. But God suffers from no such limitations, and he is able to say, "I will do what I will do and bring into being what I intend."
Moses' second contribution was his demonstration of God as a deliverer. With Moses as his agent, God's character as deliverer was clearly seen in Israel's exodus from Egypt.
The impact of the exodus can be described in a few words. One day the people of Israel were enslaved in Egypt struggling to build the cities of Ramses under the direction of their Egyptian taskmasters. A few days later, the Israelites were in the desert, free to worship their God and to follow God's directions. They said, "God is our deliverer; God has delivered us from slavery in Egypt."
The delivery was dramatic. The Pharaoh of the time, probably one of the sons of Ramses and therefore a childhood friend of Moses, had not wanted to let this people go. Their labor as slaves was too valuable to the Egyptians to be surrendered voluntarily. At Moses' insistence, however, and under the influences of deadly plagues that engulfed Egypt one after another, Pharaoh was persuaded to send the Israelites into the wilderness. When they were about to leave, Pharaoh changed his mind and sent his troops and chariots to bring them back. As the Israelites drew near to the edge of the water, they were able to pass unharmed through the sea. By the time the Egyptians and their chariots had entered upon the same territory, the winds had blown back the waves, and the horses and their riders were drowned. These covering waters created a barrier between Egyptians and Israelites, and the Egyptians could no longer exercise sovereignty over Israel. Instead, God was their sovereign. God only was the one to whom they had to answer for their own lives.
The precise nature of this deliverance is difficult to describe. The difficulty arose because the story was told over and over again in Israelite circles, and as the years passed there was an increasing tendency to stress the miraculous aspect of it. Such an interpretation need not be given it and may not have been in the earliest accounts. Plagues of frogs, gnats and flies are common occurrences in the Nile Delta, and hail, locusts, and darkness are natural phenomena that recur with regularity in the region. Even the deliverance at the edge of the water may have been the result of natural phenomena. It may have been only a small portion of the Sea that opened to Moses and the Hebrews, and a wind may have blown the water back for a time. Nevertheless, while from our vantage point we may be able to give a natural meaning to each of the events, this is not the interpretation that Moses and the people of Israel gave to them. Scripture stresses these things: that there was a deliverance, that God was the deliverer, and that in his act of deliverance God created for himself a people of God. In Moses' second contribution he became the agent through whom the true character of God was made known, namely, that God is the one who delivers his people from those things to which they are in bondage.
Moses' third major contribution to our faith involved the covenant God made through him with Israel.
Moses brought his usual dramatic flair to this event. He led the liberated people to the base of Mount Sinai where he had them prepare themselves for three days. On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightning, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke and the whole mountain quaked. As the sound of the trumpet grew louder, Moses spoke and God answered him in thunder.
The drama of the event may obscure the most important occurrence of that day. Here Moses took a form of organization of the political life of his time and applied it to the relationship between God and God’s people. This application was unique. With the exception of the acts of Jesus himself, it is the most important contribution ever made in the history of religions to describe the dealings God has with mankind. At Mount Sinai Moses bound Israel in a covenant- treaty with God.
This suzerainty treaty, which Moses employed, was operative in the Mideast at this time and within Moses' lifetime had been introduced into Egyptian affairs. The suzerain, or sovereign, who enacted the treaty was no mere ordinary king but a monarch who claimed authority over other kings. Suzerainty treaties were the means by which the reigning king reached out to bring smaller and weaker nations under his control and protection. These covenants contained the following five parts:
A preamble that identified the king who gave the treaty.
A prologue which gave a detailed presentation of the historical relation between the great king and his vassal and which always stressed the benevolence of the great king toward the vassal.
Stipulations of the covenant. Chief among them was the prohibition against the vassal having relationships with any other king. So long, however, as the vassal did not recognize any king above the great king, he was given reasonable freedom in the conduct of the internal affairs of his own kingdom.
Sealing the covenant: each contained a statement that the document should be read publicly at stated intervals, to remind the vassal king and his people of their relationship to the great king.
Blessings and curses: those who kept the covenant were blessed and those who broke it were to be severely punished.
All five parts of the suzerainty treaty are present in the agreement between God and his people, as delivered by Moses. When God spoke from the mountain, he said to the people, "I am the lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me." In this God identified himself as the great king who gave the covenant, and he described his relations with Israel, namely, that he was the God who brought them from slavery in Egypt. Then, in the familiar words of the Ten Commandments, Israel was given the stipulations by which the people were to live. Later portions of the Book of Exodus completed the presentation: blessings and curses were given for those who kept the covenant and for those who broke it, and a statement was added that the covenant was to be read publicly at stated intervals. This action of Moses was unique. No other people of that time interpreted their national life so completely in terms of a solemn covenant with a single divine sovereign as did Israel under Moses.
He was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities.
He poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors,
yet he bore the sins of many
and made intercession for the transgressors.
The impact of Moses, the pioneering person, was not confined to these chapters in Exodus, however. It continued to emerge throughout the rest of Scripture. When Elijah challenged King Ahab, the prophet returned to the mountain of God, where formerly Moses had stood, to receive inspiration from both God and his spokesman. In the time of reform under King Josiah, when Judah erased all pagan influences from her life and turned anew to the God of Israel, Moses was the guide and inspiration for these reforms. The prophet Isaiah of Babylon, in the exile of Judah, invoked again the divine name that had sounded under Moses, and the message of God's deliverance was powerfully proclaimed once more. There was a later time under Nehemiah when, in the name of Moses, the people were called to renew their allegiance to God as Moses in the wilderness had called them to loyalty to Yahweh. In the New Testament as well, the name of Moses is mentioned. Most significantly it came in the transfiguration of Jesus. Jesus had gone up to a high mount similar in importance to the mountain of Sinai, and in the presence of his disciples he had been transfigured. Two figures out of the past appeared and conversed with Jesus; one of them was Moses. The influence of Moses began in his own lifetime and extended into the time of Jesus Christ himself, who was to take each of Moses' contributions to religion and in Jesus' unique way make them central in the life of Jesus' own unique people.
As in the Book of Genesis, many sources flowed into the construction of this book. E had a hand in it, and so did J. D, the so-called “Deuteronomic Source,” did some of the editing of the book. The “Deuteronomists” were a reform movement in Judah which began with the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem and continued through the time of Josiah into the period of exile. They tried to make adherence to the law of Moses the chief feature of the religion of Judah, and we can trace their hand as they edited portions of Exodus. The Priestly source, P, played a large part in the construction of this book. The detailed instructions about Passover (11:9-12:20 and following) come from them, as do the closing chapters of Exodus, 24 through 40. (There are some accounts in these closing chapters that can be attributed to JE, but most of the material comes from the Priestly writers.)
“The Book of the Covenant, chapters 21 through 23, is a unique document in the Old Testament. As it stands now, this code is attached to the Ten Commandments and is a further attempt to explicate the meaning of being a tribal unit in the Israelite confederacy. In its present form, however, this code could not have been given by Moses in the desert since most of its provisions were irrelevant to desert living. The code regulated slavery, livestock and property; outlined penalties for various types of assault and murder; and contained a lengthy section about personal morality, including sexual conduct, treatment of widows and orphans, lying, and the rights of the oppressed. It concluded with laws about the sabbath and the three major feasts to be observed annually. This law was designed not for a desert people but for a more settled community whose life was based on agriculture.
There is no discernible principle of systematic organization in the code, but this very fact gives important information on the way the code was originally complied. A single precept was given to cover a general type of crime, but as the cases before the tribal elders became more involved, their rulings became more sophisticated. The process can be seen in the series of laws concerning murder: "Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death: but if he did not lie in wait for him but God let him fall into his hands, then he may flee for safety to the approved places: but if he willfully attacks another to kill him treacherously, you may take him even from my alter, so that he may die." The first ruling was clear: a man who kills another man is executed for his crime. Then came a second and more complicated case: the man who killed his neighbor did not do so with intent but the murder resulted from a quarrel between them: what of him? The elders ruled that he may flee to the sacred altar of a designated shrine in a city of refuge and remain there free from penalty. A third case then arose: suppose the killer started the quarrel purposely to goad his enemy into attack and in the fracas kills him, can he escape the penalty of murder? After due deliberation the elders made another ruling and it too took on the force of precedent: such a man may even be snatched from the sacred altar for he must surely die for his deed. The Covenant Code was set to regulate the common life of one Israelite tribe and it demonstrated the increasing sophistication with which they did so as their life together became more intricate.
Portions of this Covenant Code were not original to this tribe either; they borrowed or amended laws that were part of the basic legal system of Mesopotamia at a time even before Abraham left his homeland of Ur.
As nearly as we can reconstruct the situation, each clan or tribe in ancient Sumeria had a code of laws to which it adhered. One very detailed code, recently discovered, came from the ancient city-state of Eshnunna, a kingdom that flourished for a century or more around the year 2000 B.C. This code contained precepts that have entered directly into the Covenant Code: like Israel and all ancient tribes, Eshnunna had trouble with oxen and they set up a series of laws to deal with the owner of an ox who gored a person or another ox. The Covenant Code borrowed its rules about oxen and added others to them. The Code of Eshnunna was soon superseded in Mesopotamia by the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi, who ruled from 1728 to 1686 B.C. and had through his conquests become king over a large and diverse population, sensed the need for a single standard of law to govern the peoples in his extensive kingdom and early in his reign he promulgated such a standard. The laws were not original to him; most of the individual precepts were borrowed from one or another of the codes used in important cities in his territory. Having only one code of laws to cover matters of marriage, slavery and debt regularized relationships between the various populations of Hammurabi's empire so that justice could be exercised in every part of the kingdom in a more even-handed way.
We wish we could trace the exact path this Covenant Code traveled from Mesopotamia to Canaan until it was set beside the Ten Commandments in Exodus but our knowledge has so many gaps in it that this is presently impossible. These surmises do seem defensible, however. This set of precepts came with one of the clans of Israel as they migrated from Mesopotamia. When the group settled in Canaan, additions were made to the code as the elders were forced to make new rulings to cover the new situations confronting the people. Gradually, the excellence of this code as a standard of judgment for civil and religious affairs was recognized by more than one tribe; or perhaps this tribe was stronger than its neighbors and forced its standards upon others. When the Book of Exodus was put into the form in which we now have it, this code was inserted as one that demonstrated what it meant for a people to organize their legal affairs in a way accountable to Yahweh and also to fulfill the stipulations of the covenant God had made with them.
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The Book of Psalms is the songbook of the Jerusalem temple. This temple was first built in Jerusalem in the reign of King Solomon, approximately 950 BC. It was destroyed by the Babylonian armies in about 586 BC, when a large portion of the people of the small Kingdom of Judah were taken into exile in the city of Babylon. The temple was rebuilt in the time of Nehemiah and Ezra, beginning about 540 BC. It was remodeled in a major way by King Herod who ruled from 40 BC to 4BC; this is the same Herod who is reputed to have killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem in an attempt to kill Jesus. The work was scarcely completed when the Roman armies laid siege to the Holy City and burned the temple to the ground in 70 AD. It has never been rebuilt.
Like any hymn book, the hymns in the Book of Psalms come from a wide range of places and times. The earliest work in developing the psalter took place in the time of David and Solomon. In the present book Psalms 3 through 41 are credited to David. The best guess is that these were written for or collected by priests in charge of the worship of Solomon's temple and were used in the rituals there. This means that all of them were composed prior to 925 B.C.
Three additional collections appear in the psalter. Psalms 42 through 49 are credited to someone named Korah, Psalms 73 through 83 are ascribed to Asaph, and Psalms 51 through 72 are again listed as coming from David.
Korah and Asaph are identifiable from the Book of Chronicles. 2 Chronicles 20:19 indicates that guilds of musicians performed services in the temple and that these guilds most likely took their names from their founders or leaders. This offers an additional insight into the worship of the temple. Guilds of musicians participated in that worship; they brought their own hymn books and musical compositions with them, and these found a place in the official hymn book of the temple.
Other identifiable collections have made their way into the present psalter. Psalms 84 through 89 are again credited to the guilds of Korah and Asaph, with one coming from Ethan the Ezrahite. Psalms 93 through 135 and 146 through 150 are united by their frequent use of the phrase "Hallelujah," which simply means "Praise Yahweh."
Psalms 120 through 134 are called “Songs of Ascent.” They were sung by pilgrims as they made their way from their homes in Judah and Israel to the temple of Jerusalem, and they express the thoughts and feelings of the people as they approached the holy throne of God in the holy city. These psalms give us insight into the way the people of Israel and Judah thought about their worship.
At some time during the period under consideration this psalm book was put into its present form. It was structured into five books, each of which has an introduction and a concluding doxology, and its structure looks like this:
Book One: Psalms 2-41
Psalms 3 through 41 were from the original Davidic collection; Psalm 2 was added as an introduction to this collection and 41:13 was used as a concluding doxology.
Book Two: Psalms 42-72
This is the first collection of the hymns of Korah and the second collection of the hymns of David, with 72:18-19 as the doxology.
Book Three: Psalms 73-89
The Asaph collection, with some miscellaneous songs, was concluded with a doxology in 89:52.
Book Four: Psalms 90-106
A psalm that is credited to Moses, Psalm 90, was incorporated with psalms of Yahweh's kingship, and the Hallelujah psalms, especially 106:48, provided the doxology.
Book Five: Psalms 107-150
All other psalms were included in this final book to complete the pattern of five (e.g., five books of the law, five major prophets) so beloved by Hebrew writers.
Psalm 150 was used as the doxology to the completed psalter and Psalm 1 became the introduction to the book. When these were in place sometime around 300 BC, the psalter had taken on the form it still retains today.
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The Gospel of Matthew: In our New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew comes before the Gospel of Mark. In terms of the time of their writing, the Gospel of Matthew most likely follows the Gospel of Mark.
At first glance the two Gospels appear to be closely related to the other one, and in many respects that impression is accurate. Matthew took the basic outline that Mark gave to a Gospel and employed it in his own book. He expanded upon it, however, so much so that scholars formerly thought that Mark was an abridgement of Matthew rather than an independent writing. The deeper one penetrates into Matthew, however, the clearer it is that this Gospel had themes that were indigenous to it.
The primary theme of the book was its emphasis upon righteousness. This can be defined as "getting on right terms with God, neighbor, self, and the world around through Jesus Christ." The theme was set out in the scene of the baptism. John the Baptizer wanted to know why Jesus had come to him to be baptized and Jesus replied, "In order to fulfill all righteousness." (Matthew 3:15) The theme came to high expression in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount: "Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness.' (Matthew 6:33) The last parable of Jesus given in the Gospel brought it to a fitting conclusion: the king, seated on his throne, was about to make his judgments on the validity of human lives and the judgments were made solely on the basis of whether the person had acted righteously: "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' (Matthew 25:35-36) The righteous person is the one who does these things.
There seems also to be an internal organization in this Gospel that is somewhat akin to the five books of the Law of Moses. It is extremely dangerous to try to impress on these ancient writings some scheme of our own for understanding them, and I do so with reluctance; yet scholars have isolated five major sections, which they call "books,' inside this one book:
The Book of Discipleship chapters 3 through 7
The Book of Apostleship chapters 8 through 10
The Book of the Mystery chapters 11 through 13
The Book of the Church chapters 14 through 18
The Book of the Future chapters 19 through 25
Each section began with narrative material and ended with teaching material; since this teaching material was quite different and much more extensive than that of Mark's Gospel, we are indebted to Matthew for having preserved it.
To the body of this text two things were added: the passion story at the end, followed by its accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, and a prologue at the beginning.
The passion narrative has much in common with the similar narratives found in Mark and Luke. It begins with the announcement that the Passover is coming, and the Son of Humannkind will be handed over to be crucified. (26:2) It tells of the conspiracy to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; but the conspirators, chief priests and elders of the people, want to wait until the festival is over to carry out their plot. At Bethany Jesus is anointed by an unnamed woman; at this moment he becomes in fact what he had hinted at before, the "Messiah," the anointed one. After the anointing, Judas goes to the chief priests and betrays Jesus.
This is quickly followed by the the last supper of Jesus and his disciples; Jesus praying in Gethsemane; his arrest; the hearing before Caiaphas, the chief priest of the Jewish people; the three-fold denial of Peter; the repenting on the part of Judas; Jesus' trial before Pilate; the attempt by Pilate to release Jesus; that charge, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews," the sentencing, and the crucifixion.
On the cross, Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" With a loud breath he breathed his last. At that moment, says Matthew, the curtain of the temple was torn in two. And the centurion before the cross gave the first confession to come from a gentile, a Roman: "Truly this man was Son of God." Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple, took Jesus' body from the cross and placed it in his own new tomb. Because Jesus had said he might rise again, the Pharisees requested that Pilate place a guard over the tomb, which he did.
But the women who had witnessed his burial went to the tomb before dawn and were met by an angel. He invited them to see the place where Jesus was laid. The women were told to tell the disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead and was going before them to Galilee. Then Jesus met them and reinforced the message: "Tell my brothers to go to Galilee. There they will see me."
The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. There Jesus delivered what we know as the Great Commission: Go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations. Baptize them and teach them. And I will be with you to the end of the age.
This story of the crucifixion and resurrection has much in common with the stories told in other gospels. But Matthew's prologue was unique to him. This prologue -- our Christmas story -- was constructed upon Old Testament passages that Matthew found pertinent to Jesus. In his selection of text and event the author of this Gospel went further than Mark had in pointing out how Jesus had recapitulated in his own person the Old Testament experience.
Matthew began with a genealogy tracing Jesus' lineage back to Abraham and he neatly schematized it as fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen generations from David to the deportation into Babylon, and fourteen generations from then until the time of Christ. I have not given much attention to the numerology of the Bible, but it is important in this instance. 'Fourteen' is 'twice seven" and "seven' is the perfect number, Its components being 'three," the number for heaven, and 'four," the number for earth; seven is the perfection of everything in heaven and on earth and twice seven is infinitely better than that -- how neat Matthew's scheme!
In the stories of Jesus' birth, he again worked out a five- fold pattern using five Old Testament passages as the basis of his narrative: he told how Jesus was born of a virgin; had his nativity in the favored city of Bethlehem, the home of David; was taken into Egypt as an infant so that God may be said to have drawn his son from Egypt; fulfilled the prophecy of the wailing and loud lamentation of Judah as the infants of Bethlehem were slain by Herod; went to Nazareth that he might be called a Nazarene. It appears that Matthew did indeed draw upon some five-fold patterns of Old Testament Scriptures to interpret the coming of Jesus Christ.
This Gospel also exhibits a concern with problems of the organization of the church and Its congregations. In chapters 14 through 18 especially but with hints of it elsewhere, Matthew turned to questions about worship, theology, ethics, and leadership which did not appear in Mark. This interest parallels a similar movement within the Judaism of Matthew's time. When the war over Jerusalem between Zealots and Romans ended with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, rabbinic leaders settled near the town of Jamnia (called in Hebrew 'Yavneh') on the Mediterranean coast and began to organize into meaningful patterns the oral tradition of Judaism and to codify the Jewish laws and Scriptures. Matthew showed a similar interest arising from a similar situation and time, and this would indicate that this writer and his congregation were in contact with the Jewish movements of the day.
This information has led scholars to suppose that Matthew was writing his Gospel for a Christian congregation composed largely of Jewish people and was attempting to interpret Christ to people who were deeply nurtured in the Old Testament and the five books of the Law. Since this gospel showed a knowledge of the catastrophe that befell the Holy City in A.D. 70 and indicated much interest in the organizational problems faced by the Christian churches after that event, I believe this book was composed in the late seventies or early eighties of the first century of the Christian era.
I also believe that it was written in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and directed to the Christian community that was developing in that city. Matthew's Gospel reflected the condition of the church there. The struggle over the introduction of the Christian faith into Alexandria had centered in the extensive synagogue system already existing in that city. To win the battle in the synagogues, the Christians had to establish the supremacy of Jesus over Moses; had to work out the relationship between Gospel and Torah; had to affirm the teaching ministry of Jesus in this city in which the world's first university and the intellectual tradition that it represented played such a significant role; and had to demonstrate the authenticity of Jesus' resurrection. Organizational questions had to be confronted in those synagogues which had been converted from Jewish to Christian orientation. The history of the Jewish people in Egypt also had to be considered; Egypt was both the place of Jewish oppression under the ancient Pharaohs and of refuge for Jews during the Maccabean times and later, and this gospel chose to affirm the latter part of this history (Jesus and his family found refuge in Egypt, Matthew 2:13- 15) rather than the former. All this had to be played out against the foreground of the bitter struggle in the Jewish sector of Alexandria during the time of the Jewish revolt in Judea and Galilee, when Jew fought Jew over the question of actively participating with their homeland brethren in this struggle and when Roman power in Alexandria brutally repressed those who supported the Jewish rebels. Matthew's Gospel accurately reflects each and all of these questions and conflicts.
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The Gospel of John, probably the most beloved of all the New Testament writings, is also the one that most clearly states its purpose: "This is written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." (John 20:31) The declaration is couched in simple words of one and two syllables. Yet this Gospel is the most complex of all the Gospels, both in its theological understanding and in its form and organization. As we explore the book, it is important to keep this single purpose in mind: through this book the reader will come to comprehend the uniqueness of the activity of God in Jesus Christ and, as we do, we will share in the life which God shared with the Son, Jesus.
In broad outline, John’s Gospel has a prologue; a series of events, dialogues, and monologues that describe not only Jesus’ ministry but the purposes behind it; a scene at the end of an event, dialogue, monologue centered around the Lord’s Supper, concluding with Jesus’ prayer; and then the epilogue of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
John’s Gospel begins with the magnificent prologue that relates the ministry of Jesus to the moment of creation (1:1-18): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” In this prologue John introduced a number of themes he later picked up in his Gospel: Jesus as light and life, grace and truth; his relationship to John the Baptizer; his coming to his own and his own not receiving him. The section was cast into poetic, almost hymnic, form and it has absolutely mesmerized scholars. Was it a Christian hymn that John used to introduce his work? Or a pre-Christian poem to the creating word of God, to which John added his own theology? Was it a poem or hymn that John himself wrote, or which was used in his community for worship of Christ? Of whatever source, it is one of the best known and loved pieces of writing of the New Testament and serves as a fitting introduction to Johannine theology.
In the next section (1:19-51), titles are given to Jesus that relate him to the current life of the Jewish people. Jesus is called the lamb of God, the King of Israel, the Messiah, the true Israelite, the Son of God.
In chapters two through twelve, Jesus’ ministry alternates between Judea and Galilee. He is in Galilee for the wedding in Cana where he turns water into wine. He is in Jerusalem when he cleanses the temple and when Nicodemus comes to him. He withdrew to Galilee when the Pharisees heard that he was making and baptizing more disciples even than John the Baptist was. He returned to Jerusalem for a feast, when he healed the man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. He went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, where he fed the multitude. He went up to Jerusalem for another festival, even though he had been warned that he might be killed, and there he preached in the Temple. He withdrew across the Jordan River, until he learned that his friend Lazarus was dead, and then he came to Bethany, which was on the other side of the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem. He raised Lazarus from the dead. He went out into the wilderness, to the village of Ephraim, until the fateful Passover that would result in his cross, at which point he returned to the Holy City. The Gospel of Mark and the others spoke of a months'-long ministry in Galilee and weeks’-long one in Judea; whereas in John much of Jesus' ministry was conducted in and around Jerusalem, and he gave hints only of the ministry in Galilee. In a strange way the two sets of Gospels complement each other, and both are needed to portray the completeness of Jesus' work: Matthew, Mark, and Luke reported what Jesus did in Galilee, and the Gospel of John related his ministry in Judea.
John’s way of telling about Jesus’ ministry is also different from the manner it is described in Mark and the other gospels. John would begin with a narrative, a story similar to one told in the other Gospels. To explain the meaning of the narrative, there would follow a dialogue which brought out some of the major themes of the narrative. At some indiscernible point the dialogue would cease and a monologue by Jesus would grow out of it. At least seven sections built on this model -- more, if we count the narratives within narratives -- were incorporated into the first twelve chapters of the Gospel of John.
Chapters thirteen through seventeen play an important part in John’s Gospel. These chapters begin with an account of the supper but instead of emphasizing the distribution of the bread and cup, John centered the supper around the matter of foot washing. Following the foot washing, Jesus expounded on the meaning of his passion. His discourse is delivered with such solemnity that we have the feeling that he has already been crucified and raised from the dead, to be with and converse with his disciples forever. True greatness is one of the subjects of the talk. So are troubled hearts, and revelation of God, and keeping Jesus’ commandments, and the coming of the Spirit, the Counselor, and abiding in Jesus, and the promise that they will see him soon. The climax of the discourse is his prayer, which begins with the words, “This is life eternal, to know God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent,” and ends with Jesus’ promise to be with his own forever.
From there Jesus went forth to die. John’s Gospel details his crucifixion, and his resurrection, and we are left to ponder about this marvelous one in whom the life and love of God was perfectly revealed. (These subjects will be discussed in detail in the “Theological Themes,” outlined below.)
Who was the original audience for this Gospel? We do not know for certain, but my own hypothesis is that it was written for a Jewish- Greek congregation in the Diaspora, the cities of the Roman Empire where synagogues of Jewish people had been established. This would help explain the use of both Jewish and Gentile terminology in describing the meaning of Jesus; the key position given in the Gospel to Diaspora-Greeks whose coming to Jesus precipitated his death; the way the Gospel conspicuously translated Hebrew words into Greek; and why the writer's knowledge of Jerusalem and its environs seems to have been that of a tourist rather than a resident. In one of the cities of the ancient world there was a Christian community composed of Jews and Greeks out of whose life and thought this Gospel was written.
The chief source for the unique information of this Gospel appears to be the one called in the Gospel "the Beloved disciple, the disciple whom Jesus loved." He was a shadowy figure who attended the last meal, received the mother of Jesus as his legacy and care, accompanied Peter to the grave and made the proper interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus. He appeared to have been a commanding figure with access to important persons and places in Jerusalem, which would give him credibility as a source of the Jerusalem material in this Gospel.
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Paul's Letter to the Romans has consistently proved itself to be one of the most important writings in the New Testament. When Augustine wrote his "Confessions" in the fifth century, it was the Letter to the Romans that provided much of the framework for that. When Luther began his reformation of the Christian faith, it was the Letter to the Romans that offered him his greatest theological insights. When Karl Barth, in the twentieth century, initiated a revolution in theological thinking in the Christian faith, he did so by writing "A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans." This long and complex writing by Paul has a way of sparking faith in other people that is unparalleled by other scriptural books.
The letter was probably written sometime in the early months of 57 AD, just as Paul was about to leave Corinth. Paul had heard of trouble that had arisen in the Christian congregations of Rome. He wrote his letter in the hope that by this letter he could help Christian friends resolve the issues that confronted them.
The Christian church at Rome, at the time Paul wrote his letter to them, was caught in a remarkably complicated situation. According to my investigations, the first congregations in Rome had been started by Jews who had become Christian in Jerusalem and who had exported their faith to other Jewish-speaking synagogues throughout the Empire. This Jewish-Christian group in Rome read their Scriptures in Hebrew, they practiced circumcision and the food laws, they kept themselves separate from anyone who did not, including fellows Christians, and they believed that when Jesus ascended into heaven, God had made him the messiah; up until then, he had been "messiah-elect." The story of their conversion is told in the second chapter of Acts, what we call "the story of Pentecost."
But Rome was the kind of place, like London and New York today, to which peoples from all over the world migrated. Some of these people were Christians. Some of these Christians were like Paul's Christians, that is, they were gentiles, and they considered themselves free from such practices as circumcision and keeping the food laws. They read their Scriptures from the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, they prayed in the Greek language, they tended to be wealthier than the Christians who held to Jewish practices, and in many respects they considered themselves superior to these Jews who also called themselves Christians.
The result of this was a double struggle in both the Jewish and the Christian communities in Rome. Jews fought against Jews over whether they should become Christians, and Jewish Christians fought against gentile Christians as to the manner of life that Christians should follow. You can see from this brief description that it was the Jewish-Christian community that was most involved in this struggle. They were at odds with both their fellow Jews and their fellow Christians, a very difficult situation in which to be.
The struggle within this tangled Jewish community intensified until it came to the attention of the Emperor himself. "It centered around one Chrestus," said the historian Suetonius, until Claudius the Emperor decided to do something about it. In the year 49 AD Claudius issued an edict that all Jews should be expelled from Rome.
Whether all Jews were evicted or not is debated by historians, but certainly much of the leadership of the Jewish community was banished. Included among these were such people as Priscilla and Aquila. Paul met this remarkable couple as he was journeying toward Rome from the east along the Egnatian Way, the main east- west highway from Rome to Byzantium, just as those who were banished from Rome were traveling east along the same road seeking asylum in one of the cities of the east. Part of the reason for Paul's harsh treatment by the authorities in Philippi had to do with this imperial edict. Paul was unknowingly doing things in Philippi that had been banned in Rome, and the authorities punished him more brutally for his actions than would have been the case had this edict not been pronounced. For the Church in Rome, the edict and the banishment of the Jews meant that leadership shifted. The Roman church had been led by Jewish Christians. Now they were gone. Now the leadership shifted to gentile Christians, some of whom were followers of Paul.
Then, in about 54 AD, Claudius died. With his death, his edict died. Edicts promulgated by one emperor had no force under the new emperor. Jews were now free to return to Rome.
Some Jewish leaders returned to the church at Rome, and they had the natural expectation that they would resume the leadership roles in the church that they had relinquished when they were banished. But it was not to be so. The gentile leadership was now entrenched, and they were unwilling to give up their new-found authority. The struggles that Claudius had noted in the late forties intensified in the years after his death.
What could be done about this? Paul set his mind to that question. The best thing he could come up with was to send some kind of a statement to his gentile friends in Rome to ask them to receive the Jewish Christians back into the fellowship of the church. His "Letter to the Romans" is that statement. In it he points out to gentile Christians that they would not possess a Christian faith had there not been the faith of Israel that preceded it. Read the words of this text, then, as if it were written to gentile Christians in Rome inviting them to welcome their Jewish Christian brothers (and by implication "sisters") again into the fellowship of the church.
Paul is in great sorrow and unceasing anguish as he contemplates this situation: "I wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race." Then he lists that which God had given to them: sonship, glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, even the flesh of Jesus Christ. If God has done this for those who are Jews, will not you gentiles acknowledge this and offer them the right hand of fellowship? This is the point of Paul's Letter to his fellow Christians, Greek and Jew, in Rome.
After his opening salutation and prayer, Paul stated his major point: The Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (1:16). Paul added then that statement which became so important to Luther: "In the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. He who through faith is righteous shall live."
Paul then pointed out that all gentiles are guilty before God in their consciences, just as all Jews are guilty before God in regards the law. Only on the basis of faith are either Jews or Gentiles saved.
"But since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through Jesus Christ," wrote Paul (5:1), and a new section of his letter opens. We are no longer enslaved to sin, though the struggle with sin continues throughout this life. But there is no condemnation in Christ, there is no separation from Christ. Those who are united with Christ in his sufferings and death are also united with him in his resurrection.
Chapters nine through eleven of the letter sets forth the place that the Jewish faith has in Christian life. There would be no church without the contribution of Judaism to it, asserted Paul. Neither Jew is pre-eminent in the church nor Gentile, because the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him (10:12). Throughout the chapters, Paul struggles with the tangled relationship between the two families of faith.
In chapters twelve through fifteen Paul points out the kind of ethical behavior that Christ expects of his church. These ethical precepts are a fascinating mix, some coming from the Jewish- Christian Church and some from the gentile-Christian church. When Paul puts them together, they can scarcely be torn apart. Above all, Christians drawn from both segments of the church are to look to Jesus Christ as the fulfillment both of Jewish life and law and gentile life and faith.
Paul concludes by declaring that he will be coming to Rome soon to visit with the church there (though we now know that he came only in chains and for the trial that would end his life). He closes by greeting the many congregations in Rome, and their leaders, and he greets all in the name of Jesus Christ.
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Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: In order to tell about the letter, we need first to tell about the city of Philippi and then about the church that was developing in that city.
The City of Philippi
The Philippi of Paul's day was a small city both in land area and in population. Perhaps thirty thousand people lived between its acropolis and a swamp. The walls of the city encompassed an area that was not much larger than the agora of Corinth. Philip the Great, father of Alexander the Great, had built the city some three hundred years before Paul arrived there. Philip had located this city where it was for purposes of convenience and protection. Seven or more miles from the sea, it was close enough to the Pangaeon Mountains to oversee the gold found there. Like other Macedonians had done in building other cities, Philip had built his city in the unhealthy regions of a swamp, whose wetlands provided a natural obstacle to any invader.
The city that Paul saw still bore the marks of Philip's builders, but it had also been recently rebuilt by Romans. When Octavius, soon to be named "The Emperor Augustus," had taken control of the empire from Mark Anthony, he deported from Italy some of Anthony's former partisans. He had resettled them in Philippi. It was a logical move. These men had fought in Octavius' cause in the battle of Philippi, and they were given homes in the city they had fought for. Octavius named the city "Colonia Augusta Julia Philippensis." He did this in the year 30 B.C.
Philippi set itself to become a little Rome, more Roman than Rome itself. Its language was Latin, and its law was Roman. Its money bore Latin inscriptions. Two kinds of Roman citizens inhabited Philippi. Some were citizens by birth, who had formerly lived in Italy and Rome. Others, not Italian by birth, had gained Roman citizenship by other means, usually by performing some service that had assisted the Roman armies in one of its campaigns. Speculation is that Paul's family had gained its Roman citizenship in this manner. Being from Tarsus, a center of the leather-working trade and a city on the route between Rome and the mideast, perhaps the family had gained citizenship by supplying tents to the Roman army under Pompey that had stormed into Jerusalem in 63 B.C. The benefits of citizenship were many to those who held it. They were exempted from scourging, they were free from arrest in extreme cases, they had some taxes forgiven them, and they had the right to appeal to the emperor himself any charge that might be laid against them.
In addition to the Roman citizens who had recently been transported there, population segments that dated back to the former rulers of the area, chiefly Thracian and Macedonian, continued to live in Philippi. These Thracians and Macedonians spoke Greek rather than Latin. Egyptians and other Africans also lived in the city. The Jewish population must have been very small, since the Jews had no synagogue of their own. With the new city of Philippi being founded as recently as it was, there had been no opportunity yet for Jews to migrate into it. The colony was ruled by two magistrates, called "duoviri" (two men), who also acted as its judges. They were assisted in their deliberations by men who held office in the local senate.
At the mid-point of the first century A.D., the focal point of the modestly- sized city of Philippi was its forum or agora. Small enough to be placed in a corner of the agora of Corinth (it was about three hundred feet in length and about half that in width), it still contained shops, workshops, baths, fountains and temples. Unlike those of larger cities, the one agora of Philippi served both government and commercial functions.
Concerns of government were carried on in the northern half. The meeting halls, the Senate Hall, and the hall of weights and measures were on the west side of the agora. On its northern edge was the Via Egnatia, the main military and commercial highway through Greece that joined the city of Rome with its eastern empire. Uncovered by archaeologists, this marble-road still bears the marks of the wagons and chariots that rolled across It and the memories of those battle-ready Roman legions that marched over it. Touching the Egnatian Road on the north side, and at the most prominent location in the center of the forum, was the bema. On this elevated rostrum, orators delivered their speeches, messengers announced the news of the day, and trials like those that were to befall Paul and Silas were held. A temple stood at the west end of the forum where the road from Rome entered, and another stood on the east side where the road exited. Near this latter temple was the town library.
A line of shops cutting through its middle separated the commercial agora from the governmental. The shops faced south, with their salesrooms opening on the agora, their workrooms behind the salesrooms, and the apartments of the owners behind the workrooms. A marble road was constructed along the front of the shops. On the southern edge was a long portico that covered the whole length of the forum. Fountains, monuments and colonnades were also scattered over the forum of this small city which had pretensions of being another Rome.
Buildings and momentoes of former times also could be found in and around Philippi. The Greek theater that had been built by Philip was within walking distance of the agora to the north and east. Small niches to house the statuettes of former gods had been cut into the rock facing of the acropolis, as were traces of votive reliefs. Houses and dwellings of all shapes and sizes surrounded the forum. The city walls, also built originally by Philip, protected the city from invaders. The tall acropolis rose just off the north edge of the forum, its unscalable walls offering further protection in time of enemy attack. The town prison may have been fashioned from a cave at the base of the acropolis, just north of the bema where justice was dispensed. Everything necessary for civilized living in the wilds of Macedonia was provided for the Romans living in Philippi.
The Church at Philippi
The church at Philippi came as near as any among the early churches of the Christian movement to fulfilling the original apostolic design. The charter of the apostolic churches had decreed that there be no difference in treatment in the churches of "Jews and Greeks, slave and free, male and female" (Gal 3:28). The church In Philippi was founded through a woman. It was made up mostly of people drawn from the Roman and Greek strata of society. One of its trusted members was the slave, Epaphroditus.
Paul and Silas came to Philippi in the autumn of 49 A.D. There being few if any Jewish people in the town, and no synagogue where they might begin their ministry, they came instead upon a group of women worshiping by the Gaggitas River, just behind the western wall of the city. These women had sought a place for worship near a stream. For ancient peoples, water was indispensable to worship, since worship was always preceded by some form of ritual bath. If the selected place of prayer also was surrounded by a wall that offered protection from prying eyes, so much the better. The place the women had found for their worship offered both water and privacy. After conversation with them, Paul had baptized Lydia, their leader, and she offered the men the use her home as a base of operations for the spread of the Christian faith in Philippi.
Lydia was a godfearer. A native of the Asian city of Thyatira, near Ephesus, she was a dealer in purple goods. As a dealer in purple, she was probably quite wealthy. Purple cloth was sold only to the royal and the rich and was the most expensive dye color of the time. It was made by the extraction of a single drop of color from the shell of an oyster. When the dye was extracted, the oyster died. The process was wasteful. The oyster was simply discarded after it was used for this purpose, but, then, who then cared about protecting oyster crops from exploitation? It was also expensive, both in the amount of labor required and in the danger to those engaged in the work. Harvesting this many oysters from the sea required the work of a multitude of slaves, some of whom died from their time under water and others of whom slashed their hands brutally as they worked with the recalcitrant shells. The resulting dye-color was much sought after by those who wanted to wear only the most distinctive and expensive clothing.
In her native city, Lydia had learned of the Jewish faith and had been attracted to it, but, as a woman, she had had no opportunity to become part of the covenanted community. Since she was a householder but the name of her husband is not mentioned, it can be assumed that she was a widow. Upon her baptism, she led the friends who worshiped with her by the river into the faith. Her influence and her wealth were a prime factor in the establishment of the church in Philippi.
Very soon after the establishment of the Christian community in Philippi, the new church became involved in a struggle with divination. In the religious atmosphere of the time, the ability to foretell the future was much In demand. Having no living God into whose loving hands they were able to commit their lives, people turned to soothsayers and magicians whom they thought could tell them what the future held for them. The services of those who claimed that ability were much sought after.
One such young woman followed Paul and Silas through the streets of the town. She kept crying out for all to hear: "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation" (Acts 16:16). Her interventions disturbed Paul. Up to this moment, he and Silas had been able to keep their mission out of the public eye. The girl's constant clamor unmasked them. Paul tried to stop her before the whole town learned why they had come. "In the name of Jesus Christ, I charge you to come out of her," he said to the spirit of divination that had been thought to invade her life. The spirit did leave her. As Acts says, "It came out of her that very hour." (16:17-18)
The owners of the girl, who had made a good bit of money through her, seized Paul and Silas and brought them into the marketplace before the rulers. "These men are Jews," they charged, "and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs which it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice." (16:20-21) The masters of the girl could not accuse Paul and Silas of exorcism, for Roman law had no clause concerning that practice (Meinardus, Otto F. A., St. Paul in Greece. Athens, Greece: Lycabettus Press, 1972/1989, p 15). The two charges they did invoke were violations of Roman law. They accused Paul and Silas of causing civic disturbance and also of introducing new religious practices.
The first charge, though false, was serious enough, especially since word had just arrived in Philippi that the Emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome because of disturbances and riots they had caused in the city. Here, said the owners, were Jews who had come to our city of Philippi to cause the same kind of disturbances their compatriots were effecting in Rome. The second charge was even more serious. Roman law did forbid the introduction of foreign religions into Roman territory. The Philippian authorities acted quickly. They ordered their garments torn off the men, beat them with rods, and threw them into prison. The jailer put them into the inner prison where the worst criminals were kept and fastened their feet in the stocks.
Paul and Silas turned the prison into a place of worship. At midnight, they were praying and singing hymns, when an earthquake rocked the city. The prison, rickety to begin with, shook. The doors clanged open, and the fetters pulled out of the walls. The jailer was certain his prisoners had escaped. He also knew that unless he kept the prisoners safe in jail, his own life would be forfeit. He was about to kill himself with his own sword, when he heard Paul cry out, 'We are all here." Relieved, yet still fearful, the jailer cried out, "What must I do to be saved?" Paul and Silas replied, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved." That night, the jailer and his whole household were baptized. The Christian church in Philippi had gained another family for itself.
Next morning, the magistrates tried quietly to dismiss the case against Paul and Silas, but these men would have none of it. As Roman citizens (Paul seems to have included both himself and Silas in his remark "men who are Roman citizens," 16:37), they demanded a proper hearing. The rights and privileges of a Roman citizen were important, especially in a Roman colony. Paul and Silas had been condemned without a public trial, and they had been exposed to public insult before the non-Roman population of the colony. Like law- abiding citizens, they had not attempted to escape from their imprisonment. They demanded and received an apology from the offending officials, who then asked them to leave the city. Paul and Silas complied with the request. From then on, most of Paul's relationship with the church in Philippi came through the letters he sent them.
He wrote at least three letters to the church, though they are now bound in the one small volume called "Paul's Letter to the Philippians." The letters illuminate further some of the inner life of the Philippian congregation.
There was a time when some Christians who believed in circumcision visited the Philippian churches and tried to convince them that, even though they were Gentiles, they needed to be circumcised if they were to share the full benefits of Christ. (See Phil 3:2-4:1) Paul dismissed these men with hardly more than a wave of the hand.
He pointed out that the Philippians worship God in spirit and glory in Christ, and they did not need to put confidence in the flesh. He stated that if anyone had reason to put confidence in the flesh, he did; his Jewish credentials were impeccable. But he had put that aside in favor of the righteousness that comes through faith, not flesh. He wished only to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. He was willing to share Cbrist's sufferings in order to become like him in his death and attain with Christ the resurrection from the dead. Paul did not take these counter-missionaries seriously, and apparently the Philippian Christian did not, either. The arguments Paul mounted against them carried little of the fire and fury that he had earlier directed toward the Judaizers in Galatia.
The church in Philippi did respond to Paul's needs when he was imprisoned. They sent their own emissary to him in the person of Epaphroditus. In his final imprisonment, in Rome, Paul was coming to the end of his own resources. Whatever money he had laid aside to support himself in such a crisis was running out. Since prisoners at that time had to pay their own expenses while they were jailed, Paul needed someone to come to his aid. The church in Philippi did. They sent money and supplies to him, and they commissioned Epaphroditus, the slave of one of them, to stay with Paul in prison to take care of his needs.
Unfortunately, Epaphroditus became ill. The church in Philippi heard of his illness and were greatly concerned for his welfare. Paul wrote to tell them that the young man had recovered from his illness. He also sent Epaphroditus home and released him from his service. To forestall any thought that Epaphroditus had not served Paul well, Paul gave him the kind of commendation that would assure him a firm welcome when be returned to Philippi: "Receive him in the Lord with all joy. Honor such men, for he nearly died for the work of Christ; risking his life to complete your service to me." (Phil 2:29-30)
What they did for Paul while he was in prison reflected what they had already done for him. When the apostle was in trouble in Tbessalonica, the Pbilippian church had come to his rescue more than once. (See Phil 4:14-16) They also shared in the collection Paul was gathering for the saints in Jerusalem, and Paul was grateful for that.
Not that the church in Philippi was the perfect Christian community. Trouble and disagreement still echoed there. Euodia and Syntyche, two strong women, were in disagreement with each other. (See 4:2-3) Paul begged that these two resolve the differences that were dividing one house church from another in Philippi.
The organization of the Philippian church differed from that of others. No elders were mentioned. This church had few if any Jewish members, and this particularly Jewish office of leadership was not employed In this congregation. It did have deacons. These deacons may have had special responsibilities in particular house churches, as did Phoebe in Cenchreae. It also had overseers or bishops. This title may have been the gentile equivalent of the Jewish "ruler of the synagogue," one who had charge of the building where worship took place, who handled the congregation's money, and who saw to it that leadership for the community's worship was provided.
In keeping with the gentile nature of the Philippian church, its theological language was far more gentile-oriented than it was Jewish. 'Encouragement,' "incentive in love," affection and sympathy," "Joy," ..conscience," "manner of life," "forbearance," partnership,": these are Greek concepts. A new vocabulary for thinking about God and the Christian life was at work in this congregation. Nowhere in the New Testament is the Greek nature of the gospel more fully expressed than it is in Paul's concluding words to his beloved Philippian community (Phil 4:8):
"Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."
The church at Philippi stood not only on the boundary between Asia and Europe. It stood on the boundary between a Jewish conceptualization of the gospel and a Greek one. The tension between the two was to exercise the church for centuries to come.
The Letter Itself
To some scholars, the present letter to the Philippians is a compilation of three distinct letters. They are as follows:
4:10-20 Paul’s letter of thanks
1:1 - 2:30, 4:21-23 Letter written in defense of Epaphroditus
3:1 - 4:9 Paul’s last will and testament.
The makeup of the present letter presupposes four trips between Rome and Philippi:
1) A message was sent from Rome to Philippi that Paul is in prison.
2) Epaphroditus came to Rome from Philippi, bringing gifts.
3) Word was sent from Rome to Philippi that Epaphroditus was ill.
4) A message came from Philippi to Rome saying that the Philippians are distressed to hear of his illness.
5) Epaphroditus returned to Philippi with Paul’s letter of commendation. Timothy followed soon.
The distance between Rome and Philippi was 800 miles. A day’s travel on foot was fifteen miles. A one way journey between the two cities would take 7 weeks. A round trip would take 5 months. Rome to Brindisi along the Appian Way was 360 miles. The trip across the Adriatic from Brindisi to Dyrrachium took two days. The trip from Dyrrachium along the Egnatian Way was 370 miles.
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The First Letter of Peter is one of the gems of the New Testament. It is written in the most elegant Greek of any of the books; it is both simple and beautiful. It addresses itself to ethical issues that Christians continue to face today: the Christian’s attitude toward the state, the intimate matters of household and family, the nature of the church. It is particularly rich in metaphors and images that reflect the common life of the people: seeds, flocks, babes and milk. Some of its images have a military origin – arming oneself and engaging in combat; these may come from the situation of persecution and martyrdom that seems to surround these Christian people. In five short chapters this letter probes more deeply into the universal problem of suffering than almost any other writing in history, either secular or sacred.
First Peter also, more than any other writing of the New Testament, radiates the spirit of forgiveness. And why not? Jesus had forgiven Peter his denial of his Lord. Three times Jesus had denied Peter. Then three times, says the Gospel of John in chapter twenty-one, Jesus had pronounced forgiveness to Peter. That had changed his life. Now, in this letter, Peter extends that same sense of forgiveness to those who gather around him. As we permit the spirit of this letter to flow into us, we too receive the forgiveness offered first to Peter.
We detect from the letter that the people to whom it was written were primarily peasants and shepherds who lived in rural areas and villages. Many of them had been pagan before they became Christian, though some had been converted from the Jewish faith. They were common people who cultivated lands belonging to the rich of the world, some Roman, some native. Women played an important role in these communities, and one of the problems addressed had to do with Christian women married to pagan husbands. The people were not particularly happy with their way of life: they saw themselves as strangers and exiles in their own lands.
They lived in the region which now lies in the country of Turkey. The letter lists the names of their homelands: Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. Each of these was a province of the Roman Empire. Because the distance between them is so great and travel through them so difficult, the scholarly guess is that this letter was originally a circular letter, addressed to the churches in each of these regions and carried to them roughly in the order that the provinces are listed in the heading of the letter.
If the major problem facing the churches is that of martyrdom, then the letter could have been written in either the time of the Roman Emperor Nero or that of the Emperor Domitian. Nero’s persecution commenced around 64 AD, the time of the fire of Rome. This was the persecution in which Peter is said to have died. The persecution of Domitian took place in the last decade of the first century. If the letter dates from the time of Nero, Peter may have been its author. If it dates from the time of Domitian, Peter could not have been its author.
Whether or not Peter personally wrote the letter, this epistle still breathes Peter’s spirit and expresses the heart of the life and ministry of this multidimensional person. Think for a moment what we have come to know about Peter. The New Testament tells us about his relationship with the earthly Lord. Then it goes on to tell of his relationship with the risen Lord. Then it tells of Peter from the time of the Lord’s rising until the time of Peter’s own death. But in the church’s mind Peter lived on after his own death into the time of the completion of the New Testament, and their memory of him influenced much of it. And Peter lives on still, remembered in the church as its first great leader and the model for proper leadership since then. Yet better than anything else we have from or about him, this First Letter of Peter conveys Peter’s mind and thought, and for that reason it is worth reading today.
An outline of the letter, prepared by Archibald M. Hunter (The Interpreter’s Bible, 1957) tells this about it:
I. Salutation (1:1-2)
II. The blessings of God's redeemed children (1:3 - 2-10)
A. Doxology for the risen Christ (1:3-9
B. The prophets and the gospel (1:10-12)
C. Exhortation to holy living.(1:13-2:3
D. The cornerstone and the new temple of God (2-,4-10)
III. The duties of Christians in the world (2:11-4:11)
A. Believers and unbelievers (2:11-12)
B. Christians and the state (2:13-17)
C. The duty of slaves 2:18-20)
D: The Imitatio Cbristi (2-,21-25)
E. Husbands and wives (3:'1-7)
F. Recapitulation (3:8-12)
G. The Christian answer to persecution (3:13-17)
H. Our example, Christ (3:18-22)
J. Exhortation to pure living-(4:1-6)
K. Ethics for the crisis (4:7-11)
IV. The trials of Christians in the world (4:12 - 5:11)
A. A call to Christian constancy(4:12-19),B. Exhortation to elders (5:1-5)
C. Concluding exhortation (5:6-11)
V. Conclusion and blessing (5:12-14)
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