Introduction to New Testament

Course Description and Credit Hours:

Introduction to the Hellenistic world of early Christianity, examining the early traditions about Jesus that were organized into the Gospels and the letters of Paul. HU, 3 Credit Hours

Check out our course page here: Spring 2019.

Student Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, successful students will be able to do the following:

Identify the principle methods advanced by the historical-critical approach to Biblical Studies.
Recognize the various writing genres presented in the New Testament.
Identify the rhetorical strategies of the different epistle and gospel writers.
Describe how the New Testament is structured and how this is related to the structure of the Hebrew Bible.
Explain the development of Hebrew Bible material in the New Testament
Explain the historical spread of Christianity beyond the confines of Palestine during the first century (CE).

Course Materials

New Revised Standard Version The Harper Collins Study Bible

The HarperCollins Study Bible: NRSV, Fully Revised and Updated, ed. Harold W. Attridge (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006).

This scholarly study Bible will act as our course standard. You are responsible for reading not only the main text, but also the critical commentary at the beginning of each chapter and in the footnotes.

Into the World of the New Testament Book Cover. It has a Greek inscription with iconography of fish and anchors.

Daniel Lynwood Smith, Into the World of the New Testament: Greco-Roman and Jewish Texts and Contexts (New York: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2015).

This book provides a look into the broader world in which the New Testament took shape. You’ll be using this as a resource to help you tie together the geography and history with the literature.

The front page of the website, Bible Odyssey

Created by the Society of Biblical Literature, this web resource contains brief articles, videos, images, and bibliographies for those interested in the academic study of the Bible. We’ll use this to supplement our textbook.

Interactive Notebook Assignments

The following pages will guide you through course readings and help you engage the material so that you’ll be prepared for clad discussion and activities.

A magnifying glass lays atop a dictionary page open to the word "Malpractice."

Synoptic Gospels

When people talk about Jesus and even biblical accounts of Jesus, they often imagine a single comprehensive narrative. Reading the text in light of source criticism will likely give you a different impression. At this stage in our study, I want you to not only read the text, but also to note what you are…

Teasing out Methodologies in Biblical Studies

It’s not lost on me that some of the methods of biblical studies are confusing for those who are not familiar with them. The videos below (and the quotations form Mark Allan Powell’s How Do Biblical Scholars Study the New Testament?” on Bible Odyssey. I present them below to help give you a better grasp…

A Gif of Nathan Fillion looking confused when trying to answer a question.

What is the Academic Study of Religion?

Take a minute to think about your school how it organizes its curriculum. For example, checkout The University of Alabama’s Core Curriculum/General Education requirements. At one level, its organization suggests that students who have passed through the halls of higher education will have had exposure to a breadth of subject matters. These subjects are not topic,…

It’s All New to Me!

In Christian verbiage, “The New Testament” is a commonplace for the authoritative writings that bear witness (i.e “testify”) to Jesus’s presence in the first century CE. But the New Testament is pretty old, right? Strangely enough, the New Testament is older and newer than many people care to realize. The images here are the front…

The Kingdom of…God–Free Notes

One of the trickiest things about the study of the New Testament is that every textbook seems to presume you know some things about the subject matter. But that’s not really a fair assumption upon which to build a class. You all come from different contexts with different relationships to the New Testament. So even…

Read more The Kingdom of…God–Free Notes

Green computer code descending down a screen. Image is taken from the film, The Matrix.

The Kingdom(s) of God

The subtitle of Daniel Lynwood Smith’s Into the World of the New Testament is really important: Greco-Roman and Jewish Texts and Contexts. Chapter 3 of our textbook will give you some insight into the movers and shakers of the time period that we will be studying in this class: First BCE- First Century CE. Biblical scholars and other historians classify this…

Sign Prophets

When people think of religion and the New Testament, they often think of wonder-working. You know what I mean, miracles. And while these supernatural acts are an important part of the narrative, it’s important to not miss the forest for the trees. These unexplainable works help to explain the social realities that are important in…

In the Name of Jesus-es

One of the themes that emerges in a scholarly study of the New Testament is how the idea of Jesus is multi-faceted and not without precedence. This is not to say that Jesus Christ is not special or significant. Such statements are not in the purview of critical discourse, after all. Instead, I’m drawing your…

Mark–Sitz im Leben

Read the Gospel According to Mark 1-4 and 8-16. Think about this text in relation to what you’ve learned about Second Temple Judaism and the processes of Hellenization and Romanization. Write a brief (~350 words) reflection on passages that illustrate the good news in regard to these concerns. As you do so, think about the…

Dramatis Personae: Who is Who in Mark?

Dramatis Personae is a Latin phrase that means “masks of the persons” or “roles of the persons.” It is found at the beginning of dramatic works, especially plays. It provides the audience with a sense of who they will see against the backdrop, playing a part in the story. When we read a gospel, we…

A meme of a woman on a phone (stylized from the 1950s) on the phone saying, "Oh dear, bless your heart! I will be praying for you!!" From Rotten eCards User Card

Sermon on the Mount (Matthew)

“Exegetes,” or professional biblical interpreters, sometimes call Matthew 5-7 the gospel in a nutshell. This particular pericope is traditionally known as the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus speaks to a crowd of people, laying out who they are according to the standards used in the Kingdom of God. The people gathered are all the “wrong”…

A King, A Jewish King, A Matthean King,

What’s it mean to be a king? In the study of New Testament, we encounter a lot of language about kingship. Linguistically, we can think of the languages in use in the Early Roman period and the terms they provide for thinking about kingship. The Greek term basileus is used in the New Testament itself (and…

People that Change the World Series, "I am George Washington" Written by Brad Meltzer, Illustrated by Christopher Eliopoulos, A cartoon figure of George Washington in his uniform standing heroically on a hill in front of a colonial flag, but he's a kid.

Write Your Own Lost Parable!

When we think about the gospels in terms of form criticism and their sitz im leben, we can make two quick observations about the New Testament as text. Both have to do with “genre” or the category of writing defined by particularly literary conventions and reader expectations. First, the gospels are sort of like the genre we…

The Economics of the Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of Luke is a fascinating account that situates the Jesus story firmly within the history of Roman-occupied Judea and Galilee. The evangelist presents the land of the Hebrews as a place where readers should be taking note because a new kingdom is unfolding there that will similarly change our understanding of the world.…

More details Original Staunton chess pieces, left to right: pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king

The Social Ladder

Our reading of the gospels has focused on the broad concept of “the good news.” And at each step, we’ve asked about for whom the news is good. One thing that is clear is that the evangelists depict figures/characters as tools to carry out a broader agenda. We see this in how Matthew uses Jewish…

Doing Jewish

The New Testament is often seen as a collection of Christian texts. But when does it make sense to begin discussing something called “Christianity” as distinct from Jewishness? Yes, Jesus was Jewish, talking about how to be and do Jewish things. And his framing, as relayed in the gospels, was more inclined to frame Jewishness…

Students of the Way

When we anthropologically study Christianity in modernity, one move that we see time and again is the line drawn between following Jesus and the membership in the church. Two ways this plays out come to mind. The first is the critique of people who read the Bible and go to church but do not, for…

A Long Time Ago in a Land Far, Far Away

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued…

Portrait of Marble Statue of Lucius Verus as Frater Arvalis; head and torso.

The Acts of the Arval Brethren

One of the hallmarks of our study has been the use of comparison to help us better account for the sitz im leben of the New Testament. So when we thought about analogs to the gospels, we looked at the Res Gestae Divi Augusti along with Greek biographies to get a sense of the social…

Hermes is bronze. He's wearing a hat with wings. He's bare-chested and has a pan pipe in one hand and a trumpet in the other. His feet are also winged.

The Letter Writing Campaign

When we step back and look at the Acts of the Apostles and the writings to early collectives, we see two features that we (and those about whom we are reading) likely take for granted: the genre of the letter or epistle and the presence of divinity customs or deisidaimonia. Without an understanding of these…

The Cross Way

The above clip speaks to our modern assumptions about the cross. And while we may see Maeby’s ignorance as a caricature, I think it also surfaces some of our own assumptions about the role of the cross in Ancient Rome. The cross is a counter-intuitive symbol around which to gather. In fact, it wasn’t iconic…

To Thessalonica

The Epistle to the Thessalonians is the oldest writing in the corpus (that is, textual body) of the New Testament. Written around 50CE, it predates the gospel literature and the Acts of the Apostles. Even though the organization of the canon and the narrative would have you imagine those latter writings first, our critical understanding…

To Galatia

One of the ideas we teased out during our reading of the Acts of the Apostles was the basis for authority in the early church. We discussed how kinship (e.g. James) and proximity (e.g. Peter/Cephas) to Jesus seem to be two major ways to establish credibility. Another, of course, was compelling interpretation of Jesus’s message…

To Philippi

Paul’s epistle to the Philippians is among the most popularly referenced texts in the New Testament. It has found quite an audience among athletes, particularly Philippians 4:13. That verse’s interest in the “Christ who gives [one] strength” is especially evocative for those wanting to push the limits of the body. But so far as we…

Faith-Filled Collectives

One way of thinking anthropologically about the Bible is to remember that many of the familiar terms and concepts that we use to characterize Christian praxis today–though derived from the New Testament–meant something prior to 2000 years of debates and developments. It is also important to remember that the First Century was not free of…

Jesus: The Same, Always

All good news must come to an end. The last book in the New Testament that we will study is Revelation. A lot of people tend to call this book “Revelations,” but you’ll notice that there is no “s” at the end of the word. One may think of this as a simple spelling mistake,…

Jesus Returns

Revelation has puzzled and fascinated audiences for much of Christian history. Its fantastic imagery seems especially provocative for modern readers trying to make head or tails of what it means in the context of the text…let alone for the reader. Skim over Revelation 16-17 and see what I mean. “Armageddon,” which we often think of…