Introduction

My area of research is actually in crucifixion. I am particularly interested in backgrounds and the way that understanding something about the historical context of the New Testament is important for our study of the New Testament in terms of interpreting it, understanding it, and then applying it to our lives. So that's one of my infacies, and that'll come out here, it's also why I'm attached with the Archaeology Institute across the street here, with interests in trying to immerse us into ancient culture so we can better understand the New Testament in its context and the Old Testament as well. So that's a bit about me. All right, if you would open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 2, we have just come out of the Christmas season, and we tend to leave it behind very quickly because there's so much celebration and there's certain part of the Gospels that we only read right around the Christmas time, but that's not a good thing, of course. In particular, at the beginning of January, there's a celebration in the church calendar for those churches which follow that, especially like the Anglican churches and such, that celebrates the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem to see Jesus. That's the narrative I want to read together in Matthew chapter 2, and I want to pay attention to not just what it says, what it says in history, in time, and what the theological implications Matthew wants us to draw are. So Matthew chapter 2, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem and Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the East came to Jerusalem and asked, where is the one who has been born King of the Jews? We saw his star in the East and we have come to worship him. When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. In Bethlehem and Judea, they replied, for this is what the prophet has written, but you Bethlehem and the land of Judea are by no means least among the rulers of Judea. For out of you will come a ruler who will be the shepherd of my people Israel. Then Herod called the Magi secretly, and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me so that I too may go and worship him. After they had heard the King, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the East went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of mirror, and having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. Again, this is a very famous passage. You've probably read it dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and so in that regard it becomes maybe all too familiar. There's a couple of things I want to point out about this. One is that it assumes a very specific historical location, Bethlehem, with a very specific timing, namely the time of King Herod. This would have been Herod the Great, and that means that Jesus' birth did not occur in if there is such a thing, zero AD. In theory, all of history has been broken down into BC, before Christ, in AD, on a dominion year of our Lord, and so that should have been the time when Jesus was born. But in point of fact, Herod was dead by four BC, and so this narrative probably occurs earlier, roughly six BC would have been Jesus' birth as a consequence. So just from reading that one little historical tidbit, we realized that the later church, as it sat down to put a calendar together, got it a little off. So there's a historical fact, but more importantly, Herod the Great. Now in a couple of weeks, we're going to talk about the history of Judea and Palestine, especially of Herod, but let's just say that Herod was not a very nice man. And let us also say that as opposed to you guys reading that, and then later reading that he kills all the infants after Jesus escapes to Egypt or his family escapes to Egypt, and from that you learn that Herod was not a very nice man. If you lived in the first century, in the time when Matthew wrote this as soon as the name of Herod comes up, bam, there are images about who that person is. And the very fact that that doesn't come up for you, that all you know about Herod is, basically maybe two facts. One, he saw some match eye on two, he killed babies in Bethlehem. That shows the limitation of your perspective when you come to approach the New Testament, because Matthew did not intend that to be the case. He intended you already know something about Herod, and he's assuming that knowledge. So he's assuming for instance that you know that Herod built that temple. That Herod did not just build the temple, but he built all around Judea, and even into the Gentile world, he was building pagan temples around Rome, at the Roman Empire. Herod played both sides. He was a very good king, client king, client king of Rome. He did what every good king does. He had a capital city, Jerusalem. He built a temple in his capital city, the temple of Jerusalem. He benefacted the rest of the Roman world. So he gave gifts to other cities, especially for their temples, for coliseums and that kind of thing. So he played the Roman side. But he also had to watch out for his Jewish constituency, and generally he did not do as well with them as he did with the Romans. But one of the main things that he did for them was build them a temple. And even the rabbi, several hundred years later, although they hate the man, still have to speak nicely of him with regard to the building of the temple. So that's who the man would have been for them. And of course, he also put to death most of his own children, because he was afraid that they were going to take the throne from him. So you see that this text has a historical context to it, and you are distanced from that, and that is not a good thing, because that's not what Matthew intended. So you know more about Herod than has just found in the pages of Matthew. So there's the historical dimension of the text. Let's talk for a second about the theological dimension of this text. There are some words that reoccur here. There's one in particular that reoccur a number of times that would be a theological word. It's not just like child, it's not just like Bethlehem. It's not even like Star and the East. Do you know his word? It cures three times? Do you guess this? I heard some. I whisper it. Worship. That's right. It occurs three times. We tend to think that this whole narrative, again, is about Magi. And especially that it's about giving gifts. And of course, I mean, you've probably heard enough sermons on this to know that. Our construct of this, with a little drummer boy and everything else, is really messed up. Especially even the song, we three kings of Roy and R, right? How many kings are there? Three? Well, are there three in the narrative? No. There are three gifts. So that's where we get three kings from. Are they kings in the narrative? No. No, they're not kings in the narrative either. They are Magi, which means that they weren't kings, generally speaking. Magi generally were counselors to kings. Counselors, especially the Magi term, would be from Babylonia. And there's a lot of historical investigation we'd like to do there. We wish we knew a little bit more about who the Magi are. And perhaps their connection to Judaism, because there was a large Jewish population in Babylon at this time, right? You know why, right? It happened around 586. There was an exile, right? 586 BC, the leaders of Judea were taken into exile into Babylon. And so you have a large Jewish population in Babylon, some of them returned, and the return under Ezra and later under Neumaya. But there was a large Jewish population, such that the, about two centuries after this, the two major rabbinic centers of rabbinic learning were in Palestine, near C's area, and in Babylon. So you have a Jerusalem Talmud and a Babylonian Talmud as the great codifications of rabbinic law, okay? So there may be some connectedness there, but we're going to leave that aside. Yes, kings, royalty, all of this stuff gets in the way of seeing what this text is primarily about. And I think what gives it away is the repetition of three words, worship, worship, worship. So it comes up here, verse two, where is the one who's been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him. So what was the purpose of their coming? It was to worship. And then in point of fact, when they get to Jesus in verse 10, when they saw the star, they were overjoyed, on coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. The Greek word, proscanero, they fall down in front of him. And that's the means of giving him worship and homage. The third place that this is repeated, it's actually the second place, if you're counting in order, is where Herod, in verse seven, says he secretly called the magi, and he said to them, go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him report to me so that I too may go and worship him. All right? Now, was Herod going to worship him? No. I mean, immediately, as Matthew's first century reader, you're skeptical, because Herod was the guy who put to death his own children, because he was afraid that in his old age, they were going to usurp the throne from him. How is he going to put up with a person who's born King of the Jews? I mean, you're immediately skeptical. And by the time you get to the end of chapter two, you know that, in fact, he's gone and slotted all the children in Bethlehem because he was hoping to kill this King of the Jews. All right? So you're skeptical, rightly. Well, what does that mean? Well, on a literary level, okay? If we were approached to this text from a literary dimension, then you have two major groups of characters, the Magi and Herod. And the Herod would be, in literary terms, a character foil, right? He knows what is right. He knows he should go to worship, but he refuses to do so. In fact, this is a lie that he tells to the Magi in order to get some information from them. That shows all the more important that you're two major sets of characters know what the right response is. The right response is to worship Jesus, one set of character does it. The other set does not, okay? In fact, the very person who most should, the one who is crowned King, we should give over his title of King to the one who is truly the Messiah, refuses to do so. All right? So on that level within the narrative itself, I think I can say that this is a theological theme that Matthew wants us to notice, okay? Repetition of Word, that's one evidence. Although can I say that you don't want to make too much of repeated words. Sometimes authors repeat words just because it's stuck in their head and they just keep coming up with it. But here it's repeated at key junctures and more importantly, it's repeated by contrasting group of characters and it's the very point of contrast between the two of. So that increases its theological import for Matthew. And finally, this is the first time we actually meet Jesus as a baby in the whole book of Matthew. You notice that? I mean, up before that, the whole story is a genealogy and then it's all the events leading up to the birth of Jesus, but those are all focused on Joseph primarily, but also Mary, right? So it's at the beginning of chapter two that we actually meet Jesus. And when Jesus shows up on the scene, the people, what are they supposed to do? What is their response? It should be to worship him. So that increases the theological import of this because it's the first time we meet Jesus and we find out that we should worship him. One final evidence that this is an important theological theme for Matthew is it doesn't just show up a Matthew chapter two. In point of fact, in the next five or six chapters, the idea of worshiping Jesus is repeated usually in the sense of he is a grown man. He is walking through the streets of some city and somebody comes and bows down in front of him, proskenes, they worship him right in front of him and ask him to heal them or someone they know. And so that very repetition of the theme in the next several chapters helps improve it. There's also a very important repetition at the very end of Matthew. If you turn to Matthew chapter 28, there's this little passage at the end we call the great commission. Now I know you know a lot about the great commission because as Christians, we every year, in our church at least, there's a whole mission month and somebody's got to mention the great commission there. And so you end up talking a lot about going and making disciples. And that's the focus for us of the great commission and it's a very important focus. I don't want to say otherwise. In fact, we're going to return to that later. By the way, at the beginning of several classes, my idea is to give little homilies, especially in the first section of this class, the first four or five weeks of this class, because we're going to be doing a lot of technical stuff that's removed from the text. And so occasionally, at the beginning of class, just to get us back in in the New Testament, we're going to do these little homilies. Matthew 28, the great commission, starts off like this, 28 for 16. Then the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they what? They worshipped him. And some doubt it. Then it goes on and Jesus gives the great commission. The first response to Jesus in the book of Matthew is worship. And there's a recognition that even those who are going to turn against him understand that that's the proper response. And at the very end of the book of Matthew, in his resurrection glory, what is the response? Worship. Therefore, you can see that worship is a very important theological theme to the book of Matthew. Now, let me talk a little bit about the methodology that I just employed, because a lot of this class is actually going to be about method. And then, let me talk about some practical application.

The whole way that I frame the question is perhaps a little differently than we typically undergo approach the New Testament in evangelical circles. When we approach the New Testament, we usually do so either in the context of a Bible study, or a sermon, or if you have done a lot of reading in Christian work and writing in systematic theology, either applied or in its more theoretical area. I didn't really do any of that. I didn't just stay with our passage like you wouldn't a Bible study. I let the passage speak for itself, and we saw that there was a theme that was very important in the passage that we didn't dare ignore. But I was interested in the broader ramifications for it, not just in the passage, but in Matthew. That's one thing. I didn't, you know, it's kind of sermonic in some respects, but I didn't try and just immediately apply it. I wanted to step back and actually see what is the text trying to say to us, theologically, and historically, to try and bring us into the historical context of the text itself. And the last thing I didn't do is I didn't do systematic theology. I think we would all agree that in terms of systematic theology, Jesus, the incarnate son of God, the very word of God, is worthy of our worship. And you might even have a little paragraph or maybe a whole chapter on that in your systematic theology textbook. But the way they're going to prove it is they're going to show a little passage for Matthew maybe, but they're also going to look at John and they're going to look at Hebrews and they're going to look elsewhere and elsewhere and they're going to bring together a whole smattering of different things. And it can leave you when it's done well, everything is done in context. But sometimes it can leave you with the impression that this theology is being abstracted from the context and you wonder if that really was a big deal for Matthew or for the author of Hebrews or the author of Paul somewhere. Therefore, the way I framed things was not in terms of a broader systematic theology of the theology of the Christian faith. But I framed things in terms of the theology that Matthew wants us to understand. And as soon as we did that, then it becomes very important not just that this word is repeated in this passage, but the word is then repeated elsewhere in Matthew and especially at the very end because you can see this is a major theme to Matthew. What I did there was New Testament theology as it's practiced commonly today. We are interested in the themes and the different infacies that we find in the different New Testament authors to see what the theologies are that they are conveying to their own communities, trying to understand them in history and time and to the day that they were speaking. And then later you definitely want to synthesize that and develop a whole systematic theology, but we're not there. We stop short of that because we're interested in the theology of Matthew primarily at this stage. That's a bit of what we're going to do in this class. The name of the class is New Testament history and theology. I assume you know a lot about the content of the New Testament. Several of you are in degrees that you actually have to take a Bible content exam. And if you fail that, you go take the Bible content class where you run quickly through the whole Bible, Old Testament one semester, New Testament another semester, and you read through the whole thing and you remember a lot of what it said. So you know outlines and structures and all of that. I'm assuming you already know all that. In other words, I'm assuming you already know your New Testament pretty well. Frankly, if you don't then you're going to have to do a lot of extra reading in the class. And a good place to start with is Matthew because we're going to hang here for a few weeks in our area of homilies and stuff. I'm interested in taking you guys to the next level to do things that commonly aren't done in churches so that it can expand your idea of how I should be reading the New Testament. I should be reading it as a historical book and also as a series of theological books that then ultimately can be synthesized into a theological whole. That's what we're going to be doing in the class. Now, practically, we should worship our Lord. What should be our response to the Lord? Well, our first response and our last response would be that of worship. You know, Jesus was worthy of worship when he was a little baby lying in a dirty scummy old manger before he had accomplished anything, before he had died for our sins, before he was raised from the dead. The very fact of his birth was he was worthy of worship at that point. And all the more so after he had died, after he was crucified, after he was in resurrected glory and now that he's ascended to heaven, he is worthy of our worship. And what is worship? It is falling down before him, adoring him and committing our lives to his service. And that should be our response to this text as well. I started this class differently than I usually will. Usually we start in prayer but I wanted to start here to bring us to the point where we have something to pray about. So we're going to pray and then we're going to talk about the syllabus, which is what you've been wondering about for the last 20 minutes anyway. And we'll do that. Let's pray together. Father, as we are reminded in this passage, we are reminded that our Lord, that our master, that the one who is Lord of Lords, who is crowned king of us and king of the universe, that he is worthy of our bowing down, our submitting to him, of our worship. Father, we would desire in our lines, that that would be true. We would desire that as individuals. And Lord, I would desire that this whole class would be an exercise in worship. That at the end, the students here, as they have been taken through, sometimes very academic and sometimes very practical messages, that all of it would lead to your glory and to service to our Lord Jesus Christ. So we dedicate this class and I would ask with these students, some of whom this is a first semester for them, some of whom are towards the end of their program, all of whom are at the beginning of a semester that will have much work here and probably outside of campus as well. Father, through all of this, let us not lose sight of worshiping our dear Lord. We pray these things in your wonderful and holy name. Amen. Okay. All right, well let's do talk a little bit about the catalog here. I'm going to bring the screen down and wake up the computer and we'll hope all this comes together. All of this is actually on the syllabus that you have in front of you. But I do want to talk a little bit about what this class is about. All right. There's a catalog description that is here and that's useful in and of itself. But I think what's perhaps most useful is to think through course objectives. All right. Now, normally, you know, we put these on our course description and you have to wonder, you know, is this just an exercise that you got to have this on your course description? For me, these are actually very important objectives because it really says what I want to bring to the class. I can't force you to learn. You guys want to do that anyway. It's, you know, but I can't cram stuff down to you. These are all worded in terms of what I want to bring into the class. These are my objectives. So you have an idea of what I think this class is about. Now, again, I, you know, as I said a few minutes ago, this class is maybe not what you expect. This is not intended to be, okay, you're, you don't know the New Testament very well. Let's bring you up to speed. Okay. This class is intended to be, you know, the New Testament pretty well. Maybe you've been in a church for years. I every year, by the way, in a class like this, I have people who may have only been Christians for just a few months. And so therefore, you know, they don't know their New Testament quite as well. And I understand that that's the context for, for some. And if that's your situation and, you know, please, I'd love to get with you and we can talk about how to make this class all the more beneficial to you. But I'm, the predominant context in this class is people who have read the New Testament before, hopefully covered a cover, Matthew, the end of Revelation. And so you already have some basic concepts there. And so I want to do something different. I want to, I want to bring you into a more careful study. What I want to do actually is I want to take the best of academia, the best of what academia has to say about the New Testament and then bring it into your knowledge so that then you can use that in your future ministries, whether it be sitting across from somebody in a counseling session, whether it be teaching somebody in a Sunday school, whether it be pastoring a church, whatever the context is that you find yourself in leading Bible studies, you know, I want this to help inform how you approach the New Testament. And honestly, at the end of, of all of this, there'll probably be a lot of content you've learned. But I'm fundamentally less concerned about content and more about method and approach and things like that. So I'm just going to be overt with you about that from the beginning. The course objectives reflect some of these infacies. So the first objective is to critique current scholarly approaches to New Testament study and develop a working methodology of how one can better study the New Testament historically and theologically. This is the objective that we'll spend a lot of time on for the first few weeks and it's also the one that I have the most difficult time convincing people that you need this. Because most people frankly don't care what's going on in a religious studies context in a university because they don't feel like it's going to hit them at all. So questions like, for instance, did Jesus really say this or that that's represented in the gospels? And the whole issue about what is known as the historical Jesus? They think, well, you know, I know I'm a believer. I read the New Testament. I know it's true. That's enough. I don't need to know reasons for me to be able to defend that. It's enough for me because when I'm, frankly, what I'm often most concerned about is my own personal devotional life. What I'd like to say to you is you are going to be constantly encountering and increasingly over the next couple of generations of people. People who do not start from those same assumptions. They're going to start from a set of assumptions that are like, you know, the New Testament is not very trustworthy as a historical document. It does not represent who Jesus really was and taught. And so what you have to do is call them through it and find out the stuff that Jesus actually said. And, you know, you're a, you're a Protestant. That means that your theology comes from Paul. But you haven't read the rest of the New Testament. You don't understand that, you know, that's just one side of things. And that's a later side of things. And Paul is different than what Jesus would have taught. That's what's commonly taught in universities today. And it's what's increasingly being taught on the media. ABC News. Peter Jennings. The last two years, he's done two different reports, one on Jesus. And then another on what was it called, Jesus and Paul or something like that. And he interviewed the major scholars, meaning university scholars, meaning people who are extremely skeptical. There are some wonderful people working in the universities, but there's some who are extremely skeptical of the New Testament. And because they say the controversial stuff, that makes for great news. And he interviewed them and he gave them hours of airtime. News were two hour shows. And you know how many millions of people saw that? And you know, when you're sitting down in a counseling session across from somebody and you want to point out something in the gospel that Jesus said, you know, that would speak to their life. What might be going on in their mind, what's going on in your mind is this is the Lord Jesus Christ said this, so you ought to listen to it, obey it and heed it. What's going on in their mind is did Jesus really say that? And if you don't know that they're thinking that and if you can't speak to that context, you've lost them right there. This is very important. So this involves critiquing current scholarly approaches to New Testament studies and develop a working methodology. So this is both a you know, a negative and positive reflection on New Testament study today. There's some really good stuff out there and there's some stuff that you have to be wary of. And so I'm going to help work us through that. So we're going to critique, but we're also going to positively state a working methodology of how one can better understand the New Testament and then note the two words. These are intentional historically and theologically. I've very spoken to that a bit earlier. The next class objective, survey the historical context and purposes of individual New Testament books. This isn't to say that we're going to survey all the contents of the books. It's to say that we're going to situate them in their historical context so that you understand how they would have sounded in the first century. Because ultimately what I'm going to say to you is the first place that you seek to understand Matthew or any other book of New Testament is understand what he was saying to the audience to whom he was writing. And I mean, I'm going to be really shocking here for a second and I'm going to have to qualify in a second, but here's the shock, right? He was not writing to you. Matthew did not have you in mind when he wrote his gospel. He couldn't. You lived two thousand years later in a completely different historical context. He was writing to a first century audience and to the extent that you want to understand what Matthew was trying to say, you have to get into the situation of his first century audience, okay? So that's why we're going to understand the historical context now. The qualification is under God's providence, under God's super intending work of his Holy Spirit, what was said was inspired, it was an errant, it was intended for God's people for all time, but it was intended in very human categories. So you first have to understand what it meant in the first century and then apply it, the timeless truth, the eternal truth of Scripture to 21st century America, okay? Or whatever your context is if you're coming from Taiwan or other contexts, okay? So we're going to talk about the historical context and also the purposes of New Testament books because often it's better to interpret, for instance, Matthew in terms of his broader purposes. Now that you see that one of the themes in Matthew is worship, I guarantee, when you read that word again, and you're reading about the person who's coming to Jesus and bowing down and worshipping him so that he will heal them, you'll read it differently because you'll see this as part of a bigger plan in Matthew himself. Third, to consider major theological themes in the New Testament author by author and more particularly delve into the riches of each New Testament author's understanding of the cross of Christ. Moving from history into the theology, the theological themes author by author, what are some of the main themes in Matthew, all right? Now I mean we could spend the rest of this whole class just talking about Matthew or Luke or you know you name the figure. We could spend a whole class on that, I mean not just an hour, I mean like you know until December. So we won't have time to develop everything. So my approach is going to work on two levels. We're going to quickly survey the broader theological themes and then we're going to take one area and we're going to mine it repeatedly in each different author, New Testament author. And that area is the cross of Christ, the death of Christ. What did Jesus intend by that? How did it, what was it understood by the different New Testament authors? So we're going to broaden theological themes book by book and then individual ones, right? And let's see, promote appreciation for the organic unity of New Testament theology in the midst of the diversity of its expression. Having looked at the individual theological themes author by author, then I'm going to argue that because this is all super-intended by the Holy Spirit, by the mind of God, because this is the early Christian church, they knew each other, they were interacting with each other, for all those reasons we expect and we see in fact that the theological themes in each of the authors cohere, they all come together. So Matthew's not the only one to emphasize worship, although he does do so. I think this is very important because for instance it serves as a potential corrective to our own personal theologies. Chances are you have, if I said, okay, pick for me the book that has most influenced you theologically, the book of the New Testament. Chances are 80% 90% of the people in this room can immediately come up with a title. It might be different than your neighbors, but you can come up with a title. It might be Romans, it might be Ephesians, it might be Philippians, it might be the gospel of Luke, but there's one book that especially stands out to you is one that you are really interested in, okay? And that's good because you probably know the theological themes that are in that book, but the Lord gave us a canon, a whole collection of books and the themes that are in Matthew are complemented, supplemented and re-emphasized in other New Testament books. So for instance, if your book is Romans and your doctrine of salvation is all about justification, which is a good thing, you don't have a complete doctrine of the salvation of Christians. There are other aspects of salvation, other aspects of the cross of Christ that will encounter in other books that will help us have a fuller understanding of what Jesus was really doing when he was crucified, okay? And so we need to integrate the unity of New Testament theology in the midst of its diversity of expression. And then finally to provide a climate which encourages the practical application of New Testament teaching, this is going to be a lot of academic work. And I can't guarantee you, I'm not going to bring these real snazzy illustrations in, so you're going to go home and you're going to be like he wants me to pray more, you know? That's not necessarily what I'm about. I'm going to be about broader issues of method and such things, but I also wanted to have practical import in your Christian life, so we'll do that as well, all right? Are there any questions about any of those objectives? That's what this class is about. Any questions at all? If you look on the syllabus, it's like lecture six or something like that, it's on historical context or crucifixion. And it's a really good question. I should repeat it for the sake of those who might not have heard it. The question has to do with my refots on Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ, which just came out in the last year. And I will come to talk a little bit more about the historical context or crucifixion in a few weeks. So it's a great question, and I'm always glad for questions that make people want to look forward to a future lecture. I'm also glad for the opportunity to say, let's do it then. So we'll get to it. That's a good question. Other questions that might have to do with the objectives of the class? You know, one of the reasons I spent so much time talking about this is when you walked into this room, you may not have known what the class was about. And then probably some of you walked into this room assuming that you knew what the class was about and it's not about that at all. So I really want to say, okay, whatever you thought the class is about, this is what we're really about. And it's good for you. It's really good for you. I promise. And I can also promise you this. The normal, I'll just say it outright, the normal kind of emotive reaction that people have to this class is for the first three or four weeks they are completely perplexed. Maybe not completely, but largely perplexed. I mean, what is all this stuff? This is not what I came here for. And by the end, you know, by December, hopefully everything's fallen into place and people are sitting there going, okay, I see why we did all of this stuff at the beginning, okay? So if that's your reaction to this class, that's fine. It doesn't bother me, okay? Hang in there for 13 weeks and see how we do at the end of 13 weeks, okay? Some of you, this might be scratching in a chart where you are because where we're going to start is the situation in contemporary American scholarship. That's where we're going to start. And for some of you, you've seen that in your religious studies class or in another context, but some of you haven't seen it. And so it's not an itch you have, it's an itch you out of half. Okay, in terms of actual class requirements, there are basically three, we can go through this very quickly. There's a midterm exam, a final exam, and a paper on the theology of the cross in 1st Peter, and then finally class participation and completion of readings. Midterm final exam, I will give you study guides. They will have to do with anything that comes up in class and the main themes in your reading, okay? So you will want to keep up with your reading so that by the time of the midterm exam you have read all the reading that you should have read before the midterm because I'm, you know, I could ask you for a reading report but I always find those a little dodgy because some people skim through the book and they say they've read it. Some people read it in detail, spend, you know, five minutes on a page, you know, and there's no way to measure that. So the way I choose to measure it instead is, it shows up on the exams. Midterm final exam, the final exam is not cumulative, so really it's an exam on the first half of the class and exam on the second half of the class. The paper on the theology of the cross in 1st Peter, we will talk about in a few weeks. I'll have a handout for you, you'll get a lot of details as to what's involved in that but basically you are going to approach 1st Peter and look to see what theologically as he trying to say when he writes about the cross. That's what the paper is going to be about. Class participation and completion of readings, I think I may stay in your course description that the typical protocols here at Covenant Seminary are that you do not miss any more than a week's worth of class. So three class sessions, or two class sessions actually, I think I put down three, it's really two class sessions. Without permission of the instructor or extenuating circumstances, you know, death in the family or something like that. So I expect you to be in class. Secondly, I expect you to do the reading, okay? And in fact, if you don't do the reading or if you're not in class regularly then I have the right to penalize you for that, subtractor from the rest of your grade. I don't want to hold that as a big stick. I just want you to show up for class and I want you to do the reading, okay? Any questions about the requirements for the class? Do you need this? Give me.

There are three books that are part of the class. The two kind of polls of this class are represented by a book by FF Bruce called New Testament History and the other book by George Eldenland, a theology of the New Testament and the book is called New Testament History and Theology, right? So that's why these two books. To look at the New Testament in its historical context and then also to understand theological themes author by author, okay? So that's why we have the two books. Roughly speaking, you will finish the majority of this book in the first half of the class and the first half of this book in the second half of the class, okay? However, if I can encourage you to look at the syllabus here, the course description and you will see week by week what I've expected you to read, okay? There will be about 140 pages from this book by Carson Nguyen Morris, which is an introduction to the New Testament. So you'll be using that as well but the other two are the major books that we're using. Now, the way that your course description is lined up, that you'll notice right under I think tentative class schedule, it gives a little caveat there, that warns you that the readings there are listed in terms of when they show up with regard to what I'm going to be covering in class, right? However, this is very dangerous because one class then might have 150 pages of reading and another class might have 25, okay? So in other words, if you just try and read class by class for class by class, you could really get yourself in a pickle because suddenly you realize I've got to do 150 pages in two days and whereas other times it's very light. So the smart student looks at this ahead of time and realizes, okay, I've got to read this much by the midterm exam and this much by the final exam and then parcels it out for yourself more evenly than that. But I want you to know where the readings go here with what we're doing on doing in class, okay? Any questions about the readings in the class?

Yes, David, right? Right. Sorry, yes. The Carson book, second edition of Available. When I put the syllabus together back in November, they weren't sure. Now they've just listed a publication date as August 2005, so it will not be available for the classes I'm teaching it right here. Probably, and I should speak to the folks on the video here, by the time they're actually writing and reading this, you will be reading the second edition and I'll have just the pages for reading for that. But you guys will be reading the original. This one right here. Yeah, okay? Yes. The question has to do with the level of detail that you should do in readings and how that's going to affect your tests and how much you need to recall from it, basically. I would say, for instance, if there's a chapter that you're reading or a major subsection of a chapter and it hits two or three main themes, you should know what those themes are, okay? I may not ask you these little personality details, you know. But I will, in fact, I won't ask you personality details. I'll be looking for the bigger themes in chapters or major sections within chapters, okay? So, if I were you, how would I read the book? I would do more than just run my eyes across the page. I would read it for major points. And anytime I see a major point that's coming out, I would do one of the two things. I would make a note on a separate piece of paper or my preferences to mark up my own books. You know, put a little pencil mark off to the side as a key point and then I can quickly go back through it when I study for the exam. It's a good question. Any other questions? Very good.

Let's move into something else with your permission. I want to get a started on what we're going to talk about next time. You know, did you guys get the tape changed? We'll finish at 9.15, say seven more minutes. Okay. All right. Good. Sorry. So the rest of you know, the tapes are an hour long and the classes an hour and 15. So they will be having to change the tape midway through. So we'll have this irritating pause in all of our classes where, you know, I can't say anything worthwhile because they're changing the tape. So, all right, here we go. Contemporary New Testament studies is largely influenced by contemporary literary studies. So if some of you are English majors or especially if you are a French major and you know something about French literary criticism, this is huge for New Testament studies now. A quick end to understanding where New Testament studies is at is to describe the three major kind of players when you read any text but especially the text of scripture. Okay. You have an author, you have a text, and you have a reader. Okay.

These are the three major players. Obviously the text is in a person and the other two are persons, but this is this is what's involved. Roughly speaking. As a reader, do you have direct access to the author? Does anybody know the Apostle Paul? Just wondering. No? Good. If you did, you know, we'd have to talk about theology. All right. Author text and reader. That is to say that the author produces a text but the text, the reader only interacts with the text. You can't directly interact with the author, right? Does that make sense? All right. 50 years ago, the main assumption in interpretation in general, I mean, you could be studying Melville, Moby Dick, and the assumption that what you would do as a good English major there was when you read Moby Dick, you were interested in what Melville was trying to say. So you're interested in what the author is trying to say. Okay. And there would be a variety of kind of sub disciplines that would affect that. So, for instance, some people who would be very interested in like Freudian psychology would be interested in the Freudian dimensions of what Melville was trying to say. And so what his life experiences, you know, as a youth, how that impacted his writing and his stuff. But the point is that they're applying psychology to Melville. But they're really trying to understand Melville. Okay. You're trying to understand the author 50 years ago. Since that time, people have begun to ask, I mean, can you really get to know Melville? I mean, he's no longer around. You can't ask him any questions. You can't get him in the counseling room and actually try and delve into some of those dreams that he's had or experiences he remembers from his infancy or anything like that. And point of fact, the idea is if you're trying to leap into the mind of the author, is that ever possible? I mean, Beth is here in the front row. Okay. Beth just says something to me, you know, something random. You know, she likes football. Okay. You know, well, I can try and understand all the deep implications of that. And what that really means for the life of Beth, but I can never leap into her brain. Can I really know if I've gotten it right? That's the idea. This is known as the intentional fallacy. With the author intended to communicate, I can't know what the author intended to communicate because I can't leap into their brain. Okay. Now if that's true of Melville, then it's all the more true of Matthew or Paul. I mean, we have even less writings from Paul and Matthew. So to claim that we know what Paul was really intending to communicate is pretty presumptuous of us because we are not in his brain. That is known as the intentional fallacy. So therefore in modern studies, in literary studies especially, there is a major break here from the perspective of the reader. The author has offered a text, has authored a text, but we don't have the author. All we have is the text. And so what's our job as readers? Our job as readers is simply to understand the text without speaking of what the author intended to do with the text. Okay. So that's one of the things has been said. And again, this has to do with the intentional fallacy. Next. As people began to look at the text as it stood alone, it became more and more obvious to them what has been known for years, which is that sometimes Beth reads Matthew chapter two and I read Matthew chapter two and Tamiko. Tamiko. Sorry. Tamiko. You read Matthew chapter two and we might get little different things coming out of it. In other words, different readers approach texts and they approach them differently. And so the text then doesn't seem to constrain what the reader wants to get out of it. In fact, it seems to be more what the reader brings in with him or her in terms of what the reader gets out of it. So one of the things that came out of all this is what's known as reader response criticism because no longer am I really even trying to come up with the absolute objective interpretation of the text. The interpretation of the text that all right thinking people would agree is the way to understand the text. It's not possible. It doesn't work because we are subjects approaching it, which means we approach it subjectively, which means we approach it with our own presuppositions, which means that our presuppositions color what we see in the text itself. Therefore, what one seeks to do in reader response criticism is not ask how should one, how ought one to read the text. It's how do I read the text? I read the New Testament open it up. What am I getting out of it? And whatever I get out of it is assume then to be valid. Valid not for everybody, but valid for me. That's where we stand in contemporary literary theory. Now, can I point out that this is very disheartening at times because we like to think that the Bible has a meaning and it's a meaning that is written into it ultimately by the superintending work of God and that there's an objective meaning that critiques our theology and our understanding and we can be wrong when we seek to understand the Bible. That's what we like to say. But literary theory and approaches is saying, no, that's not even possible. It's a false hope. So don't even try. So the question I want to have for you is how do you respond to that? And honestly, I'm going to ask you that question in two days time. I'm going to ask you to interact with that question and I'm going to shut up. I'm just going to say, what do you think? Okay. So one of the reasons I've signaled to you what we're going to talk about on Friday is I went to you to ponder this just a little bit. Do you agree that when the reader approaches the text, the reader is just reading in his or her own presuppositions and that's the best they can do? Do you agree that the text is so abstracted from the author that we can no longer speak of the intentionality of the author in approaching the text? If you agree, why? If you disagree, why? That's what I want you to be able to say. Okay? By the way, I also want to note that probably the majority of people who are sitting in the pews, though they don't agree with the presuppositions there, it's still how they approach the Bible. Because you know, most people approach the Bible. They open it up and it's, what do I get for my life in the text of scripture? So whether they know it or not, they're doing reader response criticism and they're assuming almost in the way that they're conducting themselves, that there is not an objective truth in scripture that should be the point to deciding the validity of what they hold to be true about that passage. So most of the people in congregation are really there, even if they may not be there in terms of their philosophy. Okay? Well on that very keen note, I look forward to seeing you guys in today's time.