Bible Study Outlines
When we look at The Gospel of Luke, we understand that the first of two documents, separated in the canon by The Fourth Gospel, are two volumes of a single literary project. We have no manuscripts in which they appeared to be joined, and the early church fathers, who know of their common authorship, treated them separately. Reasons for their separation may have been straightforward. The first volume fits well among the other Gospels. When studying The Gospel of Luke, it would only seem natural to continue into the second volume, The Acts of The Apostles.
Our knowledge of earliest Christianity would be certainly diminished without Paul's two letters to the Corinthians. We find in them a portrait of a community whose life together was a mixture of confusion, pettiness, and ambition, combined with enthusiasm and further. The community struggled to define its identity as the church of God in a complex and sophisticated urban setting. The letters also revealed Paul's relationship with a beloved, but stubborn community, founded by him, a tie that forced him to delineate his full understanding of his mission, his apostleship, and the implications of thefor his authority. We thus meet here, Paul, the pastor and the father of the community.
1 Corinthians(Coming Soon)
In Paul's letter to the Galatians, we find the apostle at his most difficult and exhilarating. In the face of opposition and rejection, he pushes the scandalous implications of the gospel to their limits, leaving Christianity it's "charter of freedom." Here he moves beyond and apparently narrow, parochial problem to the deepest questions concerning life before God. In the process, he allows his own and the communities, personal religious experience to reshape their shared symbolic world in a radical way.
Galatians(Coming Soon)
Ephesians is the least personal of Paul's letters. The standard elements of opening greeting, blessing, thanksgiving, body, and final greeting are all formal. The letter is almost devoid of references to the circumstances of either the writer or the readers. About Paul, we learn only that he is a prisoner. He does not know the community firsthand, but has only heard of it's "faith in the Lord Jesus and love toward all the Saints." No community crisis seems to have motivated the writing of this letter; it's two brief references to false teaching serve as warnings against the possibility, rather than actuality of deviance. The only person mentioned my name is Tychichus, who appears, as in Colossians, to be the one delivering personal news to Paul.
The church Paul, founded at the Roman colony of Philippi was his first in Europe. The community stood behind Paul's work by financially supporting his mission. The gentle tone of the letter conveys the special relationship between Paul and the community. When Paul wrote the letter, he was in prison, but the work of the Ministry continued – if not entirely to his satisfaction – and Paul fully expected to be released. This much is clear. There is less unanimity among scholars concerning Paul's location, the situation he addressed, or even the literary integrity of the letter.
The letter of James still suffers from the marginal status, signed it by one wing of the protestant reformation. Martin Luther did not include it among the "chief proper books"; compared to them, he thought it a "right strawy epistle." since it contained "many a good saying," however, it could be read with profit. Luther disliked James because he thought it contradicted Paul's teaching on faith – righteousness and because it did not have any "gospel character," that is, did not "show thee Christ."
Those who have managed to read James on its own terms, discover in it a writing of rare figure and life, which interprets the "faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory" in a distinctive and compelling manner.