Prof: This is Introduction to New Testament
History and Literature.
My name is Dale Martin.
I've been teaching here at Yale for ten years now.
I also was a grad student here in the '80s, in the Religious
Studies Department.
I then left, taught one year at Rhodes
College in Memphis, Tennessee, and then I taught
eleven years at Duke and got in love with their basketball team.
But then I came to Yale in 1999.
This is a course that introduces you to the New
Testament literature, but also the history of other
material from the very first one hundred years or so of early
Christianity.
The first question you need to ask yourself is why do you want,
or why are you thinking about taking this course?
Why do you want to study the New Testament?
What is the New Testament and why should you study it?
The first obvious answer that a lot of people would give is,
"Because I'm a Christian,"
or "I believe the New Testament's scripture and,
therefore, I'm here to learn more about this document that is
scripture for me in my church."
The problem with that answer is before you say something is
scripture, you have to say why is it
scripture, for whom is it scripture,
and what does that mean?
And, in Christianity, when you call the Bible
scripture, what that means is that you're going to listen to
it for the Word of God.
You're expecting somehow the Holy Spirit or God to
communicate to you and to your church and to your community
through this document.
But the text of the Bible isn't scripture in itself,
it's only scripture to a community of people who take it
as scripture.
The text itself, any text, is not itself holy
writing.
That's what scripture means to us.
It actually just means "written stuff,"
from the Latin.
But we take it to mean holy writing, sacred writing.
But the writing itself is not holy.
It's only holy to people who take it as holy.
Now the problem is we're at Yale College.
This is not a holy place.
I know they might have told you that when you came,
but you've learned differently, haven't you?
This is also not a church.
So what does it mean to read the New Testament as scripture
is not something we're going to really pursue in this class,
because this is not a religious community.
So one of the things that--if you're here to learn about the
New Testament because it's scripture,
the class may disappoint you, from that point of view.
Somebody else might say, "Oh I'm here because this
is a foundational document for Western civilization and I want
to know something about the Bible."
There are probably some more seats over here or some of you,
if you need to, can sit on the steps over
there.
If you need to make your way around--can they get behind you?
But what does that mean also, if you say that the Bible is a
foundational document for Western civilization?
Does that mean you can't really get along in Western
civilization unless you know something about the Bible?
And think about that.
Isn't a knowledge of lots of other things much more important
for how you get along in Western civilization than knowing the
New Testament?
For example, it's much more important to
know about cars.
It'd be actually much more valuable for you to know how to
fix your car than it is to know about the New Testament--
right?--if you're getting along in Western civilization;
or how to use computers, or sexual technique,
or how to speak other languages.
There are all kinds of things that it might be very useful for
you to know as an inhabitant of Western civilization;
and the New Testament, you might find out,
would rank kind of down on the list of those kinds of things.
Besides that--okay, let's take a quiz first.
Get out a piece of paper.
This is your first exam.
This'll determine your grade for the rest of the semester.
Tell me if this is in the New Testament, is in the Bible,
or is not in the Bible.
All right?
It's just a yes and no question.
All you need is ten places to write yes or no.
You can even abbreviate and put Y or N.
First, which of these things are in the Bible?
The Immaculate Conception?
Now you may not know anything about the Bible.
If you don't know, just kind of guess,
just make a guess.
I'm not actually going to grade these.
Is the Immaculate Conception something that's in the Bible?
(2) This quotation: "Love bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things."
Is that quotation in the Bible?
"Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things."
(3) At Jesus' birth three wise men or three kings visited the
Baby Jesus.
Is that in the Bible?
(4) This quotation: "From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need."
"From each according to his ability, to each according
to his need."
(5) The Doctrine of the Trinity; is it in the Bible?
(6) This quotation: "You are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church."
(7) Peter founded the church in Rome.
In the Bible, not in the Bible?
Peter founded the church in Rome.
Make a guess.
(8) After his death, Jesus appeared to his disciples
in Jerusalem.
Is that in the Bible?
After his death Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem.
No talking with your neighbor.
>
(9) After his death, Jesus appeared to his disciples
in Galilee.
After his death, Jesus appeared to his disciples
in Galilee.
Tenth and Last: Peter was martyred by being
crucified upside down.
Oh hard one.
Okay, let's go back.
Number One: Is the Immaculate Conception in the Bible?
How many people think so, yes?
How many people say no, it's not in the Bible?
Somebody tell me what the Immaculate Conception is.
Anybody know?
Yes?
Student: Mary's conception.
Prof: Mary's conception.
It doesn't refer to the miraculous conception of Jesus.
That's what often people think.
See, one of the things about this course is you'll learn a
lot about the Bible and early Christianity,
but the most important thing is you learn cocktail party
conversation tips.
>
So think about--you really want to impress that girl you're
with.
"Hey, did you know that a lot of people think that the
Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Jesus?
It doesn't!"
It refers to the conception of Mary as being without Original
Sin.
Immaculate means "without stain."
So it refers to the conception of Mary, by her mother,
Anna, without--according to tradition--without Original Sin
being transferred to Mary; and that's because,
according to Roman Catholic tradition, then she could
transmit the birth of Jesus without Original Sin also.
Now that's not actually in the Bible.
It's part of Roman Catholic doctrine.
It's something that Protestants don't accept.
But a lot of people think it's one in the Bible,
or a lot of people confuse it with the Miraculous Conception
of Jesus, which is in the Bible,
in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew.
Second: "Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things."
How many people say it's in the Bible?
Can anybody tell me where?
Come on, there's got to be some fundies in here.
Student: 1 Corinthians 13.
Prof: 1 Corinthians 13.
Good Sunday School education.
(3) Three wise men or kings visited the Baby Jesus.
In the Bible?
Not in the Bible?
How many people say it's not in the Bible?
You say it's not in the Bible.
Why?
Student: I guessed.
I have no idea.
Prof: You have no idea.
It's not in the Bible.
It's true that wise men or kings did visit Jesus in the
Gospel of Matthew, but it's only tradition that
says that it's three of them.
Why was the tradition developed that there were three kings that
visited the manger of Jesus?
Yes?
Student: The gifts.
Prof: The gifts; there are three gifts:
gold, frankincense and myrrh.
And so tradition just said, "Well if there are three
gifts, there must be three kings."
So that's why we have that.
But it's not in the Bible.
This quotation: "From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need."
In the Bible? Raise your hand.
Not in the Bible?
Raise you hand.
Ah, couldn't trick you.
Does anybody know where it is from?
Yes?
Student: The Communist Manifesto.
Prof: Yes, Marx.
>
It's from Marx.
But a lot of people hear that and they think that's from the
Bible.
The Doctrine of the Trinity.
In the Bible?
Not in the Bible?
Okay, why are all you people saying the Doctrine of the
Trinity is not in the Bible?
That's usually a real good one.
Somebody explain why the Doctrine of the Trinity is not
in the Bible.
You're right, it's not in the Bible.
Student: I thought it was thought up by the church to
explain the paradox of the Son and the Father.
Prof: Exactly.
The Doctrine of the Trinity is a doctrine that developed
post-New Testament times to explain why Christians were
worshipping Jesus and the Holy Spirit also as divine.
So the Doctrine of the Trinity developed in the later
centuries, after the New Testament.
Now some people will say at least the Doctrine of the
Trinity is hinted at in the Bible and that the later church
was correct to read the New Testament to support it.
And that may well be right theologically,
but read historically it's not in the Bible.
"You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my
church."
How many people say it's in the Bible?
How many people say it's not in the Bible?
It's in the Bible.
It's in Matthew 16.
(7) Peter founded the church in Rome.
Is it in the Bible?
You all aren't sure.
Is it not in the Bible?
Ah, more people say it's not in the Bible.
You're right, it's not in the Bible.
It's part of tradition.
It's a very strong part of Christian tradition but it's not
in the Bible.
After his death, Jesus appeared to his disciples
in Jerusalem.
In the Bible?
Raise your hand.
A few people.
Not in the Bible?
You're wrong, it is in the Bible.
It's in the Gospel of Luke and Acts.
After his death, Jesus appeared to his disciples
in Galilee.
Is that in the Bible?
Yes, some of you say yes.
Not in the Bible?
Anybody who's brave enough to say it's not in the Bible?
It is in the Bible.
It's in the Gospel of Matthew.
But now notice, the Gospel of Matthew,
as we'll talk about later, has Jesus appear to his
disciples only in Galilee, not in Judea,
and the Gospel of Luke and Acts have Jesus appear to his
disciples only in Judea but not in Galilee.
Ah, that's an interesting problem we will have to get to
at some point.
Tenth and last: Peter was martyred by being
crucified upside down.
In the Bible or not in the Bible?
In the Bible?
Not in the Bible?
The not-in-the-Bibles have it; it's not in the Bible,
but it's a very important part of Christian tradition.
Now I did the little quiz--these are all things that
a lot of people out there would say,
"Oh yeah, that's in the Bible,
or it sounds like something that should be in the
Bible."
Right?
Most of them aren't, or about half of them,
I think, are not in the Bible, and yet they're very important
for the history of Western Civilization.
They're important for people's conceptions.
They're important for the history of art.
How many paintings are there of Peter crucified upside down,
or depictions in Western Art?
So it's very important for someone to know that there is an
important tradition about Peter being crucified upside down,
but it's not a part of the New Testament.
It illustrates again this idea that how much of this ancient
text is it important for you to know,
on its own terms, in its historical context in
the first century, or how is it important for you
to know in the way it's been interpreted for the last 2000
years?
And what I am telling you is kind of contrary to the way I'm
going to teach this course.
I'm actually advertising against myself,
and there'll be fewer of you here next time,
right?
Contrary to the way I'll teach this course,
which is more on the history of the first century of these
documents and what they meant in the first century,
sometimes the most important thing about the Bible is its
impact on the later history.
And that's something that we'll talk about from time to time in
the class, but it's something you'd get
more out of, for example,
if you studied an art history class,
or if you studied a literature class that talked about some of
these issues in later European times.
I could illustrate with a lot more other things.
For example, if I said, "What do most
people believe about what happens to you after you're
dead?"
And you'd get lots of different answers.
"You're dead like Rover, you're dead all over."
Some people say, "You go to heaven."
Some people--there's all kinds of different things.
If I said, "What do you think most Christian religious
people believe about what happens to you after you're
dead?"
In other words, "Where is Aunt Martha at
the funeral?"
"Well she's up with the arms of Jesus.
She's safe in heaven.
Her soul is there."
Most people would say that Christians or religious people
believe in the immortality of the soul,
and that is part of a good bit of Christian doctrine.
That again is not something that's in the Bible,
really, so--and it's not even the best interpretation of
official Christian orthodoxy.
According to official Christian orthodoxy, the form of your
afterlife existence is the resurrection of the body.
That's what the New Testament talks about, either the
resurrection of the flesh or the resurrection of the body.
That's contrary to what most people kind of assume is what
people believe.
The point about this--and where do they get the idea of the
immortality of the soul?
Much more from Plato.
So again it raises the issue, if you want to know most about
the most influential aspects for Western civilization,
would it be better for you to take an entire semester on Plato
than it would on the New Testament?
I'm saying it might, actually.
The ironic fact is, because the New Testament is
considered more important by people,
there are a whole lot more people who take my New Testament
classes than go over to the Classics Department and take a
course in Plato.
I'm not sure that's the way it should be, but that's the way it
is.
What this does is it brings up this issue of why are you here,
what do you hope to get out of this course?
And I want you to understand the method that we'll pursue in
the course.
My point is to get you to see that when we study this text in
this class, we're not going to be studying
it necessarily as scripture, as the Word of God.
We're not going to be studying it necessarily for how important
it was for Medieval and Early Modern Literature,
for example.
We're going to look at what it meant in the first century.
In fact, what I'm going to try to do is get you to come at the
New Testament from the outside.
I've been teaching this stuff for twenty years,
and I tend to find two basic kinds of students who shop my
classes for the New Testament Introduction course.
One of them are the kinds of students who grew up in a
religious household.
They went to church.
They maybe even have taken a lot of Sunday School,
and so they feel like they know these texts from at least a
Sunday School or a church kind of point of view.
In some ways they kind of feel like,
"Okay, I know what the New Testament is,
and I already know sort of what I think about it."
There are other people who come to these classes who grew up in
a non-religious context; they know nothing about this.
They've never read the Bible, and they come in and they
think, "Well I'm taking it
because I don't know anything about it."
But, oddly enough, because they've been raised in
our society, they still actually come at this text with some kind
of pre-knowledge of the text.
They have a conception of what the Bible is.
They have a conception of what-- who Jesus is,
who Paul is.
And so they're coming at the text already with some kind of
familiarity with the topic, at least in a popular
conception.
Now the reason that is true is because we live in a
post-Christian culture, and both aspects of that term
are important.
It's post-Christian in the sense that it's hard to live in
America without having some kind of exposure to Christianity and
without seeing its influence on our society,
on our politics, on our culture and our art,
and that sort of thing.
But it's also post-Christian because you can no longer
assume, in this culture,
especially in a multivalent, poly-ethnic situation like
Yale, that everybody here is going to be Christian.
So we're in this kind of situation where we have the
hangovers of Christianity still occupying the culture,
without necessarily knowing a lot about it.
So I'm going to ask you to come at the New Testament,
though, from the outside.
If you feel like you know something about it,
put those aside for the moment, because when we do the class
we'll be trying to get you to see this document as if for the
first time, to see early Christianity
completely as if for the first time.
So let's do a little practice run through this.
Come with me now, open up your New Testament as
you're just going to look at it, and we're going to go through a
rushed little survey, through the New Testament.
How would it strike you if you knew nothing about it,
if you had never heard of it before, if you open up the
covers of this book for the first time?
At the very beginning is the Gospel of Matthew,
and it starts like this: "The book of the
origin" (or the genesis is the Greek
word) "of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.
Abraham had a son named Isaac.
Isaac had a son named Jacob.
Jacob had Judah and his brothers.
Judah had Perez and Zerah from Tamar."
And you know how this goes, right?
This is the begats, the famous begats,
that start the Gospel of Matthew.
So-and-so begat, so-and-so begat,
so-and so, and it goes on like this for sentences and sentences
and sentences.
And, as a modern person, you're going,
"What is this?
What's going on with this?"
And then you get to the birth narratives in Matthew,
the stories of the Baby Jesus.
If you lived during the time of Matthew himself,
all of this stuff would seem fairly familiar to you,
the idea that kings would come from far off and see a star,
and that meant that the birth of someone great had been born.
This is actually part of propaganda culture of the
Ancient World.
If you were an ancient person and you picked up the Gospel of
Matthew and you heard these stories about these kings from
the East, following a star and arriving
and finding this baby, that would sound--you know,
okay, this is going to be somebody great.
This is telling you that this is himself a king or somebody
great.
So it would sound familiar to you in the ancient world.
Then you'd go on and read the rest of the Gospel of Matthew.
It's a story of a man who travels around,
giving speeches, sometimes talking to people or
teaching.
He's exorcising demons, performs a few miracles,
he heals people.
And, again, to us in the modern world, if you didn't already
have some exposure to religious narratives like this,
that would sound odd.
In the ancient world, actually, it would've sounded
familiar, because there are other stories
of other kinds of teachers who'd healed and exorcised demons and
performed miracles.
That was not an uncommon way to talk about someone who was
supposed to be great.
But then you get to the next book in the New Testament,
the Gospel of Mark.
Well, it's kind of the same story.
It's shorter, there's less,
fewer teachings in it but it's--
so why do you have the second chapter of this book retell the
same story that the first chapter of the book told?
The Gospel of Luke, same thing.
You get to the Gospel of John--John's kind of different,
it sounds different, there's a different style.
But again it's the same story of this same guy.
Why do you have four different chapters of this book,
all telling the same story?
That's odd in itself, from our point of view;
or it should look odd to us.
Then you get to The Acts of the Apostles.
Now we're back on more familiar ground.
It starts off like the Gospel of Luke,
because it's written by the same guy who wrote the Gospel of
Luke, and in fact it starts off with
a paragraph that kind of encapsulates the way--
how the Gospel of Luke ended.
You know, like TV shows, "Last time on ER."
And this is the way The Acts of Apostles begins.
"Last time in Luke it ended this way.
Now we're going to take up our heroes at their next
point."
Then it starts sounding like a Greco-Roman novel.
And I have to tell you something about novels in the
ancient world.
There were Greek and Latin novels.
Greek novels usually were about a man and a woman,
young, rich, who see each other and fall
madly in love and passionately want one another.
And they might get married, or they might not get married,
but they don't get to consummate their love.
Instead, one of them gets kidnapped or has to go off to
war or captured by pirates, and she's taken off by pirates
and sold into slavery, and she goes all the way around
the Mediterranean, and the young man follows her
around the Mediterranean in chapter after chapter after
chapter.
They always almost connect and almost get to have sex,
and then no, they're--she's bought by
somebody else and taken into another slave job,
or he's captured by pirates.
So the whole novel is them chasing each other around the
Mediterranean, with shipwrecks and battles and
miracles and gods intervening, and all kinds of stuff.
And that's what The Acts of the Apostles kind of looks like.
It's looks like an ancient Greek novel, except it lacks the
one thing every good Greek novel had, sex.
The Acts of the Apostles doesn't have sex.
You might be disappointed there, but you also have other
things that the novels don't have,
such as the Holy Spirit being the main actor for the whole
thing.
But, notice, that would look kind of
familiar to you in the Ancient World.
It definitely looks odd to you in the modern world,
if you don't read it as the Bible, and if you just read it
as literature.
And we also realize that The Acts of the Apostles is
mistitled.
It's not the acts of all the apostles,
it's the acts basically of Paul, and Paul's not considered
an apostle by the guy who wrote the Acts of the Apostles.
This is another little clue here we'll from learn this
semester.
The titles of most of the books in the New Testament were not
put there by their authors; they were put there by later
Christian scribes.
This will be very important.
Then you get to The Letters of Paul.
And is it strange that most of the New Testament are actually
letters?
They're not like modern letters.
They're quite a bit like ancient letters.
They're usually addressed to groups of people,
and they deal with sort of philosophical sounding issues,
and they give advice on group problems.
Then you get to The Epistle to the Hebrews, or,
in what a better translation would be, The Letter to the
Jews.
What's odd about it is that as you read this Epistle to the
Hebrews, you realize two things.
Number one, it's not a letter, it's actually a sermon.
In fact, it doesn't even claim to be a letter;
it looks just like a sermon.
And, you realize this is not really addressed to Jews,
it seems to be addressed to Gentile Christians to convince
them that Jesus provides for them a liturgy that is superior
to Judaism.
It's actually neither a letter, nor is it addressed to Jews.
This leads to an insight, though, by this time,
when you're surveying your New Testament.
These letters seem to be meant to be read out loud.
So what--we'll ask this over and over again in this
semester-- what would it mean to read this
letter out loud in a community, not alone in your dorm room,
or just by yourself, in the library?
Then you get to 1 Peter.
It's written not to one place, but it's a circular letter,
meant to be circulated around.
Then you get to 2 and 3 John, two letters that are written to
"the elected lady and her children."
What does that mean?
Then finally you get to the Revelation of John,
The Apocalypse.
The word "revelation" is just the Latinized,
English version of the Greek word apocalypse.
And apocalypse just means opening up, revelation.
This document is really bizarre.
It's not like anything you've confronted so far in the New
Testament.
It starts off with a narrative about a vision.
This guy named John says, "I was on the Island of
Patmos.
I was in--the Lord's Day.
I started having this vision and this angel appeared to me
and this all happened."
Then it has several letters, seven different letters,
very short letters, addressed to seven different
Christian churches.
And then it goes into this wild videogame, MTV-style narrative
of a heavenly journey of this guy John.
He goes up into the heavens.
He sees the throne room of God.
He sees weird kinds of beasts and animals that had
like--they're bodies of lambs, but they've got horns and
they're bleeding all over the place.
It's a story of catastrophes.
It's a story of a cosmic battle between forces of good and
forces of evil.
It's like several installments of Star Wars.
And finally it ends up with the establishment of a new world and
a new City of God.
Now that's a long way--that's the end of the New
Testament--that's a long way from the little Baby Jesus and
the Three Kings in Matthew, isn't it?
But the New Testament includes all that kind of diverse
literature; 27 different books,
written anywhere from the year 50 to the year 150.
So a hundred-year period of time that these books were
probably written in.
They have different points of view, different situations,
different theologies, different genres.
They use confusing in-house language.
I'll point out that in-house language throughout the
semester, and we'll talk about how it should be interpreted.
And these texts almost defy interpretation by a modern
person, unless you have guidance from a historian and expert like
moi.
Let's do this little trick again.
Instead of looking at the documents from the outside,
let's look at what would an early Christian church look like
if you were just to stumble upon them?
A little imagination.
Let's pretend that you're a seamstress.
You work in a clothing shop in the City of Corinth,
in Greece, in the year 56.
A guy next door to you, named Fred, works in a leather
factory next door.
He has just joined a new club and he's going to tell you all
about it.
First, they don't meet in the daytime;
they meet either early before light, at dawn,
or after dark, at night.
There's only enough of them to fill a decent sized dining room,
but they call themselves the "town meeting."
You're not sure what they do at these meetings.
They don't appear to worship any god or goddess that you can
see.
They use the term "god"
sometimes, but this god doesn't have a name, and that's very
bizarre to you.
Remember, you're pretending you're a Greek person living in
the year 56 in Corinth.
In fact, these people don't look like they believe in gods
at all, they look like atheists.
They have a very high respect for a criminal Jew,
who led some kind of guerilla war and was executed long ago,
somewhere in Syria.
Fred says, though, that this Jew is still alive
somewhere.
In fact, Fred says that the Jew "bought"
him, though you didn't know that Fred was even ever a slave.
In fact, you're pretty sure that Steve wasn't a slave.
So what does it mean that this guy bought him?
At these town meetings they eat meals--
which is not unusual since most clubs in your society eat
meals-- but they call the meals
"the boss's dinner," or sometimes "the thank
you."
Some people say they eat human flesh at these dinners,
but you doubt that because for some reason they seem to be all
vegetarians.
You kind of doubt whether vegetarians would eat human
flesh.
Fred says that to initiate new members into their club,
they "dip them," naked,
and then they "get healthy."
Once you're in the club they call you "comrade,"
and you have sex with anyone and everyone,
because it doesn't matter anymore whether you're a man or
a woman; in fact, they kind of figure
you're neither or both.
That's this new group.
Now I constructed that little picture out of actual data from
the New Testament, and what we have from writings
about ancient Christians.
This was the way at least a good many number of ancient
people saw early Christian groups.
Every one of the little details there I gave--
I won't unpack them all for you now because it would just be
boring and we need to move along--
but every one of those details comes from some interpretation
of a particular Greek term that Christians used.
For example, I said this meal they have,
it's called "the boss's dinner."
We call it the Lord's Supper.
But "the Lord" doesn't mean "God"
necessarily, it means your boss.
So the Lord's Supper, put back into normal Greek
language, would be something like "the boss's
dinner."
Or, as I said, they call it,
"the thank you."
Episcopalians call the Communion, when they take it on
Sunday, "the Eucharist,"
which is just from the Greek word meaning "thanks."
So all of these different things-- the part about it,
it doesn't matter whether you're a man and woman,
Christians went around saying things like,
"In Christ there is no male and female."
What, no male and female?
And some outsiders did interpret that as meaning that
these Christians seem to kind of have sex with each other.
They call each other "brother"
and "sister" and yet they're always talking
about love all the time.
They have meetings at night, in the dark.
Yeah, so there were all these rumors about early Christian
groups like this.
So a lot of these things--I said they call you
"comrade."
Well Christians called each other "brother"
and "sister."
But that wouldn't have been sort of a normal,
everyday way to talk about a stranger in the ancient world.
It would sound somewhat odd, like in our thinking it would
be somewhat odd, or Communist or something,
to call somebody "comrade."
So the language that different early Christians used about each
other, and for themselves,
was sometimes very common Greek language,
but sometimes it would've also sounded strange and kind of
in-house to other people.
In other words, the Bible presents us with a
very strange world, if we approach it without our
normal preconceptions, if we approach it fresh and
from the outside.
This is an ancient collection of documents.
It wasn't all put together right when they were written.
Next time I'm going to actually talk about how did these 27
different diverse documents come to be included in the New
Testament?
That's the whole history of the canon, and I'll talk about that
in my next lecture.
In fact, a good bit of the history of early Christianity,
and the New Testament itself, was to take what was a diverse
group of different people, all somehow being loyal to this
guy they called Jesus.
But they weren't all the same, and they were in different
geographical situations, they had different beliefs.
And early Christianity was an attempt to pull all these things
into one unified movement, in some way,
to get some kind of uniformity of belief and practice.
So this course is actually going to run counter to that
historical tendency to make unity out of diversity.
What we're going to do is we're going to take the New Testament,
and we're going to take the different writings,
and we're going to take them apart.
And one of the major themes of the course will be the diversity
of Early Christianity; in fact, the diversity of Early
Christianities, is one of the ways I put it on
the syllabus.
We will look at all the different ways Jesus was thought
of to be either divine or human or some combination of both.
We'll look at different ways that early Christians dealt with
the fact that this movement seemed to come out of Judaism.
Well, does that mean we're Jews?
If not, what does it mean we are?
We'll look at all the different diversities.
How they treated women, different ways that women could
take a place in this movement.
Or different ways that they treated slaves and other
servants in their households.
How did they react to the politics?
How did they react to the powerful Roman Empire?
We'll take all these different topics,
at different points in the course, and we'll talk about the
diverse ways that early Christians reacted to these
social and cultural issues, and we'll read the New
Testament in light of that.
So what's going on is taking what is a unity,
and pulling apart that unity to see the diversity of this early
Christian movement and these documents.
Now I'm going to pause for a minute and let you ask
questions, or make comments, or throw things,
or whatever.
Don't be shy.
Yes?
Student: Are you going to talk at all about sort of how
the decisions were made to what documents to include or what
documents to exclude?
Prof: Yes.
He asked if I was going to talk about how decisions were made
about what to include in the New Testament and what not to
include in the New Testament.
And I'll talk about that actually the next lecture,
when I talk about the history of the canon.
Why were some books--there were a lot more early Christian
pieces of literature that we know of.
Some we're discovering all the time.
The Gospel of Judas.
You may have read in the newspapers and magazines that a
new Gospel of Judas has just been published,
that some people at Yale actually knew twenty years ago
existed because it was shown to some people here.
But most people didn't know about it.
And it's just been published in an English translation.
Why did the Gospel of Judas not make it into the canon?
We'll talk about those issues next time.
Yes sir?
Student: Are we going to go over the different
translations?
Prof: Are we going to go over the different translations,
and which one is best?
We will raise the issue of translation periodically.
For example, when I talk about the syllabus
in just a moment, I'm going to talk about what
Bible you should bring to class, and I recommend--I did
recommend one particular study bible to the bookstore to buy,
but I'm sort of hoping that not everybody will bring that same
translation of the New Testament,
because sometimes I'll say, "Well this translation
says this in the English.
Does anyone have a different translation?"
And at particular points, when there is something
important about the different translations,
I'll bring that up, and I'll explain every once in
awhile.
That won't be sort of a major lecture in its own right.
It's something that will come up over and over again.
How does translation happen?
How do debates about translation get resolved?
Yes?
Student: Are you going to talk about the Old Testament
at all, either sort of how >.
Prof: Am I going to talk about the Old Testament at all?
I will when it's relevant.
So, for example, next time I will also talk a
bit about the canon of the Old Testament,
and how there are different decisions about that from the
New Testament.
I'll talk about why the Jewish Bible is different from the
Roman Catholic Bible, even with regard to what they
consider the Old Testament.
When we talk about apocalypticism,
and the Gospel of Mark and Judaism,
I'm actually going to--you have to read at least the last half
of the Book of Daniel, from the Old Testament.
And the reason is because Daniel is an older apocalyptic,
prophetic text that was heavily influenced on early Christian
literature.
And I will give a lecture in about two more times on the
history of Judaism in this Second Temple Period;
that is, what did Judaism look like at the time of Jesus and
Paul?
And that will necessitate referring to the Hebrew Bible
some.
So I will every once in awhile.
But I'm not going to--I will, for example,
talk about why did the Gospel of Matthew take this particular
Hebrew Bible text to be a prophecy about Jesus?
And we'll look back maybe and see how that difficult text
would've looked in its original context.
But-- so when it's relevant, I will refer back to the Hebrew
Bible or the Old Testament.
And for those of you who are not aware, what Christians call
the Old Testament is simply what Jews call the Hebrew Bible.
It basically refers to the same document.
We just use different terms, because for the Jews,
of course, Hebrew scripture is not old, in the sense of
Any other questions?
Yes.
Student: Will we be talking somewhat about the
legacy of the Bible on later literature or in the context?
Prof: Will we be talking about the legacies of the Bible
in later literature?
Not as much as I should.
And that's why at the very beginning of this lecture--
you may have come in a little bit late--
I said this course will concentrate on the meaning of
these texts in their early historical context.
Every once in a while we'll bring up an issue of well,
how has this been interpreted over the centuries?
The one time we will get this very strongly is the one time
where you go with your discussion section--
I'll talk about the discussion sections in a moment.
You're expected to all go to the Yale Art Gallery and go
through the Art Gallery, with your discussion leader,
and then you'll do a lot of looking at how are biblical
themes and issues portrayed in later art.
And that may bring up chances to talk about literature also.
If you want to bring up those kinds of issues,
feel free to.
But I'm going to concentrate, in this course,
on the meaning of these texts in their earliest context.
Anybody else?
Questions?
Okay, look at your syllabus.
If you don't have a syllabus--are there any extras
back there?
Okay, well you can find the syllabus--if you want to--there
are some more right here, if anybody needs one.
If you, or a friend of yours, wants to see this syllabus
after the class, and you don't have one,
it's on the Classes v2 server.
So you can go online and get the syllabus,
and download it and print it.
One of the things I want to emphasize, that I've not
emphasized already, is attendance here in the
lectures is very much required.
You will be expected to come to the lectures.
Just because this is a large lecture course doesn't mean you
can skip the lectures.
Even if you're doing the readings from the textbook,
you'll get stuff from my lectures that you won't get
elsewhere.
So you are required to come to the lectures.
The section leaders, once they get to know you,
they'll actually be looking to see whether the people in their
section are missing a bunch of lectures;
and I've asked them to take notes.
If you're missing a lot of lectures, it could affect your
grade.
So please come to the lectures.
There are only three assignments: two six-page
papers, that I'll explain how to do.
One is a exegesis paper, and we'll spend a whole section
discussion talking about what we mean by exegesis and teaching
you how to do it.
Another paper will be a thematic paper on some aspect of
conflict among early Christians, such as Judaism and the Law,
or women, or politics.
And then the final.
There will never be a sit-down final in class.
Your final exam will be basically one or two questions
that I'll give to you ahead of time.
You take it home and you write basically an 8-page,
double-spaced paper on the question,
not doing research--we don't want you to run outside and do
research.
Using the material you've learned in class,
you'll be expected to answer some big questions for an 8-page
final paper that you'll turn in at a date to be assigned.
Procedures for evaluation are important.
To make an A paper in my class, to make an A on a paper,
not only does the paper have to have the right answers and
fulfill the assignment, it has to be written elegantly
and excellently.
Every Yale student has access to free writing tutors.
I don't know if you realize how rare that is,
in a college.
It certainly wasn't available to me or most people of my
generation.
But I know you have access to writing tutors.
You can make an A in this class by writing your paper as far
enough ahead of time that you can take it to a writing tutor
and get the writing tutor to help you get the style better,
and then turn that version in.
That'll be much more likely to give you an A.
If you write a paper that says all the right things,
does all the right things, and yet it's not well written,
it gets a B.
If it's a C, that means it's even worse
written, and Ds and Fs mean you didn't really fulfill the
assignment.
The texts that I've ordered from the bookstore--
unfortunately I ordered them late, but the Labyrinth
Bookstore will have the textbook by Bart Ehrman,
that you can also go online and just order it yourself.
The information is here on the syllabus.
I've ordered the Oxford Annotated Version of the New
Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
But, like I say, you're welcome to bring other
translations, other versions.
When we use the term version, of a Bible, that just means a
different translation of the Bible into English.
So if you want to use a Revised Standard Version,
that is other than the New Revised Standard Version,
that's fine.
The New International Bible.
There are several other Bible translations that are
acceptable.
I don't want you to use the old translations,
such as the King James Version, or the Catholic Douay Version.
Those have too many inaccuracies because they're
just too old.
I also would rather you not use the sort of paraphrases,
like the Living Bible.
But if you want to use other translations,
that's fine.
In fact, sometimes that'll help us because we'll compare
translations.
Don't worry about discussion sections yet.
I'm not sure whether we'll use the Classes server to have you
sign up for discussion sections online,
or whether we will do it the old-fashioned way and have you
sign up on forms that we'll give you here in class.
But we will organize you into discussion sections.
There'll be a variety of times you can choose.
So there'll be options about when your discussion section
will meet.
We'll try to make sure everybody's schedule is
accommodated, and you'll either meet on
Thursdays or Fridays, in discussion sections,
and we'll organize those sections closer to the end of
the shopping period, when we have a better idea who
will be in here.
As I said, the rest of the organization of the class I
think is pretty well self-evident.
The class is organized first to teach you the methods of the
historical critical approach to the New Testament,
and help you learn how to do those through exegesis and
historical study.
And then the second half of the class,
we turn our attentions to more of these issues of disagreement
and debate within early Christianity,
around issues such as Judaism and the Law,
women's positions, politics, and the
interpretation of scripture.
So that's basically the semester.
Any other questions?
Comments?
Outbursts?
Last chance.
All right, if you decide to take the course,
I will see you same place, same time, on Wednesday.