Sunday, December 25, 2011

1st Thessalonians

Perhaps the best place to start is the very beginning.  I didn't realize it until I read Ehrman's book but Biblical scholars generally believe that 1st Thessalonians is the first Christian writing of any kind which we have.  If we were going to use the text of 1st Thess. as a seminary or Sunday school lesson what kind of questions could we come up with?  Are there verses which one could use to answer doctrinal questions?  Or when comparing two apparently conflicting verses, what over riding gospel principle resolves the conflict?
The first page of the epistle in Minuscule 699.
[Wikipedia]
I have created a Google doc for our 1st Thessalonians questions.  Feel free to add your questions to mine.  I set it up so you anyone with this link can edit the document, we will see if this work for us.  If you think that you have a particularly clever question lets discuss it in the comments below.

I would encourage you to read through 1st Thess. at least once before you check out what Ehrman has to say . . . it is always best to drink upstream and closer to the source first.  (Any debate with my use of always here?)

Monday, December 19, 2011

How should we do this?

I thought that a discussion of the New Testament would be a great way to stay connected as brothers and to study some very interesting material.  But every journey needs an objective, what do you think our purpose should be?
 
I think that the end result of our collaboration should be some sort of document which we can then use to teach the New Testament for either the youth or adults.  Since I love questions (note that I have asked two already), I think that it would be interesting to collect questions about each Bible chapter we study.  These questions could be of a catechism form appropriate for teaching youth Sunday school or just a list of good questions to bring the gospel doctrine class to life.

What do you think would be a good way to encourage discussion and stay engaged?  What do you think of the blogger forum?  Can you find a better way to organize online?