Disciple Bible Study, 1-8-20, Journeys of Paul, Part I

Yeah, I can put it on the board for you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Well Marcus.

So Marcion is this early Christian uh church heretic.

We decided he's a heretic anyway.

Um well that's not good either.

Marcion is a second uh to third century thinker who actually was very, very influential.

And um what Martian said was um that there's a little bit of weirdness in the scriptures.

Now keep in mind the Bible had not been formed as we understand it.

So if I can give you a little bit of background, because this is all about background.

The Jewish Bible, we don't think is totally formed until around the year 86 of the common era A.D., right?

And there was a lot of disputes about the Jewish Bible, because there's the Sadducees who only read the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and then there's the Pharisees who include books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms, Proverbs.

The Sadducees were really based at the temple in Jerusalem, and we know that was totally destroyed by Rome in 70, which doesn't mean the Sadducees went away, but it meant that they were extremely weakened because they had no more temple to worship at.

This is where we think the rise of the Pharisees and the synagogue starts to come about.

So there's a change from doing the sacrifices in the Pentateuch at the temple to studying about them is as good as doing about them.

And if you're Jewish today, that's still the way you view it.

Reading about sacrifices and studying what that can mean is just as good as doing them.

So most Jewish people today are not looking forward to sacrificing animals anymore.

And that's what we call rabbinic Judaism.

Most scholars, he said it's murky about Pharisees.

Maybe not so much as he lets on, but it is a little bit murky.

But Pharisees, remember, believe in a resurrection of the dead.

They read the prophets and the writings.

They say they're not as important as the Pentateuch, but they read Isaiah, they read Psalms, and there, uh the Jewish Bible gets formed around 86 at a council in Jamnia or Javnah is what most people say.

That's when it's sort of done.

Now, Paul is dead before then.

So in his own lifetime, there's debate about what belongs in the Jewish Bible.

What about the New Testament, right?

Well, the New Testament doesn't get fixed until the year 385.

385, Common Era or AD.

A lot of books, I shouldn't say a lot, two or three books of our New Testament barely made it in.

Like James.

That was on the razor's edge.

People didn't want to let James in because of a couple of reasons.

They weren't sure it accorded with grace because it talks about faith and works, and faith without works is dead.

In fact, Martin Luther in the German Bible put James after Revelation.

So he changed the order of the books.

Martin Luther hated James, and people in the 300s weren't sure what to make of it either.

A book that almost made it into the New Testament, thank God it didn't, is the Shepherd of Hermes.

You can read it.

It's weird.

It's like Moulin Rouge, basically.

Uh it's acid trip-inspired fairies, is sort of what it's about.

Shepherd of Hermos, H-E-R-M-A-S.

You can read it online.

It's totally available.

Um, and it's about a bunch of different visions that a shepherd has.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's just really like trippy, dream, vision, allegory sort of stuff.

Almost made it.

Didn't.

Marcion is before the scriptures are formed.

Okay, so he's writing in the second century when different Christians are using different books.

So to be really clear, when Martian's writing, some people only read the Gospel of John and none of the others.

Some people read the Shepherd of Hermes and some didn't.

So there's a lot of division.

Now we don't realize this because we often think, aha, the Bible got put together and everybody degreed.

No way.

No way.

Martian's writing when the Gospel of Thomas is being used in Egypt and nowhere else.

And by the way, if you want to know why the Gospel of Thomas didn't make it into the Bible, it's because it was only used in Egypt.

One of the criterion criteria, I just should tell you what they are, when they made the scriptures at the Council of Chalcedon in 385 was how widely used are books of the Bible?

So if it's only used in Cairo, it's not gonna make it.

Was it written by an apostle or by somebody who knew Jesus?

So you see the letters of Paul.

Paul didn't see Jesus except for the resurrected one.

They make it in, right?

But these other books, like Shepherd of Hermes, not written by an apostle, doesn't make it in.

So it's not eyewitness testimony.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Now James is the brother of Jesus.

So that's somebody who knew him while he was alive, right?

So that claim is good.

There's another book that almost made it in called First Enoch.

It was taken for granted.

People were reading that left and right.

There's a lot of legend that goes behind the Hebrew Bible and behind the New Testament.

It's an interesting read, it's a little weird too.

Didn't make it in, but for a lot of Christians it was influential, and they did continue to read it.

Okay, so Martian's writing and thinking during all this time, and he does what we do today.

Why are there four Gospels?

There should just be one.

Like in Luke, Jesus says, blessed are the poor in spirit, but in Matthew he says, Blessed are the poor.

Which one is it?

Martian also is under the influence of something called Gnosticism, which is a which is this idea that there is special secret knowledge.

Now I'm gonna make it sound silly when I tell you this, but um it's sort of like um Masonic rites, like the higher you go, the more you know, the more you can transcend.

Okay?

What Martian decided is that since the Gospels all contradict each other, just throw them out, and let's just go with what Paul wrote, not the things that Paul was associated with, but the things that he wrote, so that everything could be very clear and coherent and there wouldn't be differences.

He gets judged a heretic.

Although you can see Martian actually is a great engineer.

He's very linear in his thinking, and he was very, very influential because a lot of people wanted to know how do we just have like a clear guidance.

That's still true today.

People want clear guidance, people don't want ambiguity in their spiritual lives because the rest of their lives are full of it.

I I I'm really sure this is true, which is why I think very um flat versions of Christianity tend to be the ones that are growing.

Because life is unsettling enough as it is.

Don't come in here and tell me the scripture can mean four different things.

I just want to know one thing.

What do I do?

Instead of there's ambiguity.

Yes or no?

So then how does the church refer to itself as a Pauline church?

Well, um, I suppose it's because, and this is really important that he brought up in the video, if you read all the Pauline epistles, and we're going to, you'll find about one story about Jesus.

It's in 1 Corinthians, where Paul talks about the Lord's Supper.

You need to remember that Paul's letters are written, all of them are written before the first gospel is written.

So Paul is dead by 64.

Mark doesn't come out until after that.

So Paul is presuming people know enough stories about Jesus.

What Paul's trying to say is here's what it means.

So we it's interesting, right?

The first Christians focused on what it meant before they focused on what happened.

Because there's some presumption that what happened was already somewhat known.

Okay?

So Paul's written before the Gospels only has the one story about Jesus from the Last Supper, and mostly Paul talks about what that means.

Not what Jesus did, but what it means.

Therefore, I think that's why people call this a Pauline church, because again, Paul is the one who gives us this vision of what does it mean for Gentiles, for Jewish people, what is following Jesus.

And did you see there's there's three different words we even read in Acts.

Christian is the newest word.

Older than that is the way, right?

First called the way.

Or in I'm trying to remember the accusation.

Uh it's Festus makes it the sect of the Nazarenes.

The sect of the Nazarenes.

Okay, so we have a couple of labels for Christianity before Christian.

Christian doesn't show up until around the year 75.

It shows up in a letter from Pliny the Younger.

And Christian means little Christ.

But before that, the way.

I don't know if I'm actually giving you a helpful introduction here or not.

What we think, and he just to mimic in the video, that there are a few letters Paul definitely wrote.

And then there's some letters that were written, we called them deutero-Paulines, probably written by his students.

And then there's a third group called pseudo-Paulenes, as in they claim to be written by Paul, but they don't sound like him.

And how do scholars make that argument and how important is it?

I can at least tell you how they make the argument.

One is they pay attention to diction and syntax, right?

So I'll tell you the word choice in 1 Timothy is not the kind of word choice in Galatians.

It's harder to see in English, but it's easier to see in Greek.

Sentence structure in 1 Timothy, not like it is in Galatians.

Okay?

Even more different is 2 Timothy.

So 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy even vary from one another.

So almost every scholar will tell you Paul wrote Galatians, Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians.

That's a Paul job.

Almost every scholar would tell you, 1 Timothy is a Deutero-Pauline, 2 Timothy is a pseudo-Pauline.

Now, what does it matter?

It's not about saying, well, that's fake, it's not as good.

The truth is it's in the scriptures, so how do we contend with it?

What it is trying to give us, I think, these labels where it's going to start to become helpful is either Paul is having a conversation with himself, he's having a development of thought, or after Paul's gone or in Paul's absence, the conversation continues.

I would put some emphasis on the second idea because to be honest, I hope church is a place where the conversation continues, right?

Because hey, a lot's changed since then.

Like stem cells.

I mean, there's none of that in there.

Now I have brothers and sisters in the Lord who believe it is, but I'm gonna tell you I disagree with them, right?

There have been some technological advances, there's been some cultural shifts.

So I have brothers and sisters who say, hey, um, there's this discussion here about homosexuality, but again, I would tell you we have a totally different mindset about homosexuality now compared to them.

Then it was men on young boys as a way of mentoring.

I mean, it was basically pedophilia.

There was no consent.

Now we think, okay, well, there's this potential for consenting adult relationships.

You decide whether that's different for you, but in my head, those are very different categories, right?

Consenting adults is very different from non-consenting children.

Oh, those are the categories he tried to lay out, right, in the book, and there's and there's March and Martian the heretic.

Now, you're gonna hear things like uh, again, Gospel of Thomas is Gnostic, but but Paul is a hundred years before Gnosticism.

Part of the reason we know the Gospel of Thomas is later than all of our Gospels is Gnosticism wasn't around before the year 100, 110.

So Thomas is real later, Paul is much earlier.

I mean, Paul is written within, you know, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, these are the earliest books of the New Testament that we have.

They're written within 20 years of Jesus.

Well, when in Paul exactly what it is, it's hard to know if it means only the Pentateuch or if it means also the prophets and the riots.

Because remember, the Bible for Paul as a Pharisee was different from the Sadducee, by the way.

And sometimes we don't realize there's this ambiguity.

It may be helpful for you to know that Paul's name changes.

So Paul in Greek means small or humble.

Remember in the Bible, your name is who you are.

It's not just like a moniker, it's it's describes your character or your life.

Small or humble.

That's what he claims he is, right?

Saul, Hebrew, means asked for.

So he went from being the one asked for, the one who killed Stephen, to being small or humble.

And that's quite a transformation, right?

Uh one last bit, they talked about scripture, you know, originally uh Jewish brothers and sisters, and they still do this with the Pentateuch, they're carried on big scrolls.

Your reminder they're on scrolls so that you don't have to touch it because you're not allowed to.

Right?

The paper is holier than you are, so if you touch it, it'll defile you.

Um there's another way of doing it that they they figure out, which is you don't have to have these big old veal skins, vellum.

That's where it came from, enormously expensive.

The way they got vellum usually was like a stillborn calf.

They didn't slaughter calves, it's a huge loss of income, right?

But so books are really expensive because of the vellum.

Well, the way they they move forward with it was um you could take smaller pieces and you could stitch them together on the side.

It's not called a book, it's called a codex.

Because it's basically a scroll that's been chopped up, or it's made from the bits, you know, when they trim the ends.

So letters get written on these little cheap scraps because even the scraps are really expensive.

And our New Testament is written completely in capital letters, no lowercase, and no spaces between words.

It's jammed together because paper was so expensive, um, you had to make, you didn't have room for spaces.

I hope that makes sense.

So that you could carry that around.

Now, when Paul writes a letter, and all of these things we're gonna read are letters, they're written to churches, and sometimes we get confused about what a church is because we're used to church now.

Churches were um not allowed to be public places.

So it was against the law to have a church.

So they were home groups, and how big the church could be depended on how big the home was.

We have some research that says, you know, in the catacombs in Rome, this is like slave dwellings where a family of three had maybe 16 square feet to live in.

What they would do is pull up partitions and combine rooms.

But you need to think that a house church might have had 15 or 20 people.

So when you hear, ah, the church in Ephesus, please do not think of a cathedral, do not think of a standalone building, think of about 25 folks.

25.

And those 25 folks had their own bishop and overseer and their own elder, that's a presbyter, and their own deacon.

That's like three people out of 25.

So we we don't get bishops having authority until 325.

We don't get vestments, we don't get circular knaves or bishops' chairs until 325.

It's really important.

These are home groups, study groups, they do meet on Sundays, the Lord's Day, the first day of the week, but they may also have met on Friday night on Shabbat.

Okay?

Women are leaders.

Lydia is the leader of a church.

She bankrolls it, she's got the house.

Depending where you are in the empire, women can own property, they can have businesses.

In Jerusalem, no.

In Macedonia, yes.

So it all depends who's running what.

Lydia is wealthy, she's a dealer of purple cloth.

That means basically she sells garments to um the Roman elite.

To senators.

No, Lydia lives in um Philip.

Forgive me for not knowing this off the top of my head.

Um, okay.

Oh, she lives in Macedonia in Philippi.

Yep.

So she would have been arguably the head of the Philippian church at the time.

So in Jerusalem, women were the capital, but in Macedonia they were not.

Correct.

Now they weren't the same as men, but they could own their own property, they could independently own businesses.

We don't realize that.

Right?

But keep in mind, these are different kingdoms, one empire, so there's states' rights back then as there are now.

We also may not realize there's no police.

It's really important.

So when you go to a judge, it happens at the city gate.

The judge may or not be a paid person, may or may not be.

It could be the head of the barracks, for example.

Trials, though, are kind of straw trials.

They're not really formal as we understand a judge and a bench.

You need to think more wild west.

If you make an appeal to the emperor, now you're getting into a formal trial system, which Paul ends up doing.

But the other ones that it gets, nope, they just happen by uh, you know, again, the captain of the guards or the elder at the city gate.

All arrests are citizens' arrests.

There's no police going around patrolling the streets.

The world worked like that for a long, long, long time.

Which we forget.

Flogging.

Flogging is something that happened normally.

If you were arrested, it was understood that you just couldn't even tell the truth until you were brought to the edge of life.

So they didn't torture you to get information, they just beat the junk out of you and then they'd ask you questions.

It's really important to hear.

It's a totally different understanding now.

We think about like, oh, okay, like maybe there's interrogation technique.

No, the technique is you beat somebody to the edge of their life, and then they can tell the truth.

So you don't ask them, and if you don't like what they say, then you beat them.

No, you just beat them.

And then you ask them.

And this is standard.

Prison.

Don't think that the public was paying for jails.

By and large, they weren't.

Think dungeons.

How do you eat in a dungeon?

Your friends bring you food.

If they don't, what happens?

You die in jail.

When Paul goes to Rome and he's a prisoner, think house arrest.

Now they didn't have those, you know, umklet things.

But you're sort of kept if you leave your house and they'll kill you.

But you can live comfortably in your own home.

If your friends are rich, you eat well.

Notice that some of the people are hoping they'll get bribed, right?

Particularly King Agrippa or Portius Festus is hoping he'll be bribed.

That's normal.

Hey, I'll bribe you, maybe the prisoner gets more privileges.

But don't think they have a prison system like we do.

That would have been expensive.

Rome didn't want to pay for that.

Take care of yourself.

Maybe one last uh two last things to say by introduction, and I've talked way too long anyway.

Um Nero becomes emperor of Rome.

People think he's nuts.

He did not persecute Christians in the whole empire.

Did not.

We've heard ah, Christians were persecuted throughout.

There appears to be a couple of local persecutions, not empire-wide, until we get to the year 298 when Diocletian persecutes Christians throughout the empire.

So there is a Christian persecution down to 298.

What did Nero do?

He burned down Rome so he could rebuild it.

And basically his own peers said Nero burned down Rome.

And he picked a scapegoat.

He picked Christians, and so he punished Christians in Rome not for being Christian, but for arson.

Why did he pick them?

They were a new group.

A new group.

So when you come to religious matters, you're either the polytheist and you worship the pantheon of gods.

And by the way, you could be Hindu and I could be a Roman polytheist.

We'd have no problem with each other because when you're a polytheist, there's always room for more gods.

I think it's fine.

You could be Jewish because your religion was old.

Because it was an antiquated religion, it was given respect.

But now is then Dianetics, scientism, that's bizarre.

Those people are crazy.

That was the approach.

So these new Christian people were thought of as new age religion people.

They were thought of as antisocial because they didn't give sacrifices to the emperor, which meant they were hurting, actively hurting the empire.

Easy to pin something on them.

They're in such a minority.

But don't think that Nero went out killing Christians.

He only blamed the Roman ones for committing arson.

Paul might have been killed in that group.

Apostle is a word that's used instead of disciple, right?

That's what they said.

But please hear that when we meet Aquila and Priscilla, that in Greek, Priscilla always comes first.

It's always Priscilla and Aquila.

Priscilla is called an apostle, and because her name comes first, she's more important than her husband.

And I noticed in Acts 19, Priscilla and Aquila taught up.

That's right.

Yes.

And we'll see that show up in Galatians too.

Like that's in chapter one, that you'll see all the three of these people.

Okay, sorry for the long monologue.

I don't even know if it was helpful.

We read the Acts version of, so we're trying to get some chronology about where the letters are going to come from and how they're going to come, right?

So Acts definitely not written by Paul, definitely not.

We usually give credit to Luke for this.

There is a switch in Acts from Paul did this, he went, to we went.

So we presume that Luke was on this ship with Paul, and then it switches back to third person again.

So there is tense, I mean there is person change during uh Acts.

So part of it's eyewitness, part of it is recorded.

Let me ask you there would be two different people writing?

No, well Luke is writing about Paul from what he's heard and compiled, what Paul's told him, and then Luke's writing firsthand information about what he did with him.

And then it switches back.

We read a whole bunch, so this is the time for your questions instead of my monologue.

Or your thoughts.

It seemed like you had these governors and then these were the prosecutors, and then you could appeal, and sometimes they were saying, Oh, you said you wanted to talk to Caesar, then they had to take him all that way, which took years and years, and created other disasters, which were quite an opportunity.

I mean, I just kind of wondered about how the system worked and what kind of rights you had.

Yeah.

So again, you need to think that locally you have no rights, and that it's up to the local magistrate who might be the commander of the barracks, or might just happen to be the oldest citizen in town.

Again, there's no patrols or police by and large, but if you riot, then the Roman Legion is going to come down on you and it's going to be really bad.

If you were in Rome.

No, anywhere.

So we're all in the Roman Empire.

Oh.

Everywhere.

Like even in Jerusalem.

This map here doesn't show Rome.

And I'm thinking it's interesting that this was the known world.

Um where where is that?

Because I'm not that familiar with that part of the world.

Oh, this the Near East?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, this is empire, and yeah, you know.

Okay, so you you do see the boot, right?

You see Italy.

Wait a minute.

On the very far upper left.

Yeah.

There's the boot of Italy.

So just travel up the heel and you'll end up in Rome.

Okay.

And and this is it in general, what happened, right?

Is Alexander, that was Alexander's empire, and then Rome took all of that and added some to it.

So, okay.

So add modern day France, part of the southern part of France, add all of Italy.

Um maybe you're wondering why doesn't it go further in Egypt?

Because there's not much down in Egypt.

There isn't much.

They end up taking Ethiopia as well.

What about Saudi Arabia?

There ain't much in Saudi Arabia.

Um so this gives you an idea of what Rome takes.

You'd have to add Spain to it as well.

They end up there later, not yet.

Not yet.

Not till uh Hadrian builds the wall in like 180.

So it takes a while to get up there.

Okay.

Alright, so you go back to who who is it that who's who's your judge, I guess.

Okay, so Caesar, there's right now there's one Caesar.

Later there's gonna be four.

Right now there's just one who's seated in Rome.

It's supposedly a republic, but there's an emperor.

So it's the veneer of a republic.

It really is more of a dictatorship.

Was that wasn't Nero at the time, was it?

Well, when Paul dies, it's Nero.

When Jesus grows up, it's probably Tiberius.

There's a couple of transitions between Tiberius and Nero.

Tiberius is mysteriously dead in 34.

Well, yeah.

So, I mean, it's not I don't know as much as you do.

So Paul said, I want to talk to Caesar.

Yeah, and the only way he could do that, according to Acts, which says is he's a Roman citizen.

Yeah, he was a Roman citizen.

So the way you need to hear this, the way that the law works, right, is that if you're local, you're subject to the local authority only.

So the the Harris County has complete jurisdiction over you.

Doesn't matter, you you have no one to appeal to, there's no Supreme Court.

Okay?

So you don't like your sentence, too bad, it's already been carried out in your debt.

Now, the only exception is you either you belong, you're a Roman citizen, which you either were naturally born into, at some point you had to buy your way in.

Which is sort of like thinking everybody is born in Harris County, some people buy themselves into the United States.

And that's the difference between a state law and a felony, like a federal felony.

If you belong to the federal system, you have rights local people don't have.

You can appeal a decision to the federal level, whether that's a tribunal who represents the Caesar or Caesar himself, and it's always a man, so himself is right.

Okay?

You're supposed to be given free passage to see to seize Caesar.

We don't know how often this is invoked, but Paul certainly seems to do that.

So again, if the local tribunal, local tribunal uh or or you know, garrison commander gives you a sentence, you can say, I'm a Roman citizen, as long as you've got some proof of that.

Yeah, which you did.

He said, Why are you treating me like that?

Are you going to beat a Roman citizen without examination?

How'd you get to be a Roman citizen?

I had to pay for mine.

That's right.

And Paul was born, which means somebody paid for his.

You know, you somebody down the road had had to buy in because Paul isn't from Rome, he's from Tarsus, which is in modern-day Turkey.

Um, the other thing that's helpful to know is that the Empire has all these cities, but then there's things called free cities, which pay a special price, and then they are allowed to make some of their own laws.

So as long as the money's coming, certain cities have special rights, if if that makes sense.

And didn't uh the town curses help one of these Caesars with a war or something?

Yeah, and and and that's how they get special rights.

That's right.

It says here on page 134 that Rome's Jewish quarter contain at least nine synagogues.

Would that be a house or no synagogues are allowed to be public buildings as long as they're privately funded.

So a Jewish person could build a synagogue.

Um and that, by the way, is the word liturgy, if you know it.

Liturgy, it's not work of the people.

I mean, it sort of is, but really it's it's um works done by private folks for the public good.

So they don't have, they don't have like a civil planning commission like we have where taxes pay for bridges.

If you need a bridge, a rich person buys the bridge, and then everyone gets to use it.

And that's the liturgy.

Liturgy is work of private folks on behalf of the common good.

So that tells you what we're doing every Sunday.

At your expense, it's for the common good.

So every emperor of Rome was a name Caesar.

Caesar is a title, not a name.

Okay.

But I thought one person had that name, but I guess I'm wrong.

Well, Julius did.

But Julius proclaimed himself the Caesar.

Okay.

And that would explain because I would think if I were looking for somebody to judge me, I probably would not pick Nero.

Well, you didn't really get a lot of choice.

I mean, that's the hard bit.

Now, did the Caesar really hear these cases?

Come no, come on, let's be serious, right?

I mean, that's all he would do all day, is sit in court.

No.

This is, I mean, this is a despot.

Tiberius was was a dreadful person who um cultivated the prettiest lads in the empire, sexually abused them, and threw them off a cliff.

That's how he spent his time.

He didn't sit around and listen and judge fairly.

I mean, you know, what kings do is they leave the ruling of the empire to the council.

Okay.

So you wouldn't go.

Maybe that was a case how we sometimes try to help God.

Like Paul knew he was supposed to go to Rome.

Do you think maybe this was his way of helping God make that happen?

You know how we do sometimes?

Yeah.

It's really possible.

And Paul does have this really strong understanding that he is supposed to suffer for the Lord.

I mean, that really is his own understanding of life, and we hear it a few times, right?

It's kind of his self-image, isn't it?

It is a self-image, a small one.

Remember, that's what his name means.

And he says, look, I've been stoned a couple of times, I've been beaten, I've been beaten with rods, which is different from a regular beating with, you know, a leather whip.

Um, I what else does he say has happened?

I've been poor, I've been hungry, I've been famished.

I mean, he sort of does that.

Yeah, I don't think he's necessarily wrong, but I'm not convinced his call is ours either.

I think there becomes something really dangerous, in fact, if we say God is glorified in our suffering, so y'all should be suffering more.

There's a difference, I think, between suffering in order to do it and suffering because we're sharing and building up life.

So, um, for example, having a baby involves a lot of suffering.

Raising a child involves a lot of suffering, but it's not that um, hey, your baby will be better off if you cut yourself or beat yourself.

You're pouring your life into the child.

And that may or may not even take.

We all understand that, right?

So I think I like to say that if you're up on a cross and no one's getting life, you should get off.

You should get down.

So the price of love is the vulnerability of grief.

I think the efficacy of love is whether or not somebody else gets the life that you're that you're pouring out.

And if the answer is no, then stop.

Just stop.

Martyrdom for its own.

I mean, the word martyrdom means to bear witness.

So the question is, what do we bear witness to?

God hates our bodies, we should hurt them, or our bodies are meant to be enjoyed and shared with other people.

I don't know if that was what you're asking, Gina.

I hope so.

That's a lot.

I need to chew on all that.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Of course.

Appreciate having stuff to chew on that.

Okay, okay.

Um other things maybe we should talk about that we're going to see some more as we get into there.

There's a group of people called the God fearers.

And then we also hear about people called the Hellenists.

Okay?

So, and if you notice in Paul's journeys, the first place he usually goes is the synagogue.

And then he might leave.

Well, the biggest confusion at the time of Paul, and we read it throughout his letters, is what does it take to be a Jewish person?

And you all know the answer to that.

To be Jewish as a man, you have to be circumcised.

If you grow up Greek, circumcision is abhorrent to you.

Like it's not just that it's painful, it's it goes against your fundamental being, that the most beautiful thing there is is the naked male body.

Now, Jewish people disagree.

They believe in modesty.

You can read about this in James Mitchner's book, The Source.

It's a very good chapter in which Greek culture and Judaism have some conflict.

There is a Jewish boy who would like to become Greek and he would like to reverse his circumcision because otherwise he cannot compete in the Olympics.

He cannot perform in the gymnasium because he's got a mutilated body.

Some Jewish people did undergo a terrible operation, frankly, to reverse their circumcision.

Many Greek people, it's not just they were worried about the pain, they were, but they were all, again, this is like going against their native tongue to say you've got to get circumcised.

There was a lot of Greek interest, it appears, in Judaism, particularly in Pharisaic Judaism.

And here's the reason why.

If you're a Sadducee or if you're a pagan, most of your religious duty and obligation in life is bound up on what you do on festival days.

You offer a sacrifice to the gods, you eat it, you go home, make the gods happy.

If you're a Pharisee, God would like to be intimately involved in the running of your everyday life.

So that there's not just a festival practice, there's a lifelong ethic.

Many people were interested in this.

So they would go to synagogue.

We think people were maybe making prayers, but by and large, what they were doing is listening to the scriptures be read and hearing different rabbinic commentation on how that might mean and how that could play out.

Greek people weren't allowed in because they weren't circumcised, so they stood at the door and listened.

Those people who stand at the door are God fearers.

They're interested, but they haven't undergone the rite of circumcision.

We think Paul goes to the synagogue not to actually talk to the people in it, but to talk to the people who are outside the door listening.

Because he knows that's where he'll find the low-hanging fruit.

People who are interested.

And part of Paul's message is you don't have to undergo the rite.

Ain't that interesting?

It's sort of like saying, and I guess I read this somewhere.

This is the table of the Lord, not of the church.

I read that somewhere.

So you get to come because you're already invited.

You don't have to do something to receive your invitation.

That's very liberal.

Very liberal.

And it represents a huge change in Judaism because you have to remember the entrance right to Judaism is circumcision.

If you're not circumcised, you're not Jewish.

So that change is really hard for people to swallow.

Paul doesn't do it himself.

He needs Peter's help, right?

We read about this Jerusalem council sort of business where James, head of the Jerusalem church, now that's James the brother of Jesus, not the brother of John, rules in favor of this.

But does have a caveat, abstain from fornication, and you can't have blood.

So it's not like they go all the way.

Now, our English brothers and sisters, you know, blood pudding and blood sausage, they must not have read this bit.

So they had to drain their carpouses.

But let's remember why that is.

Because I'll tell you the Maasai today in Africa, they drink blood out of living cattle and then they close it up.

The blood's very nutritious, it's full of iron.

Yeah.

They have a different understanding of life than we do.

At the Hebrew time, the life force, the qi, was in the blood.

So if you took that, you were like trying to take the animal's powers.

We don't believe that at all.

I mean, we don't.

People in China believe that if you eat a monkey's brains, you can have the monkey's powers.

People in Southeast Asia believe that if you eat a tiger's penis, you'll become fertile like a tiger.

I mean, we hope you know this.

This is what's happening, right?

This is why people grind up rhino horns, because they want to take the qi of the animal.

Its symbol of strength is the horn or its genitals or its brain, and if you consume that, you get it.

We don't think like this, but people in the world still do.

That's what I'm trying to say, right?

I grew up in South Texas and slaughtering a cabrit for making tamales and other things was not uncommon done in people's backyards.

And the blood was saved for using for making.

Making stew.

It's extremely nutritious.

Oh god, you can sound it was it was very tasty.

Yeah.

And it was very nutritious.

And then I mean then later as I grew up, this is the first time I've I think I've talked about it with strangers in.

Because it sounded later, you think, oh my god, that was so I don't know.

Well again, if you're from Ireland, you eat blood city blood pudding and blood sauce, it was just coagulated blood.

Because that's what they always have for breakfast.

But this is not in our Judeo-Christian heritage, which is why most Americans don't do this.

It's not because blood's bad for us and whatever.

It actually comes culturally to us, right?

That we don't do this.

And here it is.

Fornication.

This is another word we think we get.

I just went to explain to you, you know, in the Colosseum, there's all these arches.

Those are called fornixes.

Fournixes.

And say the way the red light district worked was under a fornix, there'd be a curtain, and there'd be a lady there, or a gentleman.

You'd pull the curtain, and so fornication happens under an arch.

And that's where the word comes from.

Reminder though, it's not just bodies and sex, it's particularly done in a sacred setting.

These are like temple prostitutes.

People are having sex with prostitutes as an act of worship and devotion to gods.

Meat sacrificed to idols.

Remember, all meat is sacrificed to a god.

Just about.

The Levites butcher it for you.

You offer part to God by burning up the stuff you're not going to eat anyway, like the fat here in the hip, right?

And then you get to eat off God's table.

So you take a life and you're rewarded with nutrition and feasting with the God, right?

How do you avoid eating meat sacrificed to an idol?

Well, you just don't eat meat.

That's how you do it.

Or else you have some Jewish person kill it.

It's not like it is now, right?

Nice people ate meat like four times a year.

So really the thing is don't participate in pagan festivals because those gods aren't real.

Now, Paul is going to have a conversation with himself about that.

We'll read it in 1 Corinthians.

That seems like that's kind of maybe a reason to the child sacrifice.

And if you really want some good results, you know, you can have to go to the world.

It depends on whether or not you think you're feeding the God, which a lot of ancient people thought, or if you think you're doing some kind of holy bartering.

If it's about nutrition, animals are fine.

If you're bartering, I'll give you my best, God, you give me something in return.

That's where it takes you to your infants.

And please, we're all prone to that thinking.

God, if I just get an A on this test, I'll become a nun.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff we do.

And it's a direct parallel of God, I'll give you something really big in exchange for you giving me what I want.

And by the way, completely pagan.

The scriptures are opposed to that way of praying, but we do it all the time.

Because we think that God is transactional like we are, and we're wrong.

It's like it in it says uh bring me your tithes and I will pour out upon you the more than you can hold.

That's kind of bartery.

It's transactional thinking, but remember that a tithe then is not what a tithe is now.

It isn't?

No.

It wasn't.

A tithe then, in a pre-monetary economy, was about you feeding clergy because they had no land.

So a tithe was a tenth of your flax and linen and grain so that somebody who can't even grow those commodities can have them and survive.

Oh, okay.

So that would make sense because then your dimple would be stronger and able to well if you don't feed your if you don't feed your clergy, they'll starve and you won't have any.

Yeah, yeah.

But we don't live like that anymore.

I think tithe is an easy moniker for us because some English person a long time ago must have had 12 fingers, which is how we got inches.

But most of us have 10.

It's really easy to take 10% of something.

But please notice that in the book of Acts, Paul's taking a collection for Jerusalem because people gave 90 and kept 10.

People impoverished themselves by living in a communist lifestyle and they burned up all the resources because there were no more coming in, and Paul had to collect money to bail them out.

So the actual earliest Christian injunction is not give 10%, it's give everything.

And we have to settle.

And Paul's gonna do that too.

Paul's gonna say each should offer what they have in their own heart, and remember, God loves a cheerful giver.

Now I've gone to churches where you write your first 10% to the church, and if you do that, God will blank.

That's called the transaction.

I really believe in being liberal in sharing and being generous.

10%, I don't know if that's enough.

It's easy for me to calculate.

How much you should give, I can't tell you.

I know how much it costs to do what we are doing now.

But that is not something we have to do.

I know how much it costs to have this building and upkeep it.

But we don't have to have a building.

I mean, there's no have-to's here, right?

At the same time, I believe in what we're doing, so I hope we will continue to pay for it.

Somewhere in here, I don't remember exactly where, but someone who had been baptized by John Haptus has to get rebaptized.

Uh, has not received the Holy Spirit.

So they got the water baptism, which is one of repentance, but what they didn't get was this new way being.

So they don't get water again, they get hands laid on them.

So the earliest Christians do water baptism and the laying on of hands.

Now you'll see we sort of do that in two ways.

If you see an infant baptism, right, we do water baptism, we also seal them with oil, right?

You're sealed by the Holy Spirit, but also at confirmation, the bishop lays hands on you as another way of doing that.

Um, I've never seen somebody, because I don't belong to the Pentecostal tradition, I don't.

I've never seen the bishop lay hands on somebody and then start speaking in tongues and rolling on the floor.

I've never seen it.

But it happens in the world.

And because they say that's the proof the Holy Spirit is in you, and it is really important.

We're distant from ecstatic spirituality.

We are.

We're suspicious of it.

I can tell you why in a second.

Um, these people were not.

They were very into acts of power.

Like Simon the magician, Paul blinds him, and people are, whoa, he's more powerful than our religion.

Powerful.

Hear that word, powerful.

These acts of power, speaking in tongues, prophecy, miraculous healing, this is what caught people's attention in places like Corinth.

You're gonna read about that as we go through.

Now we say, no, we just pray for people and God does this sometimes and sometimes doesn't.

The early church was really interested in acts of power in which they could put divinity on display.

We're distant from that since oh the late 200s when a guy called Montanus said that he was the Holy Spirit incarnate.

So Jesus was the Son incarnate, he was the Holy Spirit incarnate, hey, he died so much for that, and it's a little bit of a scandal, okay?

Um charismatic Christianity is the only kind growing in the world.

The only kind.

Because people want proof that their spirituality matters.

And matters directly.

I don't know what to make of it, but please know at this time people were very into it.

I mean, look what happens.

Prison doors open, earthquakes happen, chains pop off.

Most of us don't go through our day expecting those kinds of things to happen.

We expect to God work slowly and inwardly and make transformation.

Okay?

I'm not saying one's right and one's wrong, but I am saying this is in general very different from what we usually think of as the normalized Christian life.

And how is it up to every Christian person?

I used to be a herb like me a hundred years ago.

One of our members was out.

And his wife said he had appendicitis.

But he said, uh, so we prayed for him.

I can't remember his name.

And he told us later on, he said, I was up in that hospital, and he said, and all of a sudden I felt like throwing that bed through the window.

He got better.

About the time we prayed for him.

I have experiential stories like that.

And the reason I don't know what to do with those stories is I have times that that has not happened.

So we all have to figure that out.

And some people say prayer is something we do so that God can change us.

Uh so I think there's, you know, uh sort of like a six-layer dip.

All the layers can be very now, listen, there's things that don't belong there.

Like we pray to make trades with God.

That doesn't belong in the dip, right?

But prayer does a lot of different things that all can be very life-giving.

And I don't know that any one layer has got the handle on what prayer is about and what it's for.

I think it's been very helpful in my life.

I think we would probably all securely appreciate the people in this church.

Like in Jeremiah, right?

We read that in Jeremiah too.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

Yeah, it um you know it goes it goes to um it goes to whether you're an essentialist or not.

Well, I think it always invites that question does God have a singular plan for your life that's perfect that you either rise to or you fail to rise to?

Or is God constantly rerouting possibilities according to what we pick?

I think probably the matter.

We all have to make our own decision.

But I will tell you there's this really interesting uh thought I heard.

People, when I was growing up, it was like, well, why did God wait so long to send Jesus?

Right?

And um, it was an interesting thought that maybe Mary was just the first woman who said yes.

And all the other women said no.

So that's a really interesting way to think about this, right?

I mean, God can be really, really patient, particularly if God knows where everything's going.

Um so God can wait until somebody is willing to say yes.

Yeah, and he seems to know that someone is going to say yes.

Eventually.

I think so.

And maybe Paul is one of those people who says yes.

Yeah.

Boy, I don't I'm I'm I'm afraid I'm wasting our time here.

We we do I'll just tack on then.

That we get a couple of other things here which are called like Paul's missionary journeys, right?

So he makes a couple of these, and um, you can memorize where he goes and the fact pared, and we sort of read through those.

Um what we get actually three times in Acts is why it is that Paul is an apostle and not just a regular guy.

He's seen Jesus, albeit the resurrected one.

Now, I don't know if you noticed, each time the story's told, it's different.

So uh you spoke about disciples or they spoke about disciples versus apostles.

Can you explain a little more about that?

So an apostle is a witness, and a disciple is like discipline, like a follower.

Now we can make a lot about those distinctions, but they're very fluid here.

They're very fluid.

We usually talk about twelve disciples, but the name of our book is disciple, because again it means to follow up.

So the goal is that we're also following.

I've met some people who have proclaimed themselves to be apostles, and I just think that's weird because we don't do that.

You know, we we we usually reserve the word apostle for the twelve folk.

And when I say twelve, we take Judas out and put Paul in.

But you've got to keep in mind that there's actually Judas counts, and so does Matthias, because he replaces Judas, and then we've also got Paul, but remember Priscilla and Aquryla are both called apostles.

So there's more than twelve and more than fourteen.

There's just some more apostles.

But I will tell you in modern parlance, when so-and-so says I'm the bishop and like there's one church, it's just sort of strange, or I'm the apostle.

I just strange.

Because it's I mean, in some ways, everybody can be an apostle if they're an ambassador, but we've just sort of changed our lexicography so we don't usually do that.

I mean, again, if you're the bishop of a singular, of one church, this is strange to me because bishop now has come to mean since the year 325, a bishop is overseeing several churches.

So when we say it's an apostolic church, we are from the apostles?

Yeah, so Andy Doyle is I I don't think my bishop in San Diego had this, at least not in his office wall.

Andy Doyle has a like a it's like a family tree, but the guy who ordained him and the guy who ordained him, and who ordained him, him, him, him, him, him, back to Jesus.

Wow.

So the apostolic tradition says Jesus commissioned these twelve people, they commissioned people, they commissioned people down through the ages.

So the apostolic succession means somebody has been commissioned by the laying on of hands all the way back to the Lord.

And theoretically, what it means, right, is this unbroken tradition.

I'm okay with that theory.

How exact we can be, I don't know, but why not?

Why not?

I'm sure that's the case.

So-and-so said, you'll do fine, go on.

You know, I'm sure that happened.

And so Paul claimed that he was an apostle because he he was contacted by the risen Christ.

He saw the risen Christ, and what's interesting is he was blinded by the light.

So he was touched by the light, yeah.

I'll tell you, there's a lot of people who are blinded by the light.

Really?

Yeah, and they're still blind.

Because they say Jesus said this and that and the other, and there's no way.

I mean, the the Jesus I would follow would never say that God punished the U.S.

on 9-11 because of the ACLU and the NAACP.

So I'm sorry, in that moment, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were blinded by the light instead of having their visibility enhanced by it.

And sometimes we're blinded by the light, and God help us if those scales don't come off so we can see in a new way.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really that's just that's that's very prophetic.

That's really true.

Well, it has to it has to be the case, and again, so that I don't sound too nuts, right?

We don't pray for our candidate to win and humiliate people.

That is the wrong way of prayer.

We pray for our officials, elected or appointed, to serve justice with compassion.

That's what we do.

And if we say Barack Obama is God's chosen person, sorry, we're blinded by the light.

If we say Donald Trump is God's light to the nations, we're blinded by the light.

It's not right.

Our hope is not in any political person, our hope is in God guiding our hearts.

This is our hope.

So, Paul, blinded by the light, needs a miracle to become unblinded.

Each time he tells a story, it's different.

Like in the third time he tells a story, why do you kick against the goads?

That didn't show up in the first two accounts.

So it's helpful to remember, it's in the same book we hear Paul's conversion three times.

It's different each time.

I'm not trying to say it's wrong, it's storytelling.

It depends on your audience.

And by the way, as Paul lives, he figures out more of what his conversion means.

And this is something that we don't do very well in the church I grew up in.

We say, look, if you change your position, that shows you're inconsistent.

But I think a different way to think of it is Gandhi once changed his position from A to B within a week, and one of his opponents said, Look, last week you said this, and now you're saying this.

And Gandhi said, Yeah, because since last week I learned something.

And that is really, really helpful, I think, particularly when we think about Paul.

It's not even about, oh, if you're telling it different, then like you've made it up.

It's you're telling it different because you've had different experiences and you're looking back at this memory with new experiences, so of course the memory means something different for you.

I mean, I I I've read some great research on this.

Every time you look at a photograph, you remember it differently.

Every single time.

Because of the mood you're in, what's happened since then, whether or not you still are in contact with those friends, do you still have that shirt?

I mean, all of that sort of business happens to us because we continue to make meaning.

But I do want to point out this evolution because I think it's really important as people say, Well, look, you know, your church ordains women, and the earliest church didn't.

It did.

But um that's not the big deal.

The bigger deal is, well, I learned something since then.

Well, and when you and while Paul of Embassy said consistency is the goblin of wood of minds.

Yes.

And I think scripture would say that too.

And I and I want us to pay attention now, is now it's really important.

We're gonna have to decide when we read Paul's letters, are they a uniform, systematic theology and way of being, or are they conversations with people who are trying to figure out what it means to live a new life?

When you have conversations, you're able to change a point of view and contact, particularly in context.

We're gonna see this, I put to you, when we read 1 Corinthians.

There's a lot of conversations Paul even has with himself.

At the end of some of this, you'll say, What does he really even think?

Because he said this, but maybe not that, and sometimes this, and then he comes back to the beginning, and what is it?

And remember that's a very Jewish way of thinking.

Not to make a ruling, but to come and disagree and have a conversation and to come back anyway.

To come back.

Do you notice Barnabas is the patron saint of lost cause people?

Barnabas is the only one who will have anything to do with Paul.

Everybody else thinks he's toxic.

Barnabas brings in John Mark.

John Mark leaves and goes home.

Later he wants to bring him again.

Paul says, no, and Barnabas says, look, go your own way.

I'm giving this guy another chance.

Isn't that interesting?

Patrons say the second chances.

That's Barnabas.

We decide whether we want to be people like Paul who don't give second chances, huh?

Or Barnabas.

Neither way is wrong.

Just notice they're different ways of doing ministry.

Paul benefited from it, but he won't he won't give it.

I don't know if that makes sense.

But then later on he did.

It's funny, isn't it?

Because since then he learned something.

I mean, this is really great.

But you know, there aren't times in ministry where, hey, I can't give you a second chance right now.

Right?

You embezzled money from the church.

I can't give you your job back until you've proven you're worth taking the risk on.

I mean, that's very sensible thinking.

But Barnabas is the guy who believes the good in every person so much that they give them opportunities not to fail, but opportunities to succeed.

And we need both kinds of people, don't you think?

They often are in conflict with each other.

But we need them.

Some of us do that with our kids.

You know, you just change the parameters.

Um maybe one last thing to give you an idea here.

Um Paul goes to Athens, they call him a barbarian.

And just a reminder: a barbarian is someone who says bar, bar, bar, bar, bar all the time, which means they don't speak Greek.

Paul speaks Greek.

And linguistically, remember, everybody should speak Greek.

When Paul goes to Jerusalem, maybe they speak Aramaic.

Paul speaks Hebrew, which nobody does, because Hebrew is a dead language at the time of Paul.

So when Jewish people read the scriptures, real scholars read Hebrew, but common folks did the scriptures either in Aramaic, they heard it, or they did it in Greek.

Reminder, the Septuagint is the Greek translation it took 70 rabbis to make.

Every time Paul quotes the scriptures, he quotes the Septuagint.

But when he makes his defense in Jerusalem, he does it in Hebrew, which is why everybody's quiet.

Half the people probably had no idea what he was saying.

Because they didn't speak that.

They spoke Aramaic or they spoke Greek.

So really what he's doing is showing off that he's learned.

Does that make sense?

Learned it, I guess that's the way I should have said that.

Um, well, we read through the details.

Next week, we're going to get to read some bits and snippets.

Greetings.

It's going to show us some form letters.

What we may not realize is that every one of the letters of Paul has typical elements like a salutation, a conclusion, and we're gonna get to see that by reading snippets from several.

Don't panic.

Don't panic.

We're gonna come back to all of them.

Thanks for staying with me today, and uh, we'll talk about form letter writing next week.