Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I'm here with the awesome John, by the way. Hey, John.

Hi, Hank.

John, we're in our third lesson in first Corinthians this week. We have an amazing guest with us.

As we've been watching Paul address city after city, I'm noticing that he's quite the encourager.

And then he gives these doctrinal exposés. What are you noticing about Paul? What are you looking forward to?

Today, I'm really looking forward to this whole chapter on the resurrection and arguing that there's going to be a resurrection. I was thinking Hank about the messages in our recent general conference and how many I looked at my wife like listen to all of these talks about Easter and the importance of Easter and Easter should be bigger than Christmas and this idea that without the resurrection, there wouldn't be a Christmas.

Christmas, there wouldn't be a Christianity. So I look forward to that a lot. Like I said, John, we have an incredible guest with us. He's been here before his name is Dr. Dan Peterson. Dan, what are we looking at with Paul's message to the St. in Corinth?

Well, maybe a little bit of background about the city to which he's writing. I've called it a Navy town. It was a port town and and cities like that have reputations often deserved sailors put into port and they're looking for some wise.

Life and night life and so on and the city of Corinth was known for that. It had a port on each side. It was right at the narrow isthmus of Corinth. So you could get to two different seas by going overland. If you were willing to do that, it was hard. But in ancient days, it might be better than sailing one of those coast hugging boats that were always running a ground and losing all their cargo and their men.

So it was a bit of a wild town, but the Christians had an outpost there, a branch in the city. But it seems to have been sort of under siege all the time by the moral attitudes. So some of what you get in the epistle to Corinthians, the first one, first one that we have, by the way, there seems to have been another that's lost and I sometimes wonder what would our Christian friends do if we were to discover that first epistle to the Corinthians, the real first epistle.

Would they say, no, the Bible is complete. God breathed. That's it. We don't want anymore. Don't care if it's from Paul. But if we found an indisputably authentic Pauline letter. Man, I think most of us, certainly Latter-day Saints would say, wow, fantastic.

But I sometimes wonder if you have the dogma of the Bible alone and the Bible as we have it alone, no new books, if that wouldn't cause a problem. So we know there was a letter before this one, but this is the first one we have.

So Paul had been there. He'd spent some time in the city. He knew it by now. He's living in Ephesus, but he needs aware of problems in the branch. So he's trying to deal with those and we don't know what the makeup of the branch was. I'm sure there were some Jews in it, but there may have been some people from pagan backgrounds.

In it as well. Their views of life after death and resurrection and so on were very different. That's why he's addressing some of those questions, I think. It's quite clear he's responding to questions. You see that in in the 16th chapter, which is otherwise kind of a throwaway chapter in a way. There's not a lot of doctrine in there. He's greeting people and personal notes and signing his own signature. It's clear that someone else wrote the epistle for him.

And then he writes the last little bit so that people know it's authentic, but he'll say now as for this and as for that is kind of like he's ticking off a list of questions that had been sent to him. So as for Apollo's as for as for this as for that. So he's winding down and he wants to make sure he covers everything that they had written to him about, but this is a great letter. And the nice thing is it's pretty much undisputed. There are some where they argue was this really Paul or was it not, but first Corinthians.

Just about everybody says yes and it's also pretty early 55 AD maybe 54 somewhere in there and he'd spent somewhere on 49 or 50 in the 51 possibly in current.

He's writing to a place that he knows in a branch where he kind of knows the people and he knows the problems.

We've seen Paul cover divisions, moral behaviors, spiritual gifts and now coming up on resurrection, the gift of tongues and resurrection.

John, before we go any further, let's introduce Dan to those who haven't met him before he's joined us last year for some of our chapters in Genesis.

Yeah, I think he joined us twice last year for Samuel too. I think it's so we're thrilled to have him back. He's got a great radio.

It's got a great radio voice. I'll try to talk lower when I introduce him, but then you'll see Peterson has a PhD from the University of California Los Angeles UCLA.

He's a professor emeritus of Islamic studies and Arabic at BYU where he founded the University's Middle Eastern texts initiative formally chairman of the board of the foundation for ancient research and Mormon studies.

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