Welcome to another episode of 30 Minutes of the New Testament.

30 Minutes in the New Testament is a 1517 podcast network podcast.

You can go to 1517.org slash podcast and check out all the other podcasts that are living over there.

Eric, today is the day that we begin a new book.

Today is the day that the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it, Dan.

That's right. Yes, we're not going over that psalm, but we are going to dive into the letters to the

Thessalonians.

Yeah, so we're back into some Pauline epistles, and so we're going to see what the

Apostle Paul has to say to those people over in Thessalonica.

That's a good word.

And so we're going to start with First Thessalonians, which will be followed, of course, by Second Thessalonians.

So this is exciting.

I love it.

We get into some Pauline epistles.

Well, it's always such a contrast going from a gospel narrative, which we've been in for a number of weeks with the Gospel of Mark, which is really just kind of straight history.

And then we get into an epistle,

which is doctrinal and dealing with specific heirs in a congregation. And, and you can sort of see

Paul addressing very specific issues depending on the letter that he's written or who he's written

it to. Speaking of that, we should give a little background. Obviously, this is a Pauline epistle. As you already mentioned, it's something that the vast majority of scholars, skeptics and believers alike, that they pretty much all agree that Paul wrote this. You can see this right at the beginning, as Paul mentions that he's writing on behalf of not just him, but Sylvainus in Timothy.

The reason he mentions them at the beginning may be because the Thessalonian church had some question as to why Paul had sent Timothy as a representative to that church instead of him.

And Paul wants to make sure that they know that, hey, if Timothy's there,

...