Hey everybody, this is Tim at Bible Project and welcome to the podcast. Today we are wrapping

up our final conversation in our series about how to read the New Testament letters.

If this is the first episode you're listening to in the series or on the podcast, welcome.

We do recommend you go back and check out all the episodes leading up to this one, but

if you're just going to dive in first right here, here's an introduction. You are probably

familiar with the letters of the New Testament. There's some of the most well-known books

in the Bible and they're full of inspiring one-liners. These are letters that Christians often quote,

just single sentences from, and they're actually are fairly easy to read as devotional kind

of grab bags or you just read a sentence or a paragraph at a time. However, we want to invite

people into a more in-depth and thoughtful way of reading these as whole letters. And part of

learning how to do that means learning the literary context of any given sentence or paragraph

in the flow of the letter as a whole. So today we're going to talk about some of the skills involved

with following a train of thought from the letters beginning to its end in the New Testament.

We're going to give you some tips and skills for how to read the letters more effectively. And

we're going to discuss an interesting question that comes up between John and I about why Paul

sounds so aggressive, even bombastic and arrogant sometimes in some sections of his letters.

Paul was trained in ancient Greek and Roman style of rhetoric and public speaking. And so the way

that he writes is really different from how we might try and develop a line of thought in a

modern Western context. We're going to explore things like that and even more in today's episode.

One thing to note is that John and I recorded this conversation. We were in our office

a little bit different than normal but we think it should be fine. Okay thanks for joining us.

Here we go.

...