Hey, this is John at Bible Project. This will be the final series in our How to Read the Bible

Megaseries. We've been walking through different literary genres and sections of the Bible,

learning how to understand them and read them well. In these upcoming episodes, we're going

to talk about how to read the New Testament letters. These are small books in the back of your

Bible written by apostles of Jesus to the early Christians all over the Roman world. I grew up in

a church that almost exclusively taught and preached out of the New Testament letters. We called them

epistles, which is just a fancy way of saying letter, and we like them because they're accessible

and practical. The letters actually become easy and accessible, I think, only when we ignore

their literary form. And when we honor their literary form, all of a sudden we have a way to

account for all of what's there, not just some of what's there. And all of what's there includes

a lot of texts that are really challenging for us to appropriate or understand in our modern

context. And so this is the swirl of challenges that comes along with interpreting the New Testament

letters. If you've ever read one all the way through, you'll find that they're actually

pretty hard to follow from beginning to end. Can't I just take my favorite lines of the letters,

turn them into bumper stickers and motivational posters? Do I have to read the whole letter and

understand the entire argument? Like phase one of just reading the Bible and getting to know it,

you're just trying to figure out what it all means. But the next step is to question that

instinct and to say like, would Paul be pleased that like that's what I'm getting out of that paragraph?

So today we start to unpack the challenges of reading the New Testament letters and we'll

discover empowering ways to read them well. This week's episode is recorded in front of a live

audience in Dallas. This was recorded before quarantine. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

Welcome everyone.

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