Hey, this is John at Bible Project.

In the last two episodes of this podcast, we have begun a brand new series on how to read

the New Testament letters.

These are small books in the back of your Bible.

These are letters written by the apostles of Jesus, two churches scattered throughout the

Roman world during the first century.

And it's important to emphasize that these are letters, really letters.

We're reading someone's mail.

And I've been thinking about how strange that is.

That part of God's divine word to us is half of a conversation.

I mean, to me, that feels strange.

Maybe even a mistake or an oversight.

Because if these ideas that these letters have are so important for us to understand, shouldn't

we have the whole conversation?

So Tim and I are back in the studio and I had to process this through with him.

Are the nature of the biblical letters a scandal?

Or perhaps?

By learning to read half a conversation, we're actually learning skills that will allow

us to take the way of Jesus into new modern contexts.

We get to watch the apostles take the biblical story and morph it into a cross-cultural

story in language and apply it in cultural circumstances that Jesus did not have to deal

with or encounter.

...