Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher

in the Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Now we'll talk about the even shorter epistle of St. Paul to St. Philemon.

This is actually, this epistle was actually written much earlier.

We've talked before about how St. Paul's epistles are organized in order of length, from biggest to smallest, not in chronological order.

And with some exceptions, like they put first and second Corinthians together and first and second Thessalonians and first and second Timothy.

But in general, they're from long and so short.

So the epistle to St. Philemon is last only because it's the shortest.

We'll get into Hebrews next week when we start talking about Hebrews.

But the earliest copies of Hebrews, the earliest copy of Hebrews that we have

is actually part of a collection of St. Paul's epistles, and it's not at the end.

It's right after Romans, because length.

It's been moved in our modern English New Testaments based on people's belief that St. Paul didn't write it.

So it was pulled out of St. Paul's epistles.

I'll only comment on this briefly here, but maybe more next time when we start talking about Hebrews.

We kind of take for granted the order of the books in the New Testament.

This isn't what they always were.

Right?

In the fourth century,

most of the Greek Bibles and New Testaments we have

didn't have the book of Revelation at all.

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