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.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started.

And we're actually at the beginning of a new book.

So I don't have a lot of catch up to the point where we're at to do.

So this is, tonight is primarily, we'll see how long it takes

us, but primarily going to be an introduction, not just to the book of Romans that we're about to

start, uh, but because this is the first of St. Paul's epistles, uh, that we're going to be

reading. It's also going to be an introduction to St. Paul's epistles. So a lot of introducing.

And then in future Bible studies, I'll be referring back to this one, even though it'll take

a while to be posted online. So you'll just have to listen to that every week. So the epistles of St. Paul, the word epistle basically just means letter, but it's a particular type of letter that had a particular form and a particular purpose and particular traditions surrounding it in the first century. So epistles

proper were written to groups of people. Now there are epistles like First and Second Timothy

and Philemon of St. Paul's that we have in the scriptures that were written to individuals. And they're still

called epistles. They're still reckoned among St. Paul's epistles. But properly speaking,

it was to a group. Now this would be true for any Roman person writing letters. Right. So, you know, a Roman

a Roman person writing a letter to Caesar

would be writing a personal letter to the person Caesar. He'd be writing to

Caesar's court.

To his government.

And vice versa, if he sent one to a governor, it would be to the, you know, the governor and the other folk.

And so associated with the writing of epistles, we often have in our head, and this is going to become important, and we'll talk more about this in a minute, when people talk about St. Paul having written these epistles,

...