Hey, this is John at Bible Project. Right now on the podcast, Tim and I are discussing

how to read the New Testament letters. These letters are short books near the end of

your Bible. They're letters from the early church fathers like the Apostle Paul, Peter,

and the written to emerging Jesus communities around the Roman world. Now if you're like

me, these letters are actually really familiar because, well, they're kind of the most approachable

books in the Bible. They're easy to preach. They've got a lot of inspiring verses that

make good bumpers, tickers, and motivational posters. But one thing we've been really

hammering on in this series is that these are letters meant to be read as a whole.

It's reading the letters as a grab bag of inspiring verses. I think that's not a helpful

practice. However, you once you read through the whole letter and understand how it all

works, there will be certain lines that pop. And so reading in context in the situational

context doesn't prevent you from having inspiring Bible verses. What it will do is actually

help you understand the New Testament more. So today on the show, we're going to look

at the situational context of the New Testament letters. Meaning who are the people that the

Apostles were writing to? What were they going through? What was their world like? And

as we peek behind the curtain, we'll discover there's a lot going on. Ah, here's interesting.

Fact. What Americans call first and second Corinthians. People in the UK call it one

and two Corinthians is actually two and four Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians chapter

five, Paul says, in the earlier letter that I sent to you, and then what you find out

is that they wrote a letter back to him with all these questions. Then instead of writing

a letter, he came and visited in person, and it went terrible. You hear about this in

second Corinthians. They had a huge fight, and they were really rude to him and insulted

...