Four Wrong Ways to Study the New Testament | Revolutionary Bible Study

That’s what should have happened back at about 300 A.D. Someone should have put Paul’s letters together in the order in which he wrote them, but they never did. So, I would like to acquaint you with what happened and help you understand why we have ended up with four wrong ways to study the New Testament and have not had a proper way to study Paul’s letters, nor even a large part of the New Testament.

There are 14 of the 27 books of the New Testament that come together to tell a story that spans from the year 30 A.D. to the year 68 A.D. Everything that happened during that period is of the greatest consequence. Now, folks, most of the New Testament was written also during that same time. In fact, all of the New Testament was written between 30 and 70 A.D., with the possible exception of Revelation. So, it behooves us to know what happened between 30 and 70 A.D. And Paul’s letters fall within 30 to 68 A.D. Those two years, by the way, were very easy to fill in.

But let’s go back. We now have circulating in the Roman Empire Paul’s letters written by length. There is no connection between the letters. Therefore, each letter is treated as a stand-alone document. Now, let’s add another ingredient.

Let’s say it’s the year 300 A.D. Paul’s letters are circulating. They are circulating where? They are circulating in the Roman Empire. Now, put yourself in that era, and if you were an educated person during that period of time, you would be exposed to the one and only kind of education that existed in that day, and that was a Greek education. And the heart and soul of a Greek education was a philosophical education. If you were to learn anything in the Greek way of educating the human mind, it would be primarily philosophy. You would study Homer, who was a storyteller, but mostly you would study Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and a few other lesser lights such as Zeno—and I’ll not mention the rest of them; that’s enough.

Each of these men wrote treaties—shall we call them books—that were stand-alone. They had no father, no mother, no brother, no sister. Each one of them stood alone. Now, here comes Paul’s letters. Here are educated people, educated in the Greek world. There are 13 letters by Paul, and they don’t make any sense whatsoever concerning their being connected. And, of course, the one that’s leading the 13 is the book of Romans, which, by the way, just as bad luck would have it, was the only letter Paul ever wrote that was mostly a treatise.

So now comes the Greek mind. Here’s a Greek that is saturated in the writings and education of the Western man. He is converted to Christ and comes to the book of Romans. He looks at it. He treats it as a philosophical work, and with his intellectual, logical, linear mind, he takes that book apart almost as though it had no soul, no context, no surroundings whatsoever. And he overlays his philosophical mind on top of the book of Romans.

Now, dear child of God, that’s the way Romans have been treated to this very day. I am a student of and a graduate of…hold on your hat and don’t think poorly of me…basically a Greek education. Or, to put it another way, I’m a seminary graduate, and it’s amazing what we could do, even with a simple little book like Philemon, and turn that into a philosophical, and then gradually, over the passing of centuries, it became something new, the daughter of philosophy, which was theology.

You take a little book like Philemon – it’s got less than 30 sentences in it – and what do you come up with? Philosophy. Theology. A soulless, cold-blooded, intellectual, logical, didactic look at a very passionate, beautiful letter. And so there arose the first wrong way to study the Bible, or the New Testament: the study of Paul’s letters from a philosophical and later theological viewpoint.

Context was not even considered. All those people mentioned at the end—something that was lost to us. From, say, verse 8 all the way to the end, except for chapter 16, we have a theological treatise. The soul is gone. 1 Corinthians—well, there are some personal things in there…a mention of some people who lived in certain places and certain things they did. Most of it’s at the end of the letter, most of it’s in the last eight or ten sentences, but ah, the philosophical, the theological.

And so it was, we began to study all of Paul’s letters in a totally theological way. There was some redeeming grace and mercy there. There were no chapters, and there were no verses, and there were not very many educated people. Most folks were illiterate, and all writing had to be done by hand, which was enormously expensive. So, most treaties of that era had only one or two copies and were lost to us.  About the only ones that survived in large numbers were writings by hand—I’m being correct here, many others survived, but not in large numbers—were the writings of Tertullian and a gentleman by the name of Origen, and there was a reason for that.

Origen had an extremely wealthy man backing everything Origen wrote. He had an entire room full of scribes making copies of Origen’s writings and paid some people not only to copy those letters…I’m sorry, philosophical treaties…but to distribute them throughout the Roman Empire. So, we’ve ended up with Origen and Tertullian, both of them with a strong Greek background. Although Origen wrote in Greek, Tertullian wrote in Latin, it still comes out the same way.

And so, we were not too cursed with too much writing of that day until about 1200, when the church stepped in with its money and began backing the writings of a gentleman by the name of Thomas Aquinas largely. Referred to by his students as “the bull” because of his large neck, his books were hand-copied from the coffers of the Roman Catholic Church and distributed throughout its domain. And so there grew up the philosophical, the theological marriage of the writings of Paul, in which every one of Paul’s letters was a stand-alone theological treatise. Then, about 1205, a young man named Stephanus had chapters added. Well, between handwriting and nothing more than chapters being added, we were not in too bad a shape.