terça-feira, 18 de fevereiro de 2014
THE LETTERS OF PAUL WERE APOLITICAL
By: Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
Comparing the text of Romans chapter 13.1ss and I Corinthians 2:6-8 we read that the first text , Paul commends the Christians who lived in the capital of the Roman Empire who were obedient citizens the authorities , even if the Roman government possessed highly contrary ideologies Christian doctrines as the cult of the emperor. Paul recommends that Christians obey the government only when they were disobeying conflict that would undermine the Christian to worship God . You text of the letter to the Corinthians , Paul says that the rulers of these world are ignorant of God's plan , because it knew God would never have crucified Jesus . We should not create expectations about the governments of this world, they are under the influence of many malignant forces , we submit ourselves to any government , not resist it and without leaving an instrument in the hands of governments that often tempt the church to be his support base . Our real government , is the messianic, and await the return of Jesus to reign eternally , even as Jesus taught us to pray : " Thy kingdom come ."
sexta-feira, 14 de fevereiro de 2014
DATING OF BOOK OF DANIEL
VALDEMIR MOTA DE MENEZES
The reality of it all is that we have no evidence that forbid dating from the sixth century BC In addition, the linguistic evidence (related to Hebrew and Aramaic of Daniel) indicate an earlier period to the second century. The fact that Daniel write in the first person from Chapter 7 to the end of the book, naturally suggests that it is the author, although the use of the third person in the first part might indicate that someone else has determined the structure and organization of the book. Thus, I believe that the book of Daniel is prophetic and describes future events of kingdoms, later the prophet's life.
The reality of it all is that we have no evidence that forbid dating from the sixth century BC In addition, the linguistic evidence (related to Hebrew and Aramaic of Daniel) indicate an earlier period to the second century. The fact that Daniel write in the first person from Chapter 7 to the end of the book, naturally suggests that it is the author, although the use of the third person in the first part might indicate that someone else has determined the structure and organization of the book. Thus, I believe that the book of Daniel is prophetic and describes future events of kingdoms, later the prophet's life.
quinta-feira, 13 de fevereiro de 2014
ACTS WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE LETTERS OF PAUL
Although it may be interesting to consider some New Testament books as being written in the second century by authors who imitated Paul's style, I think it is important to bear in mind that credible arguments have been set out which retain the traditional view of dating and authorship. For example, a dating of Acts before 64CE is supported by the following considerations: 1. the absence of reference to events which took place from 66 - 70 CE (ie. the Jewish revolt and the fall of Jerusalem), 2. the absence of reference to the death of Paul, 3. the subject matter accords with the themes of the early church, 4. the neutral attitude of the state toward the church (Christians were persecuted from the time of Nero) 5. the author of Acts shows little or no acquaintance with Paul's epistles, which is evidence he wrote before these were collected and widely circulated. (See Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction).
VALDEMIR MOTA DE MENEZES
VALDEMIR MOTA DE MENEZES
domingo, 2 de fevereiro de 2014
I CORINTIOS - CAPÍTULO SETE
Por: Escriba Valdemir Mota de Menezes
Este capítulo Paulo dedicou-se a explicar os conceitos cristãos sobre assuntos como namoro, casamento, viuvez, celibato, e divórcio. São conceitos básicos e fundamentais, não abrange todos os pormenores da vida matrimonial, mas dá para qualquer um compreender que ser solteiro, só vale a pena de for para ser puro, não viver na imoralidade sexual e principalmente para aproveitar a liberdade de ser solteiro e usa-la para trabalhar mais para o reino de Deus. O casamento é sagrado. O objetivo do casamento não é se auto-satisfazer, mas servir uma outra pessoa como sua cara metade.
Este capítulo Paulo dedicou-se a explicar os conceitos cristãos sobre assuntos como namoro, casamento, viuvez, celibato, e divórcio. São conceitos básicos e fundamentais, não abrange todos os pormenores da vida matrimonial, mas dá para qualquer um compreender que ser solteiro, só vale a pena de for para ser puro, não viver na imoralidade sexual e principalmente para aproveitar a liberdade de ser solteiro e usa-la para trabalhar mais para o reino de Deus. O casamento é sagrado. O objetivo do casamento não é se auto-satisfazer, mas servir uma outra pessoa como sua cara metade.
I CORINTHIENS - CHAPITRE SEPT
Par: Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
Ce chapitre, Paul se consacre à expliquer les concepts chrétiens sur des sujets tels que la datation, le mariage, le veuvage, le célibat et le divorce. Sont des concepts essentiels et fondamentaux, ne couvre pas tous les détails de la vie conjugale, mais donne pour quiconque de comprendre que seul être, le seul valable est d'être pur, pas vivre dans l'immoralité sexuelle et surtout de profiter de la liberté d'être unique et l'utiliser pour travailler plus pour le royaume de Dieu. Le mariage est sacré. Le but du mariage n'est pas l'auto-satisfaction, mais servir une autre personne que votre partenaire.
quinta-feira, 23 de janeiro de 2014
I CORINTHIAS - CHAPITRE DOUZE - VALDEMIR MOTA DE MENEZES
I CORINTHIAS - CHAPITRE DOUZE
- VALDEMIR MOTA DE MENEZES
Dans ce chapitre, Paul apporte la mémoire des chrétiens Corinthiens nous devrions rester ensemble et que chacun n'est pas fier de le don spirituel que Dieu vous a donné et à mépriser tout le moins, il n'avait pas ce don particulier. En vain le Saint-Esprit nous a avertis .... Malheureux, mais la cupidité, la recherche du pouvoir, orgueil, l'ambition, l'arrogance et plusieurs autres faiblesses de caractère ne permet pas chrétiens restent unis. Nous sommes divisés en centaines de milliers de confessions et organisations ecclésiastiques. Catholiques et protestants, pentecôtistes et les églises traditionnelles, ascétiques et libéraux, riches et pauvres, mettant l'accent sur les études bibliques et en donnant la priorité à l'Esprit Saint surnaturel. Humainement nous sommes divisés, mais les chrétiens sincères aimons tous ceux qui font partie du corps mystique du Christ.
- VALDEMIR MOTA DE MENEZES
Dans ce chapitre, Paul apporte la mémoire des chrétiens Corinthiens nous devrions rester ensemble et que chacun n'est pas fier de le don spirituel que Dieu vous a donné et à mépriser tout le moins, il n'avait pas ce don particulier. En vain le Saint-Esprit nous a avertis .... Malheureux, mais la cupidité, la recherche du pouvoir, orgueil, l'ambition, l'arrogance et plusieurs autres faiblesses de caractère ne permet pas chrétiens restent unis. Nous sommes divisés en centaines de milliers de confessions et organisations ecclésiastiques. Catholiques et protestants, pentecôtistes et les églises traditionnelles, ascétiques et libéraux, riches et pauvres, mettant l'accent sur les études bibliques et en donnant la priorité à l'Esprit Saint surnaturel. Humainement nous sommes divisés, mais les chrétiens sincères aimons tous ceux qui font partie du corps mystique du Christ.
I CORINZI - CAPITOLO DIECE
I CORINZI - CAPITOLO DIECE - Valdemir MOTA DE Menezes
In questo capitolo, Paul porta la memoria ai cristiani Corinzi della storia ebraica nel periodo dell'Esodo. L'esodo degli Ebrei dall'Egitto a Canaan è una foto dell'esodo della chiesa nel mondo per il regno dei cieli. Paolo usa figure a simboleggiare le due cerimonie del cristianesimo: il Battesimo e la Santa Comunione. In Esodo ebraica c'erano molti che perirono sulla strada e Paolo ci fa serio avvertimento a non perderci lungo la strada.
In questo capitolo, Paul porta la memoria ai cristiani Corinzi della storia ebraica nel periodo dell'Esodo. L'esodo degli Ebrei dall'Egitto a Canaan è una foto dell'esodo della chiesa nel mondo per il regno dei cieli. Paolo usa figure a simboleggiare le due cerimonie del cristianesimo: il Battesimo e la Santa Comunione. In Esodo ebraica c'erano molti che perirono sulla strada e Paolo ci fa serio avvertimento a non perderci lungo la strada.
I CORINTHIANS - CHAPTER TEN
I CORINTHIANS - CHAPTER TEN - VALDEMIR MOTA DE Menezes
In this chapter, Paul brings the memory to the Corinthians Christians of Jewish history in the period of the Exodus. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt to Canaan is a picture of the exodus of the church in the world to the heavenly kingdom. Paul uses figures to symbolize the two ceremonies of Christianity: Baptism and Holy Communion. In the Hebrew Exodus there were many who perished on the way and Paul makes us serious warning not to lose ourselves along the way.
In this chapter, Paul brings the memory to the Corinthians Christians of Jewish history in the period of the Exodus. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt to Canaan is a picture of the exodus of the church in the world to the heavenly kingdom. Paul uses figures to symbolize the two ceremonies of Christianity: Baptism and Holy Communion. In the Hebrew Exodus there were many who perished on the way and Paul makes us serious warning not to lose ourselves along the way.
segunda-feira, 20 de janeiro de 2014
HOW DID PAUL'S LETERS CIRCULATE?
Analyzed text by Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
---------------------
They didn't circulate as part of a bound book.
We don't have autographs, the original letters.
And we have to remember that Paul's letters were written as an individual
letters aimed at particular communities.
They were often co-written, sometimes penned by a scribe with Paul only
putting his own pen to papyrus or vellum at the end.
We're aware that ancient teachers trained their students in the arts of
letter writing and that there were conventional forms and topoi, just as
we have today--
"Dear so and so" or "I hope you're well."
But at some point, these individual letters of Paul and his co-writers
became part of a circulating set.
They were no longer individual letters aimed at particular communities, but a larger corpus that was understood to have relevance for a broader set of
communities.
When and how did that happen?
The earliest manuscripts we have of Paul's Letters date to the third
century, roughly 150 years after he set pen to papyrus.
It's overwhelming to think more broadly about the manuscripts of the
Letters of Paul.
Scholar David Trobisch writes, "Approximately 800 early copies of the
Letters of Paul have survived to the current day.
No two copies are completely identical."
I'd like to give us a taste of what some of these oldest manuscripts
looked like.
The first way to address the question of how Paul's earliest letters
circulated is to start with what's thought to be the oldest manuscript of
almost all of Paul's letters.
This is called P46 or Papyrus 46.
And part of it is located at the University of Michigan.
And part is in the Chester Beatty Collection in Dublin.
The text is from the third century CE from Egypt.
It's in fairly good shape.
But the outer pages don't survive.
The manuscript begins with Romans 5:17 and ends with 1 Thessalonians 5:28.
Many pages still have their page numbers.
And this is useful, because scholars can figure out then that there were
seven missing outer leaves.
The scribe also miscalculated the amount of paper needed.
After more than half the book was filled, the scribe began to write more
characters per line and more lines per page.
The remainder of 1 Thessalonians, Philemon, and other letters
traditionally ascribed to Paul--
2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus--
can't fit into the remaining 14 pages of the text.
So this is the earliest manuscript of the Letters of Paul.
But it seems not to have contained the entire collection that we know.
They are also four early codices that date from the fourth to the fifth
centuries, not scrolls but codices--
they look like modern-day books--
that contain all or parts of Paul's letters.
The first is Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century.
It contains all the Letters of Paul with only a few pages missing.
The second is Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from the fifth century.
Originally, the entire Old Testament and New Testament were
written onto it.
But in the 12th century, the ink was washed off, and the texts of the early
Christian writer Ephrem were written onto it.
Ultraviolet lighting helps us to see the palimpsest's original text.
It contains portions from every book of the New Testament with the
exception of 2 John and 2 Thessalonians.
But none of the individual texts within the New Testament is complete.
The third example is Codex Sinaiticus.
It probably dates to the fourth century.
And it's the only one of the four manuscripts that still contains all of
the books of the New Testament.
It was discovered in 1844 at the monastery of Saint Catherine in Egypt.
In 1869, it was given to Russia and in 1933 sold to the British Museum.
We can say that it has all of the Old Testament and New Testament within it.
But it also has text that some Protestants today might not know from
their bibles--
2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach.
And it also contains within it the early Christian texts--
the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.
The fourth example is Codex Vaticanus, also dating from the fourth century.
Nobody knows where this one was found.
But it's recorded at the Vatican Library as far back as 1481.
The manuscript lacks 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.
But perhaps, those had been at the end of the manuscript.
Manuscript evidence shows Christians were copying Paul's letters and
circulating them by the third century CE, even as early as 150 years after
they were written.
But remember also that this is a world in which oral
tradition is highly valued.
The early second century bishop Papias, for example, writing about the
circulation of early Christian texts says this: "For I considered that I
should not get so much advantage from matter in books as from the voice
which yet lives and remains." This is also a world of low literacy.
We should picture publication of ancient texts less in terms of copying
and circulation, not so much in terms of a New York Times bestseller list,
but more in terms of people sitting together and hearing
text read out loud.
We're still left with the question, how did early Christians first
evaluate the letters of Paul?
What discussions arose in those first 150 years, and just thereafter, at the
time when the manuscripts are being drafted and redrafted?
Today, it seems self-evident that Paul's letters are important to the
Christian tradition.
After all, they're in the Bible, first of all.
And second, they're imitated in the New Testament itself by letters
written in Paul's name, such as 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians,
Colossians.
Third, there's evidence that Christians were circulating the
letters by the third century.
Even within the New Testament, we have evidence that the letters of Paul were considered scripture by some Christians quite early
in the second century.
There's a passage in 2 Peter in which the term scripture, in this case the
Greek graphas, also translated "writings," does not refer to the
Jewish scriptures, as it usually does, but to Paul's own letters.
"So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom
given to him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters.
There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and
unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other
scriptures." Many early Christians thought too that Paul's letters were
important enough to collect.
But some thought that Paul's letters and his legacy should be
resisted and rejected.
---------------------
They didn't circulate as part of a bound book.
We don't have autographs, the original letters.
And we have to remember that Paul's letters were written as an individual
letters aimed at particular communities.
They were often co-written, sometimes penned by a scribe with Paul only
putting his own pen to papyrus or vellum at the end.
We're aware that ancient teachers trained their students in the arts of
letter writing and that there were conventional forms and topoi, just as
we have today--
"Dear so and so" or "I hope you're well."
But at some point, these individual letters of Paul and his co-writers
became part of a circulating set.
They were no longer individual letters aimed at particular communities, but a larger corpus that was understood to have relevance for a broader set of
communities.
When and how did that happen?
The earliest manuscripts we have of Paul's Letters date to the third
century, roughly 150 years after he set pen to papyrus.
It's overwhelming to think more broadly about the manuscripts of the
Letters of Paul.
Scholar David Trobisch writes, "Approximately 800 early copies of the
Letters of Paul have survived to the current day.
No two copies are completely identical."
I'd like to give us a taste of what some of these oldest manuscripts
looked like.
The first way to address the question of how Paul's earliest letters
circulated is to start with what's thought to be the oldest manuscript of
almost all of Paul's letters.
This is called P46 or Papyrus 46.
And part of it is located at the University of Michigan.
And part is in the Chester Beatty Collection in Dublin.
The text is from the third century CE from Egypt.
It's in fairly good shape.
But the outer pages don't survive.
The manuscript begins with Romans 5:17 and ends with 1 Thessalonians 5:28.
Many pages still have their page numbers.
And this is useful, because scholars can figure out then that there were
seven missing outer leaves.
The scribe also miscalculated the amount of paper needed.
After more than half the book was filled, the scribe began to write more
characters per line and more lines per page.
The remainder of 1 Thessalonians, Philemon, and other letters
traditionally ascribed to Paul--
2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus--
can't fit into the remaining 14 pages of the text.
So this is the earliest manuscript of the Letters of Paul.
But it seems not to have contained the entire collection that we know.
They are also four early codices that date from the fourth to the fifth
centuries, not scrolls but codices--
they look like modern-day books--
that contain all or parts of Paul's letters.
The first is Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century.
It contains all the Letters of Paul with only a few pages missing.
The second is Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus from the fifth century.
Originally, the entire Old Testament and New Testament were
written onto it.
But in the 12th century, the ink was washed off, and the texts of the early
Christian writer Ephrem were written onto it.
Ultraviolet lighting helps us to see the palimpsest's original text.
It contains portions from every book of the New Testament with the
exception of 2 John and 2 Thessalonians.
But none of the individual texts within the New Testament is complete.
The third example is Codex Sinaiticus.
It probably dates to the fourth century.
And it's the only one of the four manuscripts that still contains all of
the books of the New Testament.
It was discovered in 1844 at the monastery of Saint Catherine in Egypt.
In 1869, it was given to Russia and in 1933 sold to the British Museum.
We can say that it has all of the Old Testament and New Testament within it.
But it also has text that some Protestants today might not know from
their bibles--
2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach.
And it also contains within it the early Christian texts--
the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.
The fourth example is Codex Vaticanus, also dating from the fourth century.
Nobody knows where this one was found.
But it's recorded at the Vatican Library as far back as 1481.
The manuscript lacks 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.
But perhaps, those had been at the end of the manuscript.
Manuscript evidence shows Christians were copying Paul's letters and
circulating them by the third century CE, even as early as 150 years after
they were written.
But remember also that this is a world in which oral
tradition is highly valued.
The early second century bishop Papias, for example, writing about the
circulation of early Christian texts says this: "For I considered that I
should not get so much advantage from matter in books as from the voice
which yet lives and remains." This is also a world of low literacy.
We should picture publication of ancient texts less in terms of copying
and circulation, not so much in terms of a New York Times bestseller list,
but more in terms of people sitting together and hearing
text read out loud.
We're still left with the question, how did early Christians first
evaluate the letters of Paul?
What discussions arose in those first 150 years, and just thereafter, at the
time when the manuscripts are being drafted and redrafted?
Today, it seems self-evident that Paul's letters are important to the
Christian tradition.
After all, they're in the Bible, first of all.
And second, they're imitated in the New Testament itself by letters
written in Paul's name, such as 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians,
Colossians.
Third, there's evidence that Christians were circulating the
letters by the third century.
Even within the New Testament, we have evidence that the letters of Paul were considered scripture by some Christians quite early
in the second century.
There's a passage in 2 Peter in which the term scripture, in this case the
Greek graphas, also translated "writings," does not refer to the
Jewish scriptures, as it usually does, but to Paul's own letters.
"So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom
given to him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters.
There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and
unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other
scriptures." Many early Christians thought too that Paul's letters were
important enough to collect.
But some thought that Paul's letters and his legacy should be
resisted and rejected.
HOW DO PAUL'S LETTERS COME TO US?
HOW DO PAUL'S LETTERS COME TO US?
Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
It may seem like an embarrassingly simplistic question.
You know, after all, how you're reading the letters of Paul.
You're probably reading them as a book between covers.
But when we think about it, there are various kinds of Bibles and Bible
translations, various kinds of books.
And Bible publishing is a major industry in the US.
You might be reading the letters of Paul in the HarperCollins Study Bible.
The cover of it is an aged parchment color to remind you, perhaps, that
this is an ancient and venerable text, or maybe to emphasize that this
version of the Bible is used for people to understand the ancient
historical context.
The bottom line of the cover associates this translation with the
Society of Biblical Literature.
You're supposed to take this Bible seriously.
It's not only authorized, but also authoritative.
But you could equally read the letters of Paul in Revolve, which imitates a
glossy fashion magazine.
It contains the New Testament interspersed with advice on dating and
short interpretations of scripture passages.
The New Testament text is stable, but this Biblezine comes
out in multiple editions.
There are versions for girls, for teenage boys, and for
young adults as well.
These two very different examples--
the HarperCollins Study Bible on the one hand and Biblezines on the other--
help us to think about the Bible and Paul's letters as objects, just as
we've been thinking about the materiality of letter writing in the
ancient world.
Studying literature as an object tells us something about how that literature
is used and circulated.
It's an object with a social life, even a biography.
If an archaeologist found both of these covers, the HarperCollins Study
Bible and Revolve, 2,000 years from now, she probably wouldn't think they
were part of the same book.
And if she did, she would recognize that they were the same but perhaps
aimed to different audiences, that these two covers show different ways
of persuading audiences and of authorizing the text within them.
Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
It may seem like an embarrassingly simplistic question.
You know, after all, how you're reading the letters of Paul.
You're probably reading them as a book between covers.
But when we think about it, there are various kinds of Bibles and Bible
translations, various kinds of books.
And Bible publishing is a major industry in the US.
You might be reading the letters of Paul in the HarperCollins Study Bible.
The cover of it is an aged parchment color to remind you, perhaps, that
this is an ancient and venerable text, or maybe to emphasize that this
version of the Bible is used for people to understand the ancient
historical context.
The bottom line of the cover associates this translation with the
Society of Biblical Literature.
You're supposed to take this Bible seriously.
It's not only authorized, but also authoritative.
But you could equally read the letters of Paul in Revolve, which imitates a
glossy fashion magazine.
It contains the New Testament interspersed with advice on dating and
short interpretations of scripture passages.
The New Testament text is stable, but this Biblezine comes
out in multiple editions.
There are versions for girls, for teenage boys, and for
young adults as well.
These two very different examples--
the HarperCollins Study Bible on the one hand and Biblezines on the other--
help us to think about the Bible and Paul's letters as objects, just as
we've been thinking about the materiality of letter writing in the
ancient world.
Studying literature as an object tells us something about how that literature
is used and circulated.
It's an object with a social life, even a biography.
If an archaeologist found both of these covers, the HarperCollins Study
Bible and Revolve, 2,000 years from now, she probably wouldn't think they
were part of the same book.
And if she did, she would recognize that they were the same but perhaps
aimed to different audiences, that these two covers show different ways
of persuading audiences and of authorizing the text within them.
domingo, 19 de janeiro de 2014
PRESENTACIÓN DE APOSTÓL PABLO
PRESENTACIÓN DE APOSTÓL PABLO
Por: Valdemir Mota de Menezes
hablando de Pablo, es digno de atención que el Apostól se presentaba de acuerdo con la mensaje que Él deseaba transmitir a su publico. Apostól para los que no lo tenia en cuenta con la diginidad que Él tenia (caso de la iglesia de Corinto) y en la carta a Filemon Pablo se pasó como esclavo o prisionero se haciendo en la posición de Onesimo, en una condición para argumentar con Filemon sobre la petición del Apostól en favor de Onésimo.
Por: Valdemir Mota de Menezes
hablando de Pablo, es digno de atención que el Apostól se presentaba de acuerdo con la mensaje que Él deseaba transmitir a su publico. Apostól para los que no lo tenia en cuenta con la diginidad que Él tenia (caso de la iglesia de Corinto) y en la carta a Filemon Pablo se pasó como esclavo o prisionero se haciendo en la posición de Onesimo, en una condición para argumentar con Filemon sobre la petición del Apostól en favor de Onésimo.
sexta-feira, 17 de janeiro de 2014
TESTI ORIGINALI DI PAOLO
TESTI ORIGINALI DI PAOLO
Da: Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
Lettere di Paolo sono state scritte da lui, non sono lettere anonime. nessun manoscritto originale esiste oggi, abbiamo musei, alcune copie, molto vicino il momento delle lettere originali. Che cosa sappiamo della storia del cristianesimo è che i libri abbiamo oggi nel Nuovo Testamento sono stati ampiamente accettati dalle comunità cristiane dell'Asia e dell'Europa, dove il cristianesimo è fiorito e in poche generazioni, i leader cristiani ha ritenuto opportuno, si incontrano per definire il canone , cioè, i libri che compongono le Scritture cristiane, impedendo la Apocrypha confondere i cristiani.
Da: Scribe Valdemir Mota de Menezes
Lettere di Paolo sono state scritte da lui, non sono lettere anonime. nessun manoscritto originale esiste oggi, abbiamo musei, alcune copie, molto vicino il momento delle lettere originali. Che cosa sappiamo della storia del cristianesimo è che i libri abbiamo oggi nel Nuovo Testamento sono stati ampiamente accettati dalle comunità cristiane dell'Asia e dell'Europa, dove il cristianesimo è fiorito e in poche generazioni, i leader cristiani ha ritenuto opportuno, si incontrano per definire il canone , cioè, i libri che compongono le Scritture cristiane, impedendo la Apocrypha confondere i cristiani.
INTRODUZIONE LETTERA DI PAOLO AI GALATAS
Da: Scria Valdemir
Paolo in questa lettera si raccomanda di Galati l'Apostolo . Ha usato il termine "apostolo" perché vuole dimostrare la sua autorità per iscritto alle chiese . Paolo ha scritto questa lettera perché voleva proteggere i Galati da coloro che Rappresenta un vangelo falso. Ha scritto per loro que verità di Dio è dentro di vangelo e c'è solo uno. Citato anche Paul que ciò che viene rivelato è la verità di Dio e non la propria
La Lettera ai Galati fu scritta dall'apostolo Paolo . Anche se un piccolo gruppo di critici hanno sollevato obiezioni circa l'origine paolina , l' interno elementi di prova indicano chiaramente Paul come l'autore di questa lettera ( cfr. 1.1) . Infatti, il calore e l'autorità con cui l'epistola si occupa del problema dei falsi maestri , considerandoli una terribile minaccia per il Vangelo e contro la chiesa stessa , sono caratteristiche di un missionario zelante e leader che vede il dovere di diligenza quelli che sono il risultato del suo lavoro , che rafforza la tesi a favore di Paolo . Sottolineiamo , inoltre, che una proporzione gran parte della lettera è autobiografico ( 1:13 - . 2 13 ) , che logicamente vuota scopo paternità di qualcun altro.
Paolo scrisse ai Galati nell'anno dC 48 , poco prima del Concilio di Gerusalemme , avvenuta nello stesso anno ( At 15 ) . La mancanza di menzione delle decisioni del consiglio , queste decisioni sarebbe altrettanto utile allo scopo della lettera è la prova chiara a favore della data indicata , ma non c'è nessuno trucco situato nel 57 o 58 dC , comprendendo che in 2,1-10 , Paolo allude alle conclusioni del Consiglio di Atti 15
Paolo in questa lettera si raccomanda di Galati l'Apostolo . Ha usato il termine "apostolo" perché vuole dimostrare la sua autorità per iscritto alle chiese . Paolo ha scritto questa lettera perché voleva proteggere i Galati da coloro che Rappresenta un vangelo falso. Ha scritto per loro que verità di Dio è dentro di vangelo e c'è solo uno. Citato anche Paul que ciò che viene rivelato è la verità di Dio e non la propria
La Lettera ai Galati fu scritta dall'apostolo Paolo . Anche se un piccolo gruppo di critici hanno sollevato obiezioni circa l'origine paolina , l' interno elementi di prova indicano chiaramente Paul come l'autore di questa lettera ( cfr. 1.1) . Infatti, il calore e l'autorità con cui l'epistola si occupa del problema dei falsi maestri , considerandoli una terribile minaccia per il Vangelo e contro la chiesa stessa , sono caratteristiche di un missionario zelante e leader che vede il dovere di diligenza quelli che sono il risultato del suo lavoro , che rafforza la tesi a favore di Paolo . Sottolineiamo , inoltre, che una proporzione gran parte della lettera è autobiografico ( 1:13 - . 2 13 ) , che logicamente vuota scopo paternità di qualcun altro.
Paolo scrisse ai Galati nell'anno dC 48 , poco prima del Concilio di Gerusalemme , avvenuta nello stesso anno ( At 15 ) . La mancanza di menzione delle decisioni del consiglio , queste decisioni sarebbe altrettanto utile allo scopo della lettera è la prova chiara a favore della data indicata , ma non c'è nessuno trucco situato nel 57 o 58 dC , comprendendo che in 2,1-10 , Paolo allude alle conclusioni del Consiglio di Atti 15
INTRODUZIONE LETTERA DI PAOLO AI ROMANI
Da: Valdemir Mota de Menezes, lo scriba
Paolo ci dà alcune informazioni sulla condizione della lettera. Parla in programma di visitare Roma dopo aver terminato il viaggio (1:10-15). Si stava preparando a portare le offerte delle chiese di Macedonia e dell'Acaia ai poveri santi in Gerusalemme. Dopo la visita a Gerusalemme, ha voluto avviare un altro viaggio in Spagna, in Italia fermandosi lungo la strada (15:22-33). Concludiamo che Paolo avrebbe scritto questa lettera nel corso del tempo indicato in Atti 20:2-3, quando rimase in Grecia per tre mesi.
Paolo ci dà alcune informazioni sulla condizione della lettera. Parla in programma di visitare Roma dopo aver terminato il viaggio (1:10-15). Si stava preparando a portare le offerte delle chiese di Macedonia e dell'Acaia ai poveri santi in Gerusalemme. Dopo la visita a Gerusalemme, ha voluto avviare un altro viaggio in Spagna, in Italia fermandosi lungo la strada (15:22-33). Concludiamo che Paolo avrebbe scritto questa lettera nel corso del tempo indicato in Atti 20:2-3, quando rimase in Grecia per tre mesi.
terça-feira, 14 de janeiro de 2014
ROMANI - CAPITOLO SEDICI
DA Scriba Valdemir Mota de Menezes
impressionante è che l'apostolo Paolo chiude la sua lettera ai Romani per mandare i saluti di molti cristiani privati, Paolo cita nominalmente un gran numero di essi. Questo dimostra che Paolo aveva zelo da ogni fratelli cristiani.
CONTEXT OF PAUL' S LETTERS
CONTEXT OF PAUL' S LETTERS
(Valdemir Mota de Menezes studing with Nasrallah)
My name is Laura Nasrallah.
And I'm a professor of New Testament in Early Christianity at Harvard.
Today I want to tell you a bit about why I love to study and to teach the
letters of Paul and why I think you may find this class meaningful and
intellectually engaging.
This is a course module about the letters of the apostle Paul.
It's part of a semester-long academic course that I teach at Harvard.
It should provide some historical context for understanding the letters.
And we'll think together about practical aspects of letter writing in
the ancient world and what these can teach us about communication in
earliest Christianity.
Together we'll ask what's a canon?
What's scripture?
And how did the letters of Paul come to be in the Christian testament?
At the end, we'll investigate 1st Corinthians as a kind of case study,
seeing how investigating the text within its ancient context helps us to
understand more and better about the social, the economic, the political,
and the theological in the Roman world.
Some of you may have never read the letters of Paul
before, and that's great.
Some of you may be deeply familiar with them as objects of prayer,
devotion and church-based Bible study, and that too is great.
This is a course about Paul that serves both groups, because it's a
scholarly approach.
We'll spend a lot of our time focusing on the letters of Paul as documents of
ancient history.
These letters were written in the mid-1st century CE in the area of
modern-day Greece and Turkey at a time when the power and reach of the Roman
Empire was growing.
Many of those who first received the text were probably not literate.
And they didn't so much read them as heard them read out loud in assembly,
a very different experience than we often have reading alone or quietly,
sitting in front of a hardcover book or a computer or an iPad.
Paul's letters are historical documents that help us to understand
daily life in the Roman Empire; Judaism, among other religions in the
first century; and the emergence of something that wasn't yet called
Christianity.
You should come out of the course module with an understanding of how
these texts fit into ancient history.
And since I'm particularly interested in archaeology, much of this course
will draw from statues, monumental buildings, inscription, small finds to
learn more about life in the ancient world.
The letters of Paul are ancients texts about the long-dead, but they're also
living documents.
They're part of the Christian Bible.
They're considered key texts of Western culture.
They're a source for philosophical speculation and political movements
towards universalism among Christians and non-Christians.
The letters of Paul are used daily among Christians around the world,
read weekly, or even more often in church services and debated in
relation to ethical, social, political, and theological concerns.
In this course module, we'll have time to touch upon the rich importance of
these letters today.
And you'll gain some tools for thinking about your own interpretation
of these letters.
I've been researching, writing, and teaching on this topic for a while
now, but I'm only one of many such researchers and writers.
This course gives us a time and virtual place to drop into a longer
and larger stream of conversation.
My intention for this free and open access HarvardX version of a part of
my course is for us to join a conversation that's been ongoing for
centuries, a debate scholars engage around the world today, a conversation
that perhaps you've already taken part in or you're participating in
elsewhere, or perhaps you're entering for the first time.
My hope is that you'll join in conversation with others virtually,
that you'll use this course module in book club-type settings, or in church
communities or alone.
That is, I expect you all will end up doing far more interesting and
innovative things in the context of this course module than I can imagine
at this point.
The class is introductory.
No question is too basic.
That's not to say that the materials are always easy, but there are no
advanced requirements, just an expectation that you'll enjoy studying
this material, and that you'll be willing to enter into a greater larger
community of collegial, critical, and academic
investigation of these texts--
a great host of witnesses, if you will.
What kind of students might take this course?
In case you're still concerned about how you might fit into the course or
what sort of experience you could or couldn't bring to it, let me talk a
bit about what kind of students I've had in this course in my classrooms at
Harvard and elsewhere, and what kind of students you may be.
I've had in my classroom undergraduates and graduate students.
Some are Christians, evangelicals or UCC or Episcopalian.
Some are Jews.
Some are Muslims.
Some are atheists.
Some are Lutherans and love Paul.
Some are in training to be in Christian ministry-- some hoping to
work in NGOs, some studying law or government, some heading to med school
or campus ministry.
All that's to say, everyone and anyone is welcome.
In this introduction to the letters of the apostle Paul, I try to create a
level playing field, so that the person who doesn't know how to look up
Romans 8:28, and the person who memorized that text when she was five
can virtually sit alongside each other and learn together.
Teaching this course is a joy and a complicated thing too, because some of
you may have strong opinions about Paul.
For some, Paul might be an old friend, articulating your own hopes about
grace and redemption, modeling for you struggles about how to be an ethical
human in the world.
For others, Paul might be an enemy, the devolution of Christianity from
Jesus' message.
Actually that's the way Thomas Jefferson characterized him.
Some of you come to this course because Paul and his letters are an
entirely unknown or neutral topic.
For some, they're great or famous texts of Western culture.
For some, the letters of Paul are a source for knowledge about ancient
religion and philosophy in earliest Christianity.
For some, these letters are evidence regarding Judaism in the diaspora in
the first century.
For some, they're source text for current philosophical work on
equality, especially as this is discussed among European philosophers.
For some of you, this is sacred text scripture, the word of God.
Or you may feel that you fall into several of these categories.
It'll be important to recognize throughout this course module that
those who take the course alongside you may disagree with you.
I encourage you to discover what is intellectually productive about that
difference.
It's important to recognize that you may find some of the readings
troubling or uncomfortable, surprising or exciting.
This is all a part of learning.
Throughout, we'll find ways to speak respectfully and thoughtfully to each
other about our agreements and disagreements.
My pedagogical approach, that is, how I teach the course is as collaborative
and democratic as it can be in this venue.
I don't think that learning should only be about a consumer model, in
which a student passively receives what the teacher
authoritatively produces.
Rather students learn and students too produce knowledge.
I'm grateful to be in a job in which I'm required to learn and write and
think all the time.
Whether in colleges or at computers, in cafes or at home, we can all be
part of a creative process of studying interpretation.
You'll add your knowledge, the questions and insights that emerge
from your life experience and your critical engagement with that life
experience and with other scholars' interpretations to the larger
scholarly conversation.
I also don't think that learning should be about a Socratic model.
In Socrates' dialogues written in Plato's pen, Socrates manages to draw
out truth and to best his philosophical opponents by asking hard
questions that continually reveal how inept his dialogue partners are.
The dialogues sometimes humiliate his discussion partners.
I'm never for humiliation, even if I'm all for humility, because the texts we
study together are difficult, and because our knowledge of the ancient
world, given the gaps in our data from antiquity, is never complete.
We have to be humble because we're sketching earnest but imperfect maps.
Map is not territory, as the saying goes.
The work of historiography, of the writing, of history is to lay out a
range of well-considered possibilities, rather than to say,
this is what really happened.
Of course, we can do better or worse in our history writing and in our
interpretation of the letters of Paul.
Our task together is to collect more data from antiquity, and to hone our
interpretations in relation to a study of a broad range of others'
interpretations.
So we'll bring our experiences and our humility to the course hopefully.
That's not to say that experience and humility are all that's needed.
We'll also learn a good deal about the history of the Roman world, so that we
have more and better data to bring to our work of
interpreting Paul's letters.
This course is in part about cultivating a love of the creative,
imaginative, detective work of history writing.
What are the goals of this course?
What will we do together?
The course has four large goals.
The first is to investigate Paul's letters as a key record of struggle
and debate over social, political, ethical, and theological issues.
That is, we'll look at the letters as a rich resource from which we can
reconstruct the struggles of those earliest communities following Christ.
We'll learn about their debates, their interactions with their neighbors,
their struggles over what to eat, their debates over who were really
kinfolk, about race and ethnicity, about work and politics and slavery,
about love and grace and the end of the world.
Our second aim is to learn about the Roman Empire, in which the Pauline
correspondence was penned, and the second century world in which people
wrote about or even as Paul.
Paul wrote and traveled in and at the time of the Roman Empire.
His letters address issues regarding power and who's really in
charge of the world.
We'll discuss how communities to which Paul wrote lived in the midst of
various forms of power, including Roman imperial power, especially as
this was manifest in the veneration of the emperors on the one hand, and
depictions of imperial piety on the other.
Here we see an image of Augustus or Octavian, the first emperor veiled, it
was found in the city of Corinth, to which Paul addressed
more than one letter.
Octavian is veiled, because he's engaged in a religious act.
If his hand were still intact, it would have held a patera or shallow
bowl from which he would have poured a libation of wine.
Paul writes as a Jew, bringing the message of Christ in Greek.
The word is Messiah in Hebrew.
Paul does so in a culture already full of God's philosophical debate and
religious practices.
In Corinth, again, for example, there was a sanctuary to the
healing goddess Asklepios.
People slept in such sanctuaries and dreamed of the god, and often had
encounters as well with surgeons and doctors.
At Corinth, supplicants left in honor of the god votives, large and small,
objects depicting the body parts that the god had healed.
So too we find at Pergamon in modern-day Turkey an inscription to
Asklepios, a depiction of an ear.
But this ear probably doesn't indicate an ear injury, but rather a personal
and present god who hears, as we can see from the inscription, to
Aesklepios, the savior, Favia Secunda in accordance with a dream.
Paul lives as a Jewish missionary among other religious missionaries in
the ancient world.
He's part of a Jewish diaspora in antiquity.
Many of the texts in the New Testament were produced in this Jewish diaspora
around the Roman Empire.
And after Paul wrote, Jews and Christians alike had to cope with the
political reality of the destruction of the Jewish temple by the Roman
Empire in 70 CE.
The Arch of Titus in Rome publicly celebrates that occasion.
It was dedicated in honor of Titus, the son of the Roman emperor
Vespasian, who was the general in charge of the burning of the temple.
This arch depicts the temple goods, including the Ark of the Covenant and
a menorah, being paraded through the streets of Rome with Jewish captives,
a well-known Roman practice after Rome had conquered other peoples.
The Roman triumph inspired pathos, feelings of empathy, feelings of pride
for having conquered a great people with great traditions.
Pathos and fear.
And the display of objects to inspire such feelings of triumph, empathy and
fear didn't end with the pompe or celebratory parade.
In Rome, itself, a collection of sacred objects was displayed in the
so-called Temple of Peace founded by Vespasian, a site that blurs our lines
between museum, temple, and spoils of the victor.
We'll study the time of Paul and his correspondence, but we'll also study
the time after Paul, those who considered themselves to be his truest
interpreters, who authorized themselves by writing in his name in
the second century.
The third goal is for you to come to your own understanding of what the
Pauline correspondence reveals about first century debate
over several key issues.
Issues, for example, of how to define time in history, issues about women's
leadership, about Universalism, about race and ethnicity.
And our hope is that we come together to take responsibility for our
interpretations of Paul's letters.
And the final course objective is this-- to engage ancient texts with
disciplined intimacy.
This disciplined intimacy involves learning and practicing close reading,
as well as placing texts within their social, political,
and cultural context.
It involves understanding the ancient texts as stranger, as produced in a
world quite different from that of the 21st century.
But we'll also come to see the texts as quite intimate--
its themes of poverty and wealth, of love and grace and gratitude, of
worship, its debates over ethics, sexual practices, food
and religious practices.
These themes and debates may remind us of our own time and situations.
I study the letters of Paul because I think they're remarkable.
They're letters largely from the eastern part of the Mediterranean
Basin, written to small numbers of people about particular problems, joys
and situations that face them in the first century CE.
Nonetheless, they became a great text of Western history.
They're letters that often address those who were poor, slaves, women,
those waiting for the end of the world, yet they became part of a cycle
of elite transmission of literature.
They're letters written by a Jew in Christ, at the moment in time just
before the Roman Empire destroys the temple in Jerusalem.
They take up so very few pages among the literary text of the world.
Yet, they're classics.
They're transformative, and they're thought-provoking.
(Valdemir Mota de Menezes studing with Nasrallah)
My name is Laura Nasrallah.
And I'm a professor of New Testament in Early Christianity at Harvard.
Today I want to tell you a bit about why I love to study and to teach the
letters of Paul and why I think you may find this class meaningful and
intellectually engaging.
This is a course module about the letters of the apostle Paul.
It's part of a semester-long academic course that I teach at Harvard.
It should provide some historical context for understanding the letters.
And we'll think together about practical aspects of letter writing in
the ancient world and what these can teach us about communication in
earliest Christianity.
Together we'll ask what's a canon?
What's scripture?
And how did the letters of Paul come to be in the Christian testament?
At the end, we'll investigate 1st Corinthians as a kind of case study,
seeing how investigating the text within its ancient context helps us to
understand more and better about the social, the economic, the political,
and the theological in the Roman world.
Some of you may have never read the letters of Paul
before, and that's great.
Some of you may be deeply familiar with them as objects of prayer,
devotion and church-based Bible study, and that too is great.
This is a course about Paul that serves both groups, because it's a
scholarly approach.
We'll spend a lot of our time focusing on the letters of Paul as documents of
ancient history.
These letters were written in the mid-1st century CE in the area of
modern-day Greece and Turkey at a time when the power and reach of the Roman
Empire was growing.
Many of those who first received the text were probably not literate.
And they didn't so much read them as heard them read out loud in assembly,
a very different experience than we often have reading alone or quietly,
sitting in front of a hardcover book or a computer or an iPad.
Paul's letters are historical documents that help us to understand
daily life in the Roman Empire; Judaism, among other religions in the
first century; and the emergence of something that wasn't yet called
Christianity.
You should come out of the course module with an understanding of how
these texts fit into ancient history.
And since I'm particularly interested in archaeology, much of this course
will draw from statues, monumental buildings, inscription, small finds to
learn more about life in the ancient world.
The letters of Paul are ancients texts about the long-dead, but they're also
living documents.
They're part of the Christian Bible.
They're considered key texts of Western culture.
They're a source for philosophical speculation and political movements
towards universalism among Christians and non-Christians.
The letters of Paul are used daily among Christians around the world,
read weekly, or even more often in church services and debated in
relation to ethical, social, political, and theological concerns.
In this course module, we'll have time to touch upon the rich importance of
these letters today.
And you'll gain some tools for thinking about your own interpretation
of these letters.
I've been researching, writing, and teaching on this topic for a while
now, but I'm only one of many such researchers and writers.
This course gives us a time and virtual place to drop into a longer
and larger stream of conversation.
My intention for this free and open access HarvardX version of a part of
my course is for us to join a conversation that's been ongoing for
centuries, a debate scholars engage around the world today, a conversation
that perhaps you've already taken part in or you're participating in
elsewhere, or perhaps you're entering for the first time.
My hope is that you'll join in conversation with others virtually,
that you'll use this course module in book club-type settings, or in church
communities or alone.
That is, I expect you all will end up doing far more interesting and
innovative things in the context of this course module than I can imagine
at this point.
The class is introductory.
No question is too basic.
That's not to say that the materials are always easy, but there are no
advanced requirements, just an expectation that you'll enjoy studying
this material, and that you'll be willing to enter into a greater larger
community of collegial, critical, and academic
investigation of these texts--
a great host of witnesses, if you will.
What kind of students might take this course?
In case you're still concerned about how you might fit into the course or
what sort of experience you could or couldn't bring to it, let me talk a
bit about what kind of students I've had in this course in my classrooms at
Harvard and elsewhere, and what kind of students you may be.
I've had in my classroom undergraduates and graduate students.
Some are Christians, evangelicals or UCC or Episcopalian.
Some are Jews.
Some are Muslims.
Some are atheists.
Some are Lutherans and love Paul.
Some are in training to be in Christian ministry-- some hoping to
work in NGOs, some studying law or government, some heading to med school
or campus ministry.
All that's to say, everyone and anyone is welcome.
In this introduction to the letters of the apostle Paul, I try to create a
level playing field, so that the person who doesn't know how to look up
Romans 8:28, and the person who memorized that text when she was five
can virtually sit alongside each other and learn together.
Teaching this course is a joy and a complicated thing too, because some of
you may have strong opinions about Paul.
For some, Paul might be an old friend, articulating your own hopes about
grace and redemption, modeling for you struggles about how to be an ethical
human in the world.
For others, Paul might be an enemy, the devolution of Christianity from
Jesus' message.
Actually that's the way Thomas Jefferson characterized him.
Some of you come to this course because Paul and his letters are an
entirely unknown or neutral topic.
For some, they're great or famous texts of Western culture.
For some, the letters of Paul are a source for knowledge about ancient
religion and philosophy in earliest Christianity.
For some, these letters are evidence regarding Judaism in the diaspora in
the first century.
For some, they're source text for current philosophical work on
equality, especially as this is discussed among European philosophers.
For some of you, this is sacred text scripture, the word of God.
Or you may feel that you fall into several of these categories.
It'll be important to recognize throughout this course module that
those who take the course alongside you may disagree with you.
I encourage you to discover what is intellectually productive about that
difference.
It's important to recognize that you may find some of the readings
troubling or uncomfortable, surprising or exciting.
This is all a part of learning.
Throughout, we'll find ways to speak respectfully and thoughtfully to each
other about our agreements and disagreements.
My pedagogical approach, that is, how I teach the course is as collaborative
and democratic as it can be in this venue.
I don't think that learning should only be about a consumer model, in
which a student passively receives what the teacher
authoritatively produces.
Rather students learn and students too produce knowledge.
I'm grateful to be in a job in which I'm required to learn and write and
think all the time.
Whether in colleges or at computers, in cafes or at home, we can all be
part of a creative process of studying interpretation.
You'll add your knowledge, the questions and insights that emerge
from your life experience and your critical engagement with that life
experience and with other scholars' interpretations to the larger
scholarly conversation.
I also don't think that learning should be about a Socratic model.
In Socrates' dialogues written in Plato's pen, Socrates manages to draw
out truth and to best his philosophical opponents by asking hard
questions that continually reveal how inept his dialogue partners are.
The dialogues sometimes humiliate his discussion partners.
I'm never for humiliation, even if I'm all for humility, because the texts we
study together are difficult, and because our knowledge of the ancient
world, given the gaps in our data from antiquity, is never complete.
We have to be humble because we're sketching earnest but imperfect maps.
Map is not territory, as the saying goes.
The work of historiography, of the writing, of history is to lay out a
range of well-considered possibilities, rather than to say,
this is what really happened.
Of course, we can do better or worse in our history writing and in our
interpretation of the letters of Paul.
Our task together is to collect more data from antiquity, and to hone our
interpretations in relation to a study of a broad range of others'
interpretations.
So we'll bring our experiences and our humility to the course hopefully.
That's not to say that experience and humility are all that's needed.
We'll also learn a good deal about the history of the Roman world, so that we
have more and better data to bring to our work of
interpreting Paul's letters.
This course is in part about cultivating a love of the creative,
imaginative, detective work of history writing.
What are the goals of this course?
What will we do together?
The course has four large goals.
The first is to investigate Paul's letters as a key record of struggle
and debate over social, political, ethical, and theological issues.
That is, we'll look at the letters as a rich resource from which we can
reconstruct the struggles of those earliest communities following Christ.
We'll learn about their debates, their interactions with their neighbors,
their struggles over what to eat, their debates over who were really
kinfolk, about race and ethnicity, about work and politics and slavery,
about love and grace and the end of the world.
Our second aim is to learn about the Roman Empire, in which the Pauline
correspondence was penned, and the second century world in which people
wrote about or even as Paul.
Paul wrote and traveled in and at the time of the Roman Empire.
His letters address issues regarding power and who's really in
charge of the world.
We'll discuss how communities to which Paul wrote lived in the midst of
various forms of power, including Roman imperial power, especially as
this was manifest in the veneration of the emperors on the one hand, and
depictions of imperial piety on the other.
Here we see an image of Augustus or Octavian, the first emperor veiled, it
was found in the city of Corinth, to which Paul addressed
more than one letter.
Octavian is veiled, because he's engaged in a religious act.
If his hand were still intact, it would have held a patera or shallow
bowl from which he would have poured a libation of wine.
Paul writes as a Jew, bringing the message of Christ in Greek.
The word is Messiah in Hebrew.
Paul does so in a culture already full of God's philosophical debate and
religious practices.
In Corinth, again, for example, there was a sanctuary to the
healing goddess Asklepios.
People slept in such sanctuaries and dreamed of the god, and often had
encounters as well with surgeons and doctors.
At Corinth, supplicants left in honor of the god votives, large and small,
objects depicting the body parts that the god had healed.
So too we find at Pergamon in modern-day Turkey an inscription to
Asklepios, a depiction of an ear.
But this ear probably doesn't indicate an ear injury, but rather a personal
and present god who hears, as we can see from the inscription, to
Aesklepios, the savior, Favia Secunda in accordance with a dream.
Paul lives as a Jewish missionary among other religious missionaries in
the ancient world.
He's part of a Jewish diaspora in antiquity.
Many of the texts in the New Testament were produced in this Jewish diaspora
around the Roman Empire.
And after Paul wrote, Jews and Christians alike had to cope with the
political reality of the destruction of the Jewish temple by the Roman
Empire in 70 CE.
The Arch of Titus in Rome publicly celebrates that occasion.
It was dedicated in honor of Titus, the son of the Roman emperor
Vespasian, who was the general in charge of the burning of the temple.
This arch depicts the temple goods, including the Ark of the Covenant and
a menorah, being paraded through the streets of Rome with Jewish captives,
a well-known Roman practice after Rome had conquered other peoples.
The Roman triumph inspired pathos, feelings of empathy, feelings of pride
for having conquered a great people with great traditions.
Pathos and fear.
And the display of objects to inspire such feelings of triumph, empathy and
fear didn't end with the pompe or celebratory parade.
In Rome, itself, a collection of sacred objects was displayed in the
so-called Temple of Peace founded by Vespasian, a site that blurs our lines
between museum, temple, and spoils of the victor.
We'll study the time of Paul and his correspondence, but we'll also study
the time after Paul, those who considered themselves to be his truest
interpreters, who authorized themselves by writing in his name in
the second century.
The third goal is for you to come to your own understanding of what the
Pauline correspondence reveals about first century debate
over several key issues.
Issues, for example, of how to define time in history, issues about women's
leadership, about Universalism, about race and ethnicity.
And our hope is that we come together to take responsibility for our
interpretations of Paul's letters.
And the final course objective is this-- to engage ancient texts with
disciplined intimacy.
This disciplined intimacy involves learning and practicing close reading,
as well as placing texts within their social, political,
and cultural context.
It involves understanding the ancient texts as stranger, as produced in a
world quite different from that of the 21st century.
But we'll also come to see the texts as quite intimate--
its themes of poverty and wealth, of love and grace and gratitude, of
worship, its debates over ethics, sexual practices, food
and religious practices.
These themes and debates may remind us of our own time and situations.
I study the letters of Paul because I think they're remarkable.
They're letters largely from the eastern part of the Mediterranean
Basin, written to small numbers of people about particular problems, joys
and situations that face them in the first century CE.
Nonetheless, they became a great text of Western history.
They're letters that often address those who were poor, slaves, women,
those waiting for the end of the world, yet they became part of a cycle
of elite transmission of literature.
They're letters written by a Jew in Christ, at the moment in time just
before the Roman Empire destroys the temple in Jerusalem.
They take up so very few pages among the literary text of the world.
Yet, they're classics.
They're transformative, and they're thought-provoking.
INTRODUCCIÓN A LAS CARTAS DE APOSTÓL PABLO
Por: Escriba Valdemir Mota de Menezes
¿Quién era el público de estas cartas, y quién fue el autor ?
Esas preguntas que responder , tenemos que mirar a las prescripciones .
Y podemos ver una gran cantidad de estas pequeñas partes de la carta , aunque
parecen engañosamente simple, e incluso aburrido.
El precepto consta de tres partes .
En primer lugar, la superscriptio , el nombre del remitente .
El segundo , el adscriptio , el nombre del destinatario .
Y en tercer lugar , la salutatio , el saludo .
A menudo, quienes son seguidos por o plegaria o buenos deseos al destinatario.
Te voy a dar tres ejemplos de prescripciones .
La primera viene de Filipenses 1:1.
" Pablo y Timoteo , siervos de Cristo Jesús , a todos los santos en Cristo
Jesús que están en Filipos , junto con los supervisores y los funcionarios ", o
" Los obispos y los diáconos, " dependiendo de cómo desea traducir eso .
El segundo dice así .
" Hefestión Isias a su hermano , un saludo. "
Y la tercera es la de Filemón , de nuevo la carta de Pablo.
"Pablo, prisionero de Cristo Jesús, y Timoteo , el hermano , a Filemón , nuestro
y nuestro querido compañero de trabajo, y para Apia , hermana, y nuestros Archippos
compañero de trabajo, y para la ekklesia en tu casa " .
X a Y saludos .
Eso es lo que un precepto parece, y que no parece muy Necesariamente
interesante.
Es posible que sienta un poco de desesperación , pensando que voy a
te hacen ver de cerca lo que son esencialmente encabezados de correo electrónico .
A: alguien, de: a alguien, respecto a: algo.
Pero a medida que se mira de cerca , encontraremos detalles realmente interesantes en estos
prescripciones .
Una cosa que usted puede notar es Que Que autoría no es tan simple.
No es sólo Paul escrito.
Él y otros co - enviar las letras.
También te das cuenta Que la audiencia no es sencilla , tampoco.
¿Qué es una ekklesia ?
Usted podría preguntarse .
Y también se puede notar Que Pablo se presenta en diferentes formas de
diferentes públicos , casi con títulos .
En un caso, el esclavo.
En otro , un apóstol.
En otro , un cautivo .
Así que vamos a profundizar en cada uno de estos descubrimientos : la autoría,
audiencia , y la presentación de Pablo de sí mismo.
¿Quién era el público de estas cartas, y quién fue el autor ?
Esas preguntas que responder , tenemos que mirar a las prescripciones .
Y podemos ver una gran cantidad de estas pequeñas partes de la carta , aunque
parecen engañosamente simple, e incluso aburrido.
El precepto consta de tres partes .
En primer lugar, la superscriptio , el nombre del remitente .
El segundo , el adscriptio , el nombre del destinatario .
Y en tercer lugar , la salutatio , el saludo .
A menudo, quienes son seguidos por o plegaria o buenos deseos al destinatario.
Te voy a dar tres ejemplos de prescripciones .
La primera viene de Filipenses 1:1.
" Pablo y Timoteo , siervos de Cristo Jesús , a todos los santos en Cristo
Jesús que están en Filipos , junto con los supervisores y los funcionarios ", o
" Los obispos y los diáconos, " dependiendo de cómo desea traducir eso .
El segundo dice así .
" Hefestión Isias a su hermano , un saludo. "
Y la tercera es la de Filemón , de nuevo la carta de Pablo.
"Pablo, prisionero de Cristo Jesús, y Timoteo , el hermano , a Filemón , nuestro
y nuestro querido compañero de trabajo, y para Apia , hermana, y nuestros Archippos
compañero de trabajo, y para la ekklesia en tu casa " .
X a Y saludos .
Eso es lo que un precepto parece, y que no parece muy Necesariamente
interesante.
Es posible que sienta un poco de desesperación , pensando que voy a
te hacen ver de cerca lo que son esencialmente encabezados de correo electrónico .
A: alguien, de: a alguien, respecto a: algo.
Pero a medida que se mira de cerca , encontraremos detalles realmente interesantes en estos
prescripciones .
Una cosa que usted puede notar es Que Que autoría no es tan simple.
No es sólo Paul escrito.
Él y otros co - enviar las letras.
También te das cuenta Que la audiencia no es sencilla , tampoco.
¿Qué es una ekklesia ?
Usted podría preguntarse .
Y también se puede notar Que Pablo se presenta en diferentes formas de
diferentes públicos , casi con títulos .
En un caso, el esclavo.
En otro , un apóstol.
En otro , un cautivo .
Así que vamos a profundizar en cada uno de estos descubrimientos : la autoría,
audiencia , y la presentación de Pablo de sí mismo.
quarta-feira, 8 de janeiro de 2014
AUTHORSHIP PAUL'S LETTERS
What do we discover about authorship in the prescripts?- They teach us something really important about
- letter writing in antiquity.
- We call these the letters of Paul, and they are.
- But if we look more closely, they aren't just the letters of Paul.
- Influenced by our own circumstances, we might think about writing as
- something that occurs in solitude, a person alone at her laptop.
- But in Paul's letters, other figures begin to emerge as authors.
- Their names add something to our historical knowledge of these earliest
- communities in Christ, Silvanus, Timothy,
- Sosthenes, Tertius the writer.
- As we study Paul's letters in the context of the first century, and as
- we ask the question, "What was going on as these letters were produced and
- then first read aloud among the ekklesia?" the room slowly begins to
- get more crowded, the picture more exciting and complex.
- There's more than one author, often, of the letters of Paul.
- For example, from the prescripts, in a scrap of information at the end of the
- letter to the Romans, we meet a writer, Tertius, a scribe, perhaps a
- slave, since many slaves were trained as writers.
- And also meet co-workers at the end of that letter.
- A community begins to emerge.
LETTERS OF PAUL
LETTERS OF PAUL
By: Valdemir Mota de Menezes, scribe.
Intrinsic examination in biblical texts that show various letters attributed to Paul's authorship really given the identification of the apostle as the author of some letters. They are:
1 Thessalonians 1:1 Paul and Silvanus and Timothy to the ekklēsia of the Thessalonians. . .
Galatians 1:1-2 Paul an apostle. . . to the ekklēsiai of Galatia
1 Corinthians 1:1-2 Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, through the will of God and Sosthenes, brother, to the ekklēsia which is in Corinth. . .
2 Corinthians 1:1 Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God and Timothy, brother, to the ekklēsia of God which is in Corinth, together with all the saints who are in all of Achaia
Philippians 1:1 Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, together with the overseers and servants (or, bishops and deacons). . .
Philemon 1-2 Paul, captive of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, brother, to Philemon, our beloved and our co-worker, and to Apphia, sister, and Archippos our co-worker, and to the ekklēsia in your (singular) house. . .
Romans 1:1, 7 Paul, slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. . . to all those who are beloved of God in Rome, those called to be holy. . .
Romans 16:22 I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord
By: Valdemir Mota de Menezes, scribe.
Intrinsic examination in biblical texts that show various letters attributed to Paul's authorship really given the identification of the apostle as the author of some letters. They are:
1 Thessalonians 1:1 Paul and Silvanus and Timothy to the ekklēsia of the Thessalonians. . .
Galatians 1:1-2 Paul an apostle. . . to the ekklēsiai of Galatia
1 Corinthians 1:1-2 Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, through the will of God and Sosthenes, brother, to the ekklēsia which is in Corinth. . .
2 Corinthians 1:1 Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God and Timothy, brother, to the ekklēsia of God which is in Corinth, together with all the saints who are in all of Achaia
Philippians 1:1 Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, together with the overseers and servants (or, bishops and deacons). . .
Philemon 1-2 Paul, captive of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, brother, to Philemon, our beloved and our co-worker, and to Apphia, sister, and Archippos our co-worker, and to the ekklēsia in your (singular) house. . .
Romans 1:1, 7 Paul, slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. . . to all those who are beloved of God in Rome, those called to be holy. . .
Romans 16:22 I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord
terça-feira, 7 de janeiro de 2014
DISCUSSION ABOUT FILEMON LETTER - SCRIBE VALDEMIR IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY ON-LINE
DISCUSSION ABOUT FILEMON LETTER - SCRIBE VALDEMIR IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY ON-LINE
EdinburghPixie
about 3 hours ago
Good evening. My interpretation is that Paul is writing first and foremost to Philomen, and also secondarily to Apphia & Archippus. What stands out for me in this letter is that despite being imprisoned, Paul is cheerful in the Lord. He writes many things to this effect, but also highlights that it is others in the body of Christ - the broader 'church' and those with Philomen from whom he receives joy & encouragement.
I think of those falsely imprisoned and those who cannot see their children, or political prisoners, as is the case with Paul. I imagine due to his age Onesimus could have stayed with his Father, Paul, as many countries allow young children until the age of 18 months to remain with their mothers in prison even today. However, Paul sent him, as a symbol of his love to the church with Philomen. It is, however, intruguing, that he is asking for forgiveness in advance on Onesimus' behalf - foreshadowing some wrongdoing perhaps?
Finally, in verse 22, we see the strength of Paul's faith - he does not doubt that God's power will see him freed in due course, as he writes: "One thing more—prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you".
Report Misuse
I had the same initial thoughts about Paul's imprisonment but have changed. I don't think Paul was imprisoned by the Romans in confinement but that Paul was imprisoned spiritually in strict obedience to the will of God and the teachings of Jesus, free to travel to spread the gospel message. Also, in my humble opinion and considering the time and circumstances, usage of the word "son" does not have a biological meaning in this text. I believe it's more in line with the Roman Catholic tradition of fellowship within that religious institution - as in a priest calling a junior person, unrelated, "my son". I'm not sure what v22 means so I can't offer anything on that.
Report Misuse
–posted about 3 hours ago by ChunkyMouse
Hello ChunkyMouse ,
Allow me to disagree with your opinion with the same kindness that Paul interceded for Onesimus with Philemon . The historical context of this letter with Acts shows that Paul was literally stuck in confinement . Paul was imprisoned in the period that he wrote this letter . Regarding verse 10 it is clear that the apostle refers to Onesimus as his son in the faith because Paul would not like it generates in prison and as quickly Onesimus has become an adult . The context shows that Onesimus had a history before meeting Paul was a fugitive slave to his master , Philemon . Therefore the term " child " means someone who has become a disciple who accepted the faith through the preaching of Paul.
Report Misuse
–posted 6 minutes ago by SCRIBEVALDEMIR
EdinburghPixie
about 3 hours ago
Good evening. My interpretation is that Paul is writing first and foremost to Philomen, and also secondarily to Apphia & Archippus. What stands out for me in this letter is that despite being imprisoned, Paul is cheerful in the Lord. He writes many things to this effect, but also highlights that it is others in the body of Christ - the broader 'church' and those with Philomen from whom he receives joy & encouragement.
I think of those falsely imprisoned and those who cannot see their children, or political prisoners, as is the case with Paul. I imagine due to his age Onesimus could have stayed with his Father, Paul, as many countries allow young children until the age of 18 months to remain with their mothers in prison even today. However, Paul sent him, as a symbol of his love to the church with Philomen. It is, however, intruguing, that he is asking for forgiveness in advance on Onesimus' behalf - foreshadowing some wrongdoing perhaps?
Finally, in verse 22, we see the strength of Paul's faith - he does not doubt that God's power will see him freed in due course, as he writes: "One thing more—prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you".
Report Misuse
I had the same initial thoughts about Paul's imprisonment but have changed. I don't think Paul was imprisoned by the Romans in confinement but that Paul was imprisoned spiritually in strict obedience to the will of God and the teachings of Jesus, free to travel to spread the gospel message. Also, in my humble opinion and considering the time and circumstances, usage of the word "son" does not have a biological meaning in this text. I believe it's more in line with the Roman Catholic tradition of fellowship within that religious institution - as in a priest calling a junior person, unrelated, "my son". I'm not sure what v22 means so I can't offer anything on that.
Report Misuse
–posted about 3 hours ago by ChunkyMouse
Hello ChunkyMouse ,
Allow me to disagree with your opinion with the same kindness that Paul interceded for Onesimus with Philemon . The historical context of this letter with Acts shows that Paul was literally stuck in confinement . Paul was imprisoned in the period that he wrote this letter . Regarding verse 10 it is clear that the apostle refers to Onesimus as his son in the faith because Paul would not like it generates in prison and as quickly Onesimus has become an adult . The context shows that Onesimus had a history before meeting Paul was a fugitive slave to his master , Philemon . Therefore the term " child " means someone who has become a disciple who accepted the faith through the preaching of Paul.
Report Misuse
–posted 6 minutes ago by SCRIBEVALDEMIR
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