CB01

This course approaches the New Testament not as scripture, or a piece of authoritative holy writing, but as a collection of historical documents....

The Christian faith is based upon a canon of texts considered to be holy scripture. How did this canon come to be? Different factors, such as...

Knowledge of historical context is crucial to understanding the New Testament. Alexander the Great, in his conquests, spread Greek culture throughout...

Of the four kingdoms that arose after Alexander's death, those of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies are most pertinent to an understanding of the New...

The accounts of Paul's travels in The Acts of the Apostles and Galatians seem to contradict each other at many points. Their descriptions of a...

The Gospels of the New Testament are not biographies, and, in this class, they are read through a historical critical lens. This means that the...

The Gospel of Matthew contains some of the most famous passages that both Christians and non-Christians are familiar with. However, Matthew also...

We have known of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas from ancient writers, but it was only after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices that the...

Luke and Acts, a two-volume work, are structured very carefully by the author to outline the ministry of Jesus and the spread of the Gospel to the...

The speech that Stephen gives before his accusers in Acts shows how the author of Luke-Acts used and edited his sources. So, also, does the...

The Gospel of John is a gospel dramatically different from the Synoptic Gospels. It is full of long dialogues, it speaks of "signs" rather than...

The Jesus of the Gospel of John often speaks in riddles so that his dialogues with characters such as Nicodemus appear confusing, rather than...

It is obvious that certain narratives in the New Testament contradict each other and cannot be woven into a historically coherent whole. How, then,...

The New Testament and other texts provide us with many accounts of the Apostle Paul, some that contradict each other. Throughout the history of...

1 Corinthian and 2 Corinthians give us several snapshots of the development of the Corinthian church and Paul's relationship to it. In 1 Corinthians...

The Apostle Paul's description of the Jewish Law in his letter to the Galatians demotes from being an expression of Jewish faith to an object of...

In ancient times, documents that were falsely attributed to an author, called pseudepigrapha, were a common phenomenon. Both the Letters to the...

Early Christianity presents us with a wide diversity in attitudes towards the law. There were also many different Christologies circulating in...

In the undisputed Pauline epistles, marriage is seen as a way to extirpate sexual desire - neither as a means for procreation nor as the preferred...

The Acts of Paul and Thecla has a narrative quite similar to those in ancient Greco-Roman novels: Thecla becomes enamored of Paul and they share a...

There are many ways of interpreting the text, and ancient methods of interpretation may seem bizarre to our modern sensibilities. The New Testament...

The principles of interpreting the New Testament in this course assume a historical critical perspective. The historical critical method of...

The Apocalypse, or the Revelation of John, shares many of the traits found in apocalyptic literature: it operates in dualisms--earthly events...

The Apocalypse of John showed an anti-Roman, politically revolutionary perspective. This is in contrast with Paul's writing in Romans 13, which calls...

The Epistle of Jude can be dated to somewhere during post-apostolic Christianity and before the formation of the Canon. It refers to the apostles as...

How did a small group following an apocalyptic prophet in Palestine become Christianity - what is now called a "world religion"? This small movement...

The Life of Muhammad is a 2011 British three-part documentary miniseries examining the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the origins of Islam....

Bettany Hughes sets out on an epic journey across continents and back in time to trace the hidden and often controversial history of women in religion