RELI 104 1st Edition Final Exam Study Guide Chapter 20 From Apocalyptic Prophet to Divine Reedemer Christianity is best understood as beginning not with the teachings of Jesus per se or with his death or resurrection but with the belief in his resurrection Once his followers came to believe he had been raised from the dead and so had been shown unique favor by God they reconsidered his teachings o How did first persons who believed in Jesus resurrection interpret this event since resurrection of dead was to come at the end of the age and since somebody had now been raised then the end must have already begun It had begun with the resurrection of a particular person the great teacher and holy man Jesus who had overcome death the greatest of the cosmic powers aligned against God Jesus was the personal agent thru whom God had decided to defeat the forces of evil He had been exalted to heaven where he now lived until he would return to finish God s work For this reason people were to repent and await his second coming Jesus was soon to return in judgment as the Son of Man They began to claim that he himself was the Son of Man he had anticipated that he was not simply close to God but was the unique Son of God and that he was not simply their leader and master but was the Lord of the world They also reflected on the meaning of his death in light of their Scriptures finding passages that referred to the death of God s righteous one and taking them to refer to Jesus o Came to believe that the Jewish Bible anticipated the coming of a suffering messiah These Christians then developed the idea unknown to Judaism that the messiah was one who must suffer and die Different Christian communities developed various understandings of who Jesus was and what he had done Some but by no means all of these different understandings are still reflected in our earliest Gospels may appear to represent the same understanding of Jesus but to some extent this is only b c they have been placed side by side within a canon of scripture Chapter 20 Paul the Apostle Paul was a central figure in the spread of Christianity especially among the Gentiles whom he insisted contrary to the claims of others did not need to become Jewish in order to follower Jesus There are difficulties in trying to reconstruct Paul s life and teachings o Some of the letters written in his name are probably pseudonymous o The book of Acts is not always historically reliable in recounting his life and preaching o The letters he wrote were occasional that is written to address specific situations that had arisen in his churches not general treatises systematically laying out his though Paul had been a highly religious Pharisee who persecuted the Christians before becoming convinced on the basis of a visionary experience that God had raised Jesus from the dead Belief in Jesus resurrection confirmed Paul s basic apocalyptic view of the world He came to believe that God had already begun to intervene in history to overthrow the cosmic forces of evil This belief radically affected Paul s understanding of Jesus he is the way of salvation the Jewish Law it is not important for a person s standing before God and the relationship of Jew and Gentile they are equal before God Once he came to these convictions Paul began a missionary campaing to convert othersprincipally Gentiles to faith in Jesus in major urban areas of the northern Mediterranean especially Asia Minor Macedonia and Achaia Chapter 21 Paul and his Apostolic Mission 1 Thessalonians is the earliest of Paul s epistles and thus the earliest book of the NT and the earliest surviving Christian writing of any kind It can be used to provide clues concerning how Paul went about his missionary o He didn t preach on the street corner or stage evangelistic rallies and he didn t begin by preaching in a local synagogue contrary to Acts o He instead started up a business in town and talked to his customers convincing them about the Christian message o Virtually all of his converts were pagan He needed to convince these people that the Jewish God was the only true God that Jesus was his son who had died for their sins and that God had raised him from the dead and was sending him back soon in judgment This kind of preaching activity made Paul appear like philosophers in the Greco Roman world His converts formed closely knit communities that gathered together periodically for worship and saw themselves as a group that stood over against outsiders After Paul left the Thessalonian church problems arose particularly concerning the fate of those who had already died prior to Jesus return in judgment which had been expected to be very soon Paul s letter addresses this and other problems assuring gthe Thessalonians that they can retain their hope in the apocalyptic end of the world to be brought by Jesus and that those who had already died had not missed out on the benefits of the apocalyptic kingdom soon to arrive Chapter 22 Paul and the Crises of his churches 1 Corinthians o Is written to the church located in Corinth in the Roman province of Achaia a city with a reputation for dubious morals in antiquity o Paul had established the church by converting former pagans to faith in Jesus most of his converts were poor and uneducated but some came from the upper classes The different socioeconomic levels of the Corinthian Christians may explain some of their problems tensions over the community meals o After Paul left the community a number of problems had arisen involving disunity in the church immorality and difficulties during worship service o Paul s deals with all of these problems one by one in the letter and at the end deals with the major problem of all the Corinthians failure to appreciate the true nature of the resurrection of believers which was to be future and physical o Understanding that the resurrection will be bodily was to affect the Corinthians sense of what in the meantime they were to do with their bodies 2 Corinthians o 2 Corinthians appears to embody at least two of Pauls letters Chapter 1 9 and 10 13 and possible as many as four or five o at a later time someone took these various letters and edited them together into one o its possible to trace the history of Paul s relationship with this community based on the different letters combined here o after he wrote 1 Corinthians Paul visited Corinth again and faced a public humiliations Soon thereafter other Christian apostles arrived in town