Religious or not, Christian or not, hundreds of millions of people around the world utilize the New Testament for everything from personal belief (“Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior”) to mass entertainment (documentaries, art house films, and blockbusters); from religious gatherings (most forms of Christianity) to “secular” spiritual teachings (“Turn the other cheek”); from fine art (Salvador Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross”) to matters of law (Good Samaritan laws); and from politics (Christian nationalism) to literature (the quotes Harry Potter finds on the gravestones in Godric’s Hollow). The New Testament deeply influences modern cultural contexts all around the world, but especially in the Western world. This course will explore the New Testament from a different context, that of its first century birthplace. We will build students’ understanding of the writings of the New Testament in the Roman Empire of the first century by gaining basic cultural knowledge of first century Greece, Rome, and Israel/Palestine and then reading the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the Book of Revelation from the perspective of these intersecting worlds. The New Testament is grounded in this context, and deeper exploration of New Testament writings from a first-century perspective will help students enrich their understanding of modern references like the ones mentioned above.
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