Dr. Nijay Gupta from Northern Seminary joins Mark to discuss how the church can better read and apply the writings of Paul and the New Testament.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00

Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host, Mark Moore. And on the show, we are joined by Dr. Nee, J. Gupta, who is a professor of New Testament and northern seminary. He's the author of numerous books, including Paul and the language of faith, a beginner's guide to New Testament studies, reading Philippians, a critical commentary First and Second Thessalonians, just amongst a few of the books that he has published. He also co edits several books. He's a world class scholar, and Anna, and a great writer and a really fun conversationalist. I know you're going to enjoy the show.

0:44

Yeah, DJ, thank you so much for being on the show and joining us and really excited to, to talk to you about your scholarship on Paul in the New Testament. And particularly with Paul in the language of faith, but we'll we'll get there. But as I was kind of preparing for, for this episode, it was interesting at our church, also a pastor here in Sacramento, and at our church, we're reading the New Testament through and 90 days, so that can the first 90 days of the year, you know, added onto your workout regimen or something, you know, that you that you do starting on January one. And and this year, I think for me was, was the first time like we read through the Gospels, and just hearing Jesus hearing that and the message. And then moving to Paul and was like, Oh, yeah, there's there's a little bit of a subtle shift in, in maybe tone and what Paul highlights in a sense, and, and so I could see and then started getting questions from people in the church like, Oh, hey, how do I understand this? How do I read this? How do I, you know, how do I understand Paul here is for me, it was kind of, you know, a really good experience to be like, Oh, yeah, when we get to Paul, it's a little bit different. And we have to understand like, Okay, how, how do we approach Paul? And so really, I'd love just from you, maybe what are some ways or what are some advice for people in the church to read Paul better? Like, what is their things they need to know going into Paul? And how can we understand Paul better?

2:23

Yeah, hi, Mark, great to be with you. And it's fun, fun to be connecting with your institution. And great, even during a pandemic, we can, you know, talk online and through a podcast and connect and meet new people. Yeah, you know, it's when you start reading the Bible carefully, you start noticing differences, distinctives of different writers and things like that. So just within the Gospels, if you're paying careful attention, you'll notice gospel, john does things differently. Right. Right. JOHN is called the maverick gospel. Yeah, because it's anti Mark, Luke are Matthew. But because it gives a little bit different of a vantage point, it kind of highlights some different things. If you think about like a modern biography of Lincoln, or even, you know, Barack Obama. Right now you're dealing with the same basic information about a person in history, you can take different camera angles, to look at that person, and it gives you a more robust picture. So yeah, when you turn to Paul, you notice things are a bit different. I would give a couple couple pieces of advice. Number one is to remember that most of Paul's letters were probably written before the gospels were written down. Yeah. And that's actually hard to keep in mind. The gospels were reading about Jesus who came before Paul's ministry, right? And yet something like First Thessalonians and Galatians were, you know, they're known to be the earliest New Testament texts. So I hate to use the word primitive, because it has negative connotation. But when you're thinking of the earliest voices in Christian literature, you're talking about Paul, and that's, you know, I Dunn's work in First Thessalonians, and you get this kind of