Intro to the New Testament "Leveling Course"

This last month (or, really, most of the semester) has been full to the brim with teaching, class prep, and other work responsibilities here, but thankfully I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the semester! This week, on Thursday and Saturday, I taught an 8-hour "leveling course" in Introduction to the New Testament. These "leveling courses" are designed for students from our Ministerial Institute of Medellín (IMM) program (our five semester basic Bible Institute program that students can attend on Saturday mornings or weekday evenings) who hope to now study the complete undergraduate program in theology. Over the course of this semester they have had the opportunity to take up to eight of these courses which seek to deepen their knowledge and make up for competencies that they didn't cover in the IMM program. This gives them the chance to enter the undergraduate program with up to 20 credits already under their belt.

We have 16 students who are going through these courses and, while not all have the financial resources to enter into the undergraduate program right away, or at least not full time, I think we will have good enrollment for the coming semester with a lot of them starting full time studies.

Given that the IMM program has a very strong biblical studies component, I didn't have to cover any of the basic introduction to the content of the New Testament books, but rather cover a few things that make up part of the New Testament Intro course here as it relates to the academic study of the New Testament. While I am sure that doesn't sound particularly exciting, it's very helpful information for enabling them to navigate the different commentaries they'll be using in further New Testament courses (or in preparing sermons or discipleship classes) and understand a bit of the context of some of the quite confusing discussions found therein.

Basically we covered three main areas:

First, an overview of textual criticism of the New Testament. Textual criticism is the study of the different manuscripts to establish what the New Testament originally said by comparing the different small variations from the ancient manuscripts we possess from different times and geographical regions. While this can consternation in students at first when they realize that there are a number of small errors that have become part of their most well-loved Bible translations (especially the Reina-Valera 1960; the KJV and NKJV in English have the same issues), the reality is that by having so many copies of the New Testament from early on in diverse regions we can actually determine with great certainty what the New Testament originally said (for example, this is why most modern translations omit or put explanatory notes regarding Acts 8:37, part of 1 John 5:7-8, Mark 16:9-20, and John 7:53-8:11). I know this class won't give my students many tools to evaluate the evidence for themselves (especially not knowing Greek), but I hope to at least have given them the ability to understand what commentaries are talking about on these points and to respond to the pastoral questions that arise when someone runs across these ideas and starts wondering whether they can really trust the Bibles we have today.

Second, we looked at historical-literary criticism of the New Testament, specifically form, source, redaction, and literary criticism, as well as touching on a couple of other issues such as pseudepigraphy, the idea that some epistles were written by different people than their supposed authors. This is one of the parts of seminary that many students would probably prefer to avoid, but it is actually crucial if we are to understand and respond to historical skepticism regarding the New Testament documents, especially the gospels (such as Bart Ehrman's books, for one). We looked at the presuppositions beyond these academic approaches to studying the New Testament, what positive things we can learn from each approach, and what dangers can arise from uncritically accepting each approach wholesale. Especially interesting was applying these methods to a study of parallel passages in the gospels, applying redaction criticism to the story of the rich young ruler and literary criticism to the portrayal of the end of Jesus' life on the cross, looking at how each writer portrays Jesus' death as part of his overall narrative portrayal of Jesus. We talked a lot about the importance of finding complementary perspectives in the diversity of the New Testament instead of assuming there is a contradiction that the text never actually explicitly affirms.

Third, we looked at some basics on the historical context of the New Testament, looking at the history of intertestamental judaism and the philosophical and religious context of the Greco-Roman world. This part was unfortunately too brief, but students said it helped unify a bunch of bits of information they had heard here and there in past, fitting it into a coherent framework.

Overall, the course went well. What most impressed me was how much students participated and the great questions that they had throughout. While Saturday was a long day with almost 6 hours of class, I can see that these students are both bright and pastorally minded, just the kind of people that will make great students as they transition to our undergraduate program.