The New Testament in 90 Days

The Letters of Peter, James, John and Jude are called by scholars the "catholic" epistles -- because they don't seem to be written to any one church (as Paul's letters were) but seemed meant to be shared among many churches.  So they are not known by who they are to, but by who (supposedly) wrote them.  I say supposedly because not all scholars are agreed that every one of these catholic epistles was written by the person to whom it is ascribed. Aside:  the word catholic means "universal." That being said, there does seem to be a theme for this short letter.  It is written to a church, or to churches, that are experiencing persecution.  So there is a combination of the inspiration, encouragement an exhortation in this letter.  There's the wonderful images of the church as living stones, chosen, gathered up and built into a house by God.  Peter wants the people to remember that God first loved and chose them; this will help them to resist the tempta...

So we are drawing to the close of Paul's 2nd Letter to the Corinthians (though some people think it is actually portions of two different letters( and Paul is ratcheting up his rhetoric in the face of the competition:  the super-apostles.  Whether the problem is that those super-apostles are there, on the ground, or that the super-apostles just seem so, well, super:  strong, without flaw, awe-inspiring charismatic, inspiring -- or perhaps, all of the above, I don't know.  But Paul's  reputation among the Corinthians suffers b            y comparison.  He doesn't speak as well as they do  He doesn't cut as fine a swath as they do.  He does not have the mega-churches or large crowds that they do. So, what does Paul really have to brag about? Plenty, as it turns out. He can bring about the hardships and persecution that he has endured (and he does).  He can bring about how much he loves them (and he does). ...