New Testament

New Testament

New Testament

The Gospel of Matthew

I began this series in July 2013.  The series title is “Fulfilled,” and the emphasis throughout is on the fact that, for the gospel of Matthew, the most important things to say about Jesus have to do with the ways that He fulfils the Scriptures.  As you might have guessed, we didn’t get through those massive chunks of material every week, so some selections will overlap.

The Gospel of Mark

In March 2011, because the other teacher of adult Sunday school at Athens Christian resigned due to an imminent move to another part of the state, I became the sole adult Sunday school teacher there.  This series of lessons was the other group’s introduction to the way I do Sunday school.

My approach to Mark is similar to my approach to Revelation (those handouts available further down the page): start with a responsible historical reading, and see what theology emerges.  Anyway, here are the handouts:

Acts

I taught this series starting in January 2012, and our exploration focused on the central character of Acts, the Spirit.

Paul’s Letters

These handouts come from occasions when I’ve taught Paul’s letters in Sunday school. The Philemon lesson I used as a paradigmatic introduction to Paul’s corpus, and I’m drawing on that setup as I teach Ephesians. For the seminarians out there, I neither insist upon nor reject Pauline authorship of Ephesians in Germanic philological terms; as far as I’m concerned, the Church has held these texts to be the letters of Paul for a couple millennia, and that’s good enough for Sunday school. I intend no offense to the insisters or to the deniers. The 1 Timothy series started in medias res because our regular Sunday school teacher had some life happen after teaching chapter one. So don’t be alarmed that part one covers chapter two, part two chapter three, and so on. That’s just the way Sunday school happens sometimes. I might get ambitious and write a part zero that covers chapter one, but I might not.

In January of 2010, our Sunday school class started a study of Ephesians with the help of N.T. Wright’s Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters commentary.  We ended up going through his entire prison-epistles commentary, and the handouts for Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon are available below.

Ephesians (Three-Week Version)

1 Timothy

Philippians with Wright

Colossians with Wright

Philemon with Wright

Hebrews

I taught through the book of Hebrews in 2014 in Athens Christian Church’s adult class.  We traveled rather quickly, reading through the book together in 10 weeks.

James

In October 2011 I began a series of lessons on James for Athens Christian Church’s adult Sunday school class.  Since James is relatively short but difficult to translate, I tried to incorporate more translation-discussion than usual into these lessons.

1 John

Alright, so I did this series for Wednesday night Bible study (substituting for Carl Shearer, who was down with extended illness) rather than Sunday school.  But I didn’t want to put it on my Teen Classes page, alright?  Deal with it!

You’ll notice that the pace of the lessons accelerates around week 3.  I did that because I promised to be done in four weeks, and I realized after two that I wasn’t going to make it.

2 and 3 John

I filled in for a couple weeks after Jan, our class’s other teacher, did a series on 1 John. I managed to get both 2 and 3 John onto one handout. How handy am I?

Revelation

I started teaching Revelation in February 2013.  My approached, summed up in “Gilmour’s Four Rules” at the top of each handout, emphasizes that the 21st-century reader is always hearing words meant primarily (thought not exclusively) for first-century believers.  To get at the really good stuff, we must not bypass those folks but make our way through their reading experience to our own.  These files will be in .doc format.

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