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Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Summary - New Testament From a Jewish Point of View Class 1/3/2022

Dr. Lori Baron PHD, Assistant Professor of New Testament Theological Studies, St. Louis University Visited Our Class on 1-4-2022

Monday, January 3, 2022 again was a great class!  

What made this particular class extra special was the Dr. Lori Baron, Assistant Professor of New Testament Theological Studies, St. Louis University, joined us and visited us!  Lori, come back again soon!  

Jo Ann, Dan, Merrill, Dave, Karen, Cindy, Robin, Randy, Odette and Lori attended.

We took a bit of time introducing ourselves to Lori.

Then….

Cindy read Romans Chapter 15 aloud.  

After reading the chapter, we asked Lori for commentary and she gave us an incredible summary of all of Romans.  She explained how confusing the book of Romans is.  

Lori showed us how Paul refers to obscure verses in the Old Testament randomly.  He says gentiles don’t have to become Jewish to become Christians (which sounds absurd today). 

She had us look at some of the related notes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament.  She also had us look at page 285 in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which explains Romans.  The letter to Romans was intended for Christ following gentiles to give them guidance on how to live.  Paul suggested that they live their lives with Jewish guidelines without becoming Jews.

Lori referred to the promise in the Tanach that at the end of days the gentiles would come to worship the God of Israel. Paul understood his success in converting gentiles to Christianity to be fulfillment of that promise.

There was so much information Lori gave us, that there is no way I can remember all of it.  What I did learn is that Romans is one of the more difficult letters of Paul’s to understand.

We learned that Paul just wanted the Jews and gentiles who believed in Jesus to get along.

We decided to next look into the book of James after we complete Romans Chapter 16 rather than going on to Corinthians.  We may after James, skip to Revelation (with the help from a book called Revelation for Dummies.  

A friend who teaches at a Jewish Day school in Irvine said this about the book of James which Dan suggests we perhaps study next:

James is very Jewy. Except for one sentence about Jesus as "Lord of glory" it has nothing distinctively Christian about it. He calls the gathering place the synagogue. The book is a moral meditation. It may have been written partly to contradict Paul because it speaks of deeds vs faith alone. See what your Jewish NT commentary book says about that. However, it is not typical of the NT for all those reasons. The NT as we have it is a Paul dominated collection.  The name James in Greek is yakobos = Jacob. How it came into English as James, I do not understand.

Please add anything you can to this summary.

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