Paper 3

At the beginning of this course I honestly knew very little about Paul, I knew he was an apostle and that was about it. I knew a little that he used to preach in many places and somewhere I had read that he persecuted Christians at some point. But now my knowledge and my understanding of him is much more vast. First I learned how ancient texts like this can’t just be read and taken at face value because the time when they were written was a lot different so understanding the context and the background of a text is crucial to understanding what the text is really saying, especially a religious text like Paul’s letters since misunderstanding a religious text can have a lot of consequences due to their delicate nature. I learned to see Paul as a living breathing person instead of just a religious figure that is high above us and considered as the perfect Christian. Learning that he never stopped being a Jew gives more perspective in how at the time Christianity was not its own religion yet. Seeing him as someone who was not considered that special at the time but just one of many people trying to preach the word of Christ humanizes him a lot and his multiple failures and near death experiences at the hands of other Jews really takes him down a notch in my mind from the perfect figure that is sometimes constructed. I found it fascinating the beliefs of apocalyptic Jews, that Christ resurrection in Paul’s eyes heralds the end of time is something I had never heard before anywhere and I would like to read more about this topic since my interest in analyzing theology has gone up with this course.

And questions I have left from this course are:

about the righteous remnant I did not understand it very well, like I get how Jews that don’t believe in Christ might not survive the end of the world in Paul’s eyes but on the other hand they are the chosen people of god so should not they be fine either way? Its the gentiles that do not believe you should be worried about.

And also not so much a question but I think it is worth expanding the topic of homosexuality in the ancient world because it has become such an important topic nowadays and many people hate on it because of what they see in the bible which we already saw its just their ignorance and misinterpretation, so I think more students should learn about this topic to at least understand it, maybe some people will become more tolerant if they see the flaw in their interpretation.