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Today, we're going to begin to unravel the questions--
what are the Letters of Paul, and what's their significance?
First, we'll ask, when were they written, and in what language?
The letters of Paul are the earliest texts written in the Christian canon,
or the New Testament.
They date from roughly 49 to 57 CE.
And let me take a moment to explain what I'm talking about when I
use the term CE.
It stands for Common Era; BCE for Before the Common Era.
It's a more academic, a less religiously-inflected way of talking
about time.
Often, people will say AD.
That means Anno Domini, "Year of our Lord," or they'll say BC, which means
Before Christ.
As you may know, in different religions, people have
different ways of dating.
And the term CE--
Common Era-- and BCE--
Before the Common Era--
are more academic, more neutral.
We know that Paul wrote more letters than the ones
contained in the New Testament.
And of course, we know that communities wrote back to him, but
none of those letters survive.
Paul's letters were written in Greek.
Latin was the primary language of those in power in the Roman Empire,
and Aramaic and Hebrew, among other languages, were in use among Jews and
others in the Roman province of Judaea.
But Greek was the common language of the Roman Empire.
And we don't know if Paul knew Hebrew or Aramaic or, for that matter, Latin.
The Greek in which the letters of Paul are written is called koine.
It's a Greek term to talk about the common language at the time, not the
more literary or fancy versions of Greek that imitated the stylus of the
classical period of Greece, like Demosthenes or Plato.
Yet Paul's letters demonstrate that he had some education in Greek, and even
some knowledge of rhetoric--
the third stage of education in the ancient world.