Issued Monthly in the Interest of Reasonable Religious Behold I have set before thee an open door. Rev. 3:8 Subscription, per year, one dollar. Bingle Copies, ten cents Volume Three, Number Two CONTENTS A HINT FOR BIBLE TEACHERS FABLES FOR THE DAY-PUBLIC Service PUBLISHED AT ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, LOGAN, UTAH Issued Monthly in the Interest of Reasonable Religious Behold I have set before thee an open door. Rev. 3:8 Subscription, per year, one dollar. 8ingle Copies, ten cents Volume Three, Number Two CONTENTS A HINT FOR BIBLE TEACHERS THE NEW METHOD FABLES FOR THE DAY-PUBLIC SERVICE PUBLISHED AT ST. JOHN'S HOUSE, LOGAN, UTAH A Hint for Bible Teachers. Truth is indeed immutable, but humanity is progressive; and thus the form in which truth is presented must be examined in relation to the age in which the revelation was made.-WESTCOTT. To make a book interesting one must see as a picture the age in which it was written. No historical picture is more interesting than the one in which the New Testament assumed its present form. What are the salient details of that picture? (1) The one thing uppermost in the mind of Christ's disciples, and the little band of His followers, was the expectation that He would at any moment return to judge the world, consequently they felt no very great incentive or impulse to write a life of Christ or to make use of written records of His sayings. The first Christians were still Jews in Jerusalem, still members of the Jewish National Church; they still used the Old Testament as their sole Bible and what they heard of the life of Jesus came directly from the mouths of such men as St. Peter, St. James, St. Andrew, St. John, and others of the original twelve disciples. All relig ious teaching was a matter of word of mouth, the Tradition, as it was called, and for nearly the first century A. D. this method made no demand for any official documents. (2) But this situation changed after Saul the Jewish persecutor became Paul the great Christian missionary to the Greeks and Romans. As he traveled through Asia Minor and the peninsula of Greece he founded little Christian communities. Very soon afterward, this or that event would make it necessary to write letters to these new Christian congregations, hence his letters to the church at Rome, at Corinth, in Galatia, at Philippi, and others. These letters, of course, were held in high esteem as written by an eminent Christian, but the time had as yet not come for them to be ranked as equal to the Old Testament, that is, Holy Scripture. In this connection two important historical details should be emphasized: the matter of traveling in St. Paul's day was a much easier thing than at a later age because the Roman government preserved the Mediterranean Sea from pirates and maintained a superb system of military roads. |