Seeing the Big Picture

Many of the skills that Into the New Testament teaches direct you to close reading of biblical texts. When you compare translations, study words, or look for time and place references in a text, you are slowing down your reading and looking carefully at small portions of the New Testament. Yet if all you do is look at small bits of scripture, you will miss much of what the New Testament can communicate. In this skill, you widen the angle of your lens to take in elements of the contexts in which any single biblical text lives.

Desired Results

I have a series of desired results for each Into the New Testament skill. Here are the ones for Seeing the Big Picture.

Enduring Understandings

1. New Testament documents were composed as whole works, not as a series of small text units, or merely a collection of pearls on a string.
2. The context within which a reader sees a text shapes what a reader sees in the text itself.
3. Reading the whole book always helps to figure out what any part of the book means.

Essential Questions

Questions like these will recur in our work on seeing the big picture.

1. Have we been here before? What's the same and what's different?
2. Where are we going?
3. Where does this text fit in the big picture?

Key Knowledge

1. That shared vocabulary often links a smaller text unit with the themes of the larger work of which it is a part.
2. That any NT text exists within several important literary contexts, such as:

• The immediate literary context (the chapter, argument or section of which it is a part),
• The broader literary context (the book of which it is a part),
• The context of the author's extant work (which could be the same as a text's broader literary context but isn't always the same),
• The context of the New Testament as a whole, and
• The canonical context of the Old Testament and New Testament together.

Key Skills

1. Identify shared vocabulary, recurring themes, reappearing characters, etc. between a part of a New Testament book and the whole book.
2. Articulate how a text relates to the major themes of the work within which the text is found.
3. Research how a New Testament text is related to Old Testament texts quoted or alluded to in it.

Resource Pages

Seeing the Big Picture | This is the introductory page you are reading now.

Texts and Contexts | Any New Testament text fits in several contexts: within the book of which it is a part, within the type of literature it is, within all the literature we have from its author, and so on. Here you will find a list of various contexts to consider when you are reading.

Looking through a Wide-Angle Lens | It is one thing to know that every text has multiple contexts and another to say how the context affects the meaning of a text. Here you will find a list of some things to look for in order to relate your text to its context and to figure out how the context(s) inform the way you read the text.

Two-Minute Tutorial on the Old Testament in the New | New Testament writers made sense of Jesus and what had happened to them by reading what Christians would come to call the Old Testament. Look here for an introduction to how the Old Testament functions in the New.

Review | Here is your executive summary of the Big Picture resource pages. You can use it either as a review after you have read all the pages, or you can start here and go to the previous pages to fill in detail.

Next: Texts and Contexts