Course Description
REL3241 is the academic study of the New Testament. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it New Testament and describes it in six words: "classical New Testament texts, historical background materials." There is no statewide prerequisite.
Three Florida public universities carry it, all at 3 credits: the University of North Florida as New Testament, Florida Gulf Coast as Introduction to the New Testament, and the University of West Florida as Studies in the New Testament. ✅ No credit divergence, and the three titles name the same course.
⚠⚠ But the GORDON RULE designation is not the same at all three — UWF carries it and the other two do not — and it is invisible from the title, the number and the credits. See *Special Information* before using this course to fill a writing requirement.
⚠⚠⚠ And the most important thing about this course comes first, because students arrive with reasonable expectations in two opposite directions and both are wrong.
This is the HISTORICAL-CRITICAL study of the New Testament at a public university. ⚠ It is neither a Bible study nor a debunking. The course treats these texts the way a historian treats any first-century document: asking who wrote it, when, to whom, in what language, in what circumstances, drawing on what sources, and what its author was trying to accomplish. ⚠⚠ It does not ask whether the claims are true, because that is a theological question and a public institution is not in that business.
Two consequences follow, and they are worth stating plainly:
- ⚠ A student of Christian faith will not be asked to give it up, and will very often find the course deepens their reading — most people have never encountered these texts as documents with authors, audiences and histories. That said, learning that Mark was probably written first, that the four Gospels differ in ways that cannot all be harmonised, and that some letters attributed to Paul are widely thought not to be his, can be genuinely unsettling. It is honest to say so in advance.
- ⚠ A student of another faith or none will not be preached at, and will encounter the single most historically consequential body of literature in Western history. You cannot read Western art, law, literature or politics without it.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- ⚠ Describe the historical-critical method and distinguish it from devotional, confessional and polemical reading.
- Describe the historical context of the first century: Second Temple Judaism, its diversity and its institutions; Roman imperial rule in Palestine; Hellenistic culture; and the Jewish revolt and destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
- ⚠⚠ Explain the composition and canon — that the New Testament is a library of twenty-seven documents written over decades, in Greek, by different authors, and collected into a canon over centuries.
- Analyse the Synoptic Gospels — Mark, Matthew, Luke — their literary relationship, and the Synoptic Problem and its standard solutions (Markan priority, Q).
- Analyse the Gospel of John and explain how and why it differs from the Synoptics in chronology, style and Christology.
- ⚠ Distinguish the portraits of Jesus each Gospel presents, and explain the authorial and communal concerns that shape each.
- Describe the historical Jesus question — the criteria scholars use, what is widely agreed, and what is contested.
- Analyse the letters of Paul — the undisputed letters, their occasions, and Paul's central arguments about law, faith, community and gentile inclusion.
- ⚠⚠ Explain pseudonymity and the distinction between undisputed, disputed and pastoral letters — and what "pseudonymous" meant in the ancient world, which is not what forgery means now.
- Analyse Acts as a historical and theological narrative of the early movement.
- Analyse Hebrews, the catholic epistles and Revelation, and read apocalyptic as a genre with conventions rather than as prediction.
- Apply critical methods: source, form, redaction, literary, social-scientific, and reception criticism; and textual criticism — how manuscripts differ and how a printed text is established.
- ⚠ Compare translations and explain how translation choices carry interpretation.
- Describe the development of early Christianity from a movement within Judaism to a distinct religion.
- ⚠⚠ Identify and avoid anachronism and supersessionism — reading later Christian categories or anti-Jewish assumptions back into first-century texts.
- Construct an interpretive argument about a passage, supported by textual and historical evidence, and cite correctly.
Optional Outcomes
- Read the non-canonical literature — the Gospel of Thomas, the Apostolic Fathers, Nag Hammadi texts — and address why they are outside the canon.
- Address the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran community.
- Address Greco-Roman parallels — philosophical schools, mystery religions, imperial cult.
- Address women in the early movement and feminist interpretation.
- Address reception history — how these texts have been read and used, including in art, law and politics.
- ⚠ Address the New Testament and antisemitism — how particular passages have been used, and how scholarship reads them.
- Address post-colonial, liberation or empire-critical readings.
- Work with Koine Greek vocabulary or a specific text in the original.
- Address archaeology of the first-century eastern Mediterranean.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Method — what historical criticism is, what it can establish, and its limits.
- The world of the New Testament — Second Temple Judaism, Rome, Hellenism, geography and society.
- Canon and text — how the twenty-seven books were selected; manuscripts, variants and textual criticism.
- Mark — the earliest Gospel, its structure, its Christology, its abrupt ending.
- Matthew and Luke — their use of Mark, their distinct emphases, infancy and resurrection narratives.
- The Synoptic Problem — the evidence and the standard solutions.
- John — signs, discourses, high Christology, and the Johannine community.
- The historical Jesus — sources, criteria, consensus and dispute.
- Paul — his life and letters, the undisputed seven, justification, the law, the body of Christ, gentile inclusion.
- Disputed and pastoral letters — authorship, pseudonymity, and the institutionalising church.
- Acts — narrative, sources, and its relationship to Paul's own account.
- Hebrews, the catholic epistles and Revelation — genre, occasion, and reading apocalyptic.
- The parting of the ways — how a Jewish movement became a separate religion.
- ⚠ Interpretation and its consequences — including the history of anti-Jewish reading.
Optional Topics
- Non-canonical gospels and the Apostolic Fathers.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran.
- Greco-Roman religious and philosophical context.
- Women, gender and household codes.
- Reception history and the arts.
- Liberation, feminist and post-colonial readings.
- Koine Greek and language study.
- Archaeology and material culture.
Resources & Tools
- The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings by Bart Ehrman is the most widely adopted textbook in American public universities; Introducing the New Testament (Mark Allan Powell) and The New Testament: A Literary History are common alternatives, and ⚠ Powell is frequently chosen where an instructor wants a treatment that religious students find less abrasive while remaining critical.
- ⚠⚠ A STUDY BIBLE is the real text, and which one matters. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV) and the HarperCollins Study Bible are the academic standards — their notes are written by scholars using historical-critical method. ⚠ Use the translation your instructor assigns; translations differ in ways that carry argument, and a devotional study Bible's notes answer a different set of questions.
- ⚠ On translations, a practical note: the NRSV is the usual academic choice; the NIV is a widely used evangelical translation; the KJV is beautiful, historically enormous and based on a much later manuscript tradition. ⚠⚠ Comparing two translations of one passage for ten minutes teaches the course's central lesson faster than a chapter about it.
- ⚠⚠ Free and genuinely good: BibleGateway and Bible Hub for parallel translations and Greek; ⚠ the Codex Sinaiticus project (free, online, a fourth-century manuscript — worth ten minutes just to see what a manuscript actually looks like); the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for philosophical topics; and Early Christian Writings for public-domain non-canonical texts.
- Library databases: ATLA Religion Database is the discipline's own index — ⚠ ask a subject librarian, because biblical scholarship is not where a general search puts it. JSTOR and Project MUSE for journals.
- ⚠ A technique worth adopting: read the text before the textbook. Read the assigned Gospel chapter first, form your own impression, then read what the scholarship says about it. ⚠⚠ Students who read the textbook first arrive with the answer and never notice what is odd about the passage — and noticing what is odd is where interpretation starts.
- ⚠ Florida context: Florida State, UF, FIU and UCF all run religious-studies programmes with biblical specialists; ⚠ and the state's religious diversity means a student can readily encounter how these texts are read in Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical, Haitian Protestant and Latin American Catholic communities — which is reception history available locally.
Career Pathways
- ⚠ Like most humanities courses, this one's value is a skill that transfers rather than a subject that employs. It trains close reading of a difficult text in a foreign context, careful use of evidence, and the discipline of describing a position accurately before evaluating it.
- Clergy (SOC 21-2011), Director of Religious Activities and Education (SOC 21-2021) — ⚠ and worth knowing: seminaries and divinity schools generally expect exactly this kind of critical preparation, and a student arriving with it is ahead.
- Chaplaincy — hospital, hospice, prison, military — ⚠ requiring a graduate degree and clinical pastoral education; a substantial and often-overlooked profession.
- Secondary Social Studies or English Teacher (SOC 25-2031) — ⚠ biblical literacy is genuinely useful for teaching Western literature and history, and Florida's standards touch it; a teacher must handle it accurately and constitutionally.
- Postsecondary Teacher (SOC 25-1126) via a PhD — ⚠ a small and difficult academic market; discuss it frankly with faculty.
- Lawyer (SOC 23-1011) — ⚠ the fit is real: textual interpretation, arguing from authoritative documents, and reconciling texts that do not agree is close to what statutory and constitutional interpretation involves.
- Writer, Editor, Journalist (SOC 27-3043, 27-3041, 27-3023) — ⚠ religion reporting is a specialism and a badly informed story does real damage.
- Archivist, Curator, Librarian (SOC 25-4011, 25-4012, 25-4022) via graduate study; non-profit, interfaith and international work; and museum and heritage roles.
- ⚠ The honest framing: nobody is hired for having taken New Testament. But the interpretive skill is scarce, and the cultural literacy is assumed far more often than it is possessed — in law, journalism, teaching, diplomacy and the arts.
Special Information
⚠⚠⚠ The Gordon Rule designation differs — UWF has it, UNF and FGCU do not
Florida's Gordon Rule (State Board of Education Rule 6A-10.030) requires designated writing-intensive and designated mathematics coursework for a degree, ⚠⚠ with a grade of C or higher for the course to count — a C-minus does not satisfy it at most institutions.
| Institution | Its title | Gordon Rule writing? |
|---|
| University of West Florida | Studies in the New Testament | ✅ yes |
| University of North Florida | New Testament | ❌ none recorded |
| Florida Gulf Coast University | Introduction to the New Testament | ❌ none recorded |
⚠ This is the fourth number in this catalog on which the Gordon Rule designation diverges, after `HIS2050`, `PHI4300` and `REL1300`. The pattern is now thoroughly established: the designation is made by the institution, and the course number tells you nothing about it.
What follows: ⚠ a UNF or FGCU student taking this course to clear a writing requirement has not cleared it; ⚠⚠ a UWF student must earn a C or higher for it to count, which in an essay-assessed course is a real condition; and ⚠ a transfer student should ask the receiving registrar in writing, because a course that was not designated at the sending institution has nothing to carry.
⚠⚠ Note also that unlike `REL1300`, none of the three carriers records a HUMANITIES general-education designation on this number — unsurprising, since it is a 3000-level course and Florida's general-education core sits at the lower division. If you need a humanities general-education credit, `REL1300` World Religions is the number that reliably carries it.
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| University of North Florida | New Testament | 3 | not published |
| Florida Gulf Coast University | Introduction to the New Testament | 3 | not published |
| University of West Florida | Studies in the New Testament | 3 | not published |
Three State University System institutions. ✅ All three at 3 credits, and the three titles name the same course — UNF matches the statewide title; FGCU's "Introduction to" and UWF's "Studies in" are conventional variants rather than signals.
⚠ One small thing worth noting about "Studies in": in some catalogs that phrasing marks a VARIABLE-CONTENT course whose focus changes by term. It does not appear to here — the statewide definition is a survey and the credit value is fixed — ⚠ but if your section's syllabus turns out to concentrate on a single Gospel or on Paul rather than surveying the whole, that is worth knowing before you rely on the course for a general New Testament requirement.
⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived — the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course. No institution publishes an hour figure. ⚠⚠ The scheduled hours describe the load poorly. The real work is reading the primary texts closely — which is slower than it looks, because first-century documents assume a world you do not know — plus a textbook and essays.
⚠⚠ What "historical-critical" actually commits the course to
⚠ Students are rarely told what the method involves until they are in it, so here it is in outline.
| The course DOES ask | The course does NOT ask |
|---|
| Who wrote this, when, where, and to whom? | ⚠ Is it true? |
| What sources did the author use, and how did they change them? | Is it inspired? |
| What did this word or image mean in the first century? | What should I believe? |
| What problem in the author's community does this address? | Which denomination reads it correctly? |
| Why do two texts describing the same event differ? | Can the differences be harmonised into one account? |
⚠⚠ The last row is the one that most often surprises students. Historical criticism treats a difference between two Gospels as EVIDENCE — about the authors, their sources and their purposes — rather than as a problem to be resolved. Where Matthew changes something in Mark, the change is the most interesting thing on the page, because it tells you what Matthew wanted.
⚠ Some widely held scholarly positions a student should expect to meet, stated as what the field holds rather than as settled fact: Mark was probably written first and the other Synoptics used it; the Gospels were written decades after the events, anonymously, with the traditional names attached later; seven of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul are undisputed and the others are disputed; and Revelation is apocalyptic literature addressing its own time rather than a coded forecast of ours. ⚠⚠ These are the mainstream positions in the academic study of the New Testament, they are argued from evidence, and a good course shows you the evidence rather than asserting the conclusion.
⚠⚠ Second Temple Judaism is not background — it is the subject
⚠⚠⚠ This deserves separate emphasis because getting it wrong is the most consequential error a student of this material can make.
Jesus was a Jew. Paul was a Jew who remained one. The first followers were Jews. The New Testament is, in large part, Jewish literature arguing about Jewish questions. ⚠ The separation of Christianity from Judaism happened gradually and mostly after these texts were written.
⚠⚠ Two errors follow from forgetting it, and both are common:
- Anachronism — reading later Christian doctrine, or later Judaism, back into first-century texts. Neither religion existed in its later form when these documents were composed.
- ⚠⚠⚠ Supersessionism and the antisemitic reading. Certain New Testament passages — the polemic in John, the passion narratives, "the Jews" as a phrase — have been used for centuries to justify persecution. A serious course addresses this directly: it examines how intra-Jewish polemic became, in later hands, a charge against a whole people, and it distinguishes what a first-century text was doing from what later readers did with it. ⚠ Avoiding the subject is not neutrality; it leaves the student with the received reading.
⚠ Practically: a course that spends real time on Second Temple Judaism at the start is doing it properly. One that treats "Jewish background" as a week is not.
⚠ Prerequisites, position and who takes it
No statewide prerequisite. Institutions normally expect upper-division standing; ⚠ some restrict it to majors and minors, which is invisible until registration fails. ⚠ An introductory religion course is useful but rarely required, and no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew is assumed.
⚠ It is taken overwhelmingly by non-majors — often students with a religious background wanting to study the texts academically, and often students with none wanting the cultural literacy. Both do fine.
Budget eight to ten hours a week, weighted toward reading. ⚠ Expect a small number of essays carrying most of the grade, which makes a bad week expensive.
⚠⚠ The characteristic weak essay, and it comes in two opposite forms
⚠⚠⚠ This course is unusual in having two distinct failure modes that pull in opposite directions, and a student is likely to be tempted by one of them.
- The devotional essay. Explaining what a passage means for us, or arguing that the texts are consistent because they must be. ⚠ That is theology, and it is not what is being assessed — the course asks what the text meant in its own context.
- The debunking essay. Treating each discrepancy as a gotcha and the enterprise as exposure. ⚠ That is equally beside the point, and it is bad history: ancient authors were not attempting modern documentary accuracy, and judging them against a standard they did not hold explains nothing.
⚠ What is wanted sits between them and is harder than either: explain why THIS author wrote THIS, THIS way, for THESE readers. A difference between Mark and Matthew is not a scandal and not a triviality — it is data about Matthew. An essay that treats it that way is doing the discipline's work.
⚠⚠ And the same charity norm that governs philosophical writing applies: represent a position — including a scholarly one you intend to argue against — in its strongest form before criticising it.
⚠ A note on a course that touches people's faith
⚠⚠ This is one of the few subjects where classmates may be describing the foundation of their own lives while others treat it as an object of study, and that asymmetry is real.
Three things worth saying. You are never obliged to disclose your own beliefs, and a good instructor does not ask. ⚠ A student who belongs to a tradition under discussion is not its spokesperson and may decline that role. And ⚠⚠ if a critical conclusion is genuinely distressing, that is a normal response to a real intellectual challenge rather than a failure — many students find it eventually enriching, and campus counselling and chaplaincy are both available if it is not. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available to anyone at any hour.
AI Integration
Genuinely useful: background on first-century history, geography and institutions; explaining a scholarly method or term a second way; summarising a long article to decide whether to read it; comparing translations of a passage; building a chronology or a table of parallels across the Synoptics; generating objections to a thesis you have written; and tightening prose in revision.
⚠ One genuinely good use specific to this course: ask it how a passage has been read in different traditions and eras, then check it. Reception history is a legitimate topic, and the exercise of verifying a generated account against a real source is itself the discipline's method.
⚠⚠ Where it fails, and the failures here are sharper than in most subjects:
- ⚠⚠⚠ It fabricates citations and, worse, misquotes scripture — supplying verse references that do not say what it claims, or blending translations. ⚠ This is unusually detectable, because these texts are among the most thoroughly indexed documents in existence: an instructor can check a reference in seconds. Quote from the assigned translation with the reference located.
- ⚠⚠⚠ It cannot tell you which of its answers is confessional and which is critical, and it mixes the two. The training corpus contains vast quantities of devotional, apologetic and denominational writing alongside scholarship, and a generated answer may hand you a traditional attribution, a harmonisation, or a doctrinal reading in the register of a historical claim. ⚠⚠ That is precisely the distinction this course exists to teach — which makes the tool's output a live exercise in the course's own central skill. Ask yourself of every answer: is this what historians argue, or what a tradition holds?
- ⚠⚠ It is ANACHRONISTIC by construction, and anachronism is the named error of the discipline. Trained mostly on recent text, it explains first-century material in later Christian categories — ⚠ and in doing so it will sometimes reproduce supersessionist framing, which is the reading this course specifically teaches you to identify.
- ⚠ It gives the received answer on contested questions — authorship, dating, the historicity of particular episodes — where the scholarly position is more careful and more interesting.
- It is weak on the Greek, and confident about it — ⚠ do not rely on a generated claim about what a Greek word "really means", which is in any case a move the discipline distrusts.
- ⚠ It will not take an interpretive position, and taking one is the assignment.
⚠ The corrective is the discipline's own: quote the text in front of you, name the translation, say who holds the view you are reporting, and make a claim you could be wrong about.
Academic integrity: read your syllabus. ⚠ Where the assessment is an exegesis of a passage the instructor taught, a generated essay is recognisable by its tidiness and by its uncertainty about whether it is doing history or theology. ⚠⚠ And where a Gordon Rule writing designation attaches to the course, the writing IS the designated content — which makes the question a requirements matter as well as an integrity one.