The Letters

This book is a brief collection of bullet point notes focused on only the letters written by the apostles and Jude. Throughout church history there has been some controversy over authorship, dates, locations, and the audience of the letters. I did not research deeply into such disputed controversies. I instead used the general agreed on basic factual evidence of the documents.This book is not an in-depth scholarly examination of these epistles. Rather, this book is a short quick collection of personal one-line notes. My purpose was to gain an overview of each biblical letter. As you will see my outline captures such things as the author, the audience, the date written, authors location when writing, the church the author founded or was associated with, the missionary journey the author may have been on when writing, purpose of the letter, major themes, and doctrines discussed. As best I could I attempted to go through each epistle by the date the letter was written. So, this book is not in the same order as your personal Bible. I began with 1 Thessalonians and ended my study in the book of Jude. Again, since this book is only focused on the epistles, I purposely did not include the synoptic gospels, the gospel of John, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation. Hebrews was not included in my study because it doesn’t appear to be a letter, the author is unknown, and the audience is unknown. Although the book of Revelations author is known and is addressed to the seven churches in Asia it is not a pastoral letter or a personal letter. The book of Revelation is an apocalyptic writing that deserves an in-depth study by itself.