New Testament

Title: A «gospel not in word only» (1Thess 1:5). The first letter to the Thessalonians: the oldest surviving Christian writing.

Probably written between 50 and 51 CE, 1Thess is usually considered by critics to be the oldest writing of the "authentic Paul" and, likewise, the oldest surviving Christian document.
The analysis of this short letter allows us to critically appreciate the peculiarities of the first Christian access to writing and detect its para-literary characteristics more easily.
The formal peculiarities and critical difficulties posed by 1Thess (the unity of its drafting; its rhetorical discontinuities; the lexical peculiarities of the writing) will be presented contextually to its main thematic turning points (with particular attention to the concept of "gospel", which here appears for the first time; the relationship between kerygma, apocalyptic prophecy and eschatological theology; the emergence of the Pauline antithesis between charisma and morality) to accustom the student to a critical reading of proto-Christian textual products.
The typical and anti-trend profile of this first Christian textual product - and, overall, of all proto-Christian writing - made it necessary to set up a critical approach to these texts capable of reconciling the knowledge of the historical-theological assumptions within which these documents were composed (as a motivation of the textual peculiarities of these writings) with an adequate notion of their textual peculiarities (as a hermeneutic prerequisite to avoid the risk of misunderstandings of their theoretical content).
The development of the course will follow three Argument Units:
In the I Unit, the role played by textuality first, and then by writing, within the history of rabbi Jesus of Nazareth and the first preaching of his Passover will be presented. The context in which the first Christian writings were born, their religious aims and characteristics of literary typicality that isolate them from the historical-literary panorama of the ancient world will be the subject of specific analysis. The description of these markers will follow that of the methodologies and critical tools developed specifically by biblical philology to set up the critical analysis of these complex documents.
In the II Unit, particular attention will be paid to the so-called "synoptic question", probably the most visible outcome of the peculiar proto-Christian practice of writing, reading, producing and circulating manuscripts. At the same time, the progressive emergence, also in Christian production, of literary consistencies will be discussed, trying to motivate this process of revision and downfall of the first Christian culture of the written word.
Particular attention will be paid to the literary-critical and historical-critical approach of the Formgeschichte.
Finally, the III Unit will be dedicated to reading 1Thess' comment: the critical analysis of the text, the hermeneutic of its contents and the description of its Sitz im Leben (vital context) are aimed at reconstructing the sources, the circumstances, the reasons, the aims and the contents of this first page of the Christian culture of the text and writing.