I had a great conversation with Fr. Mitch last night on EWTN Live - it's always fun talking with him, and always goes way too fast! Now I'm sitting in the Birmingham airport waiting to board my first of two flights to get home.
I see we have some new folks here - thanks for checking out the Original Church community - the whole purpose of this is to give people a place to make comments and ask questions, because I don't have comments active on my YouTube videos, and because I'm not on social media. So this is the place to interact with me! EVERYONE should feel free to post here - observations, questions, even prayer requests. We're glad you're here. We are still a relatively small community, but we are growing!
And please join us for The Journey - our ongoing, indepth Bible study - live every Saturday morning at 10 am Central Time; 11 am Eastern Time. And if you can't watch it live, you can watch it later.
Blessings!
- Jim
P.S. All Christians are welcome here, but we do operate on the assumption that the Original Church was the Catholic Church, that the Catholic Church of today is the heart of the universal Church, and most faithfully expresses the intentions of Jesus when he said, "On this rock I will build my Church." So this is not a place for controversy, drama, politics, or even debate, per se, but we do want people to learn how to defend their faith when it's challenged out in the world.
Dear friends - Please take 10 minutes to watch this personal update from me:
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
Hi folks,
When I was putting together my list of how to read the rest of the NT chronologically, I now realize that I left out the Letter to the Hebrews!
As you know, in the early and medieval Church there was a debate over whether St. Paul wrote this, and whether it should be included among his letters. Since most scholars do not include Hebrews among the letters of Paul, I had left it off my chronology of Paul's life. If he did write it, we don't know when - but I suspect that if he wrote it, it would have his name on it. In any case, it has to have been written before 70 AD because it speaks of the temple sacrifices as ongoing, and Clement of Rome quotes it in 1 Clement a couple decades later. So I would put Hebrews either with James (after the prison epistles of Paul) or with Peter's letters (after the pastoral epistles of Paul). I'm not saying that I think James or Peter wrote it, but they would be interesting candidates for authorship.
And if you want a couple short, but ...
Hi Folks,
I'm planning to shut down the platform this Saturday. It will be 3 years almost to the day since we started. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope we keep in touch.
Stay subscribed to my YouTube channel for all the upcoming episodes of The Way of the Fathers podcast. The second episode on St. Thomas Aquinas will air on the 29th, and in November we're jumping out of the chronological sequence to talk about the newest doctor, St. John Henry Newman! (And I will be taking December off, getting back into it with St. Catherine of Siena in January.)
And make sure you're on the email mailing list, so you'll know about new books and future pilgrimages (HINT: Mike Aquilina and I are already planning ROME 2026 - probably right about a year from now - so stay tuned...). You can sign up for the email list, which comes no more than once a month, at my home page: https://jimpapandrea.wordpress.com/
Thanks again for all your support!
- Jim
If you wanted to read the rest of the New Testament (after the gospels) in chronological order, interspersed with the book of Acts, this PDF gives you the order in which to read everything. There are a few books for which specific dates are unknown, and as you know, other scholars might have a different way of working this out - but it does work, and the math checks out (see the other PDF, the chronology of St. Paul's life, which I will post after this). And if you find any problems to be corrected or you have something to add, please let me know!
