I just finished a very interesting book by Frank Viola. Did you know what order our church fathers put Paul's letter to churches? The are in order from longest to shortest. Apparently this was a common way of ordering letters at some point in the past. Of course I would think chronologically would make more sense, but I wasn't around when they were deciding such things. And then, take the fact that we only get the letters that Paul, Peter, and others wrote. You don't get the letters written to them that they are in response to, and you don't get the personal reports from Timothy, Titus, etc that others were in response to. Kind of like listening to one side of a phone conversation.
Anyway, in this book Frank Viola take the NT story from the book of Acts, he adds some additional information and then tells where in that story the epistles were written and what specifically Paul, Peter, and Jude were addressing. It is an amazing way of looking at things. Now; of course, it takes some reading between the lines to come up with all of this. He uses some extra Biblical history and some "mirror reading." "Mirror Reading" is his term for reading a letter trying to find out what questions were asked that the author is trying to answer. Not the way to be most absolutely correct, but very interesting.
He is trying to recreate as much of the history as possible. Some of it is an educated guess at what was going on. Don't take this book as the absolute truth of what was going on, but it can have a profound effect on your thinking about the New Testament. Buy it and read it.
