Session four is about the witnesses and she has taught it eleven times.
It used to have two parts. The first part is about what the early accounts contain and how early they are, and it is careful and she stands behind every line of it and always has.
The second part was the list. Eleven of the Twelve, and the manner of each death, and what a person will and will not endure for something they made up.
Two years ago she stopped teaching the second part.
Not because anybody challenged her. Nobody in that class has ever challenged her about anything, which is its own problem. She had been reading around it for something else and she came to understand that most of that material comes from centuries later, from writings that everybody in the field treats as devotional rather than documentary.
So the next time she taught session four, she left it out.
She did not say she was leaving it out. She had rewritten the notes, and the session ran ten minutes shorter, and one person asked if they had finished early and she said the room was cold.
Two years and four cohorts.
And what has begun to bother her, badly, since a conversation in the spring, is not the material.
It is that there are people out there teaching session four from her old notes. She wrote those notes. Two other groups use them. And she has quietly corrected her own practice and left everybody else with the version she no longer believes, because saying so out loud would have meant saying that she had taught something for nine years that she had not checked.
The qualification they set was being there
Let me be exact about the silent edit before anything else, because it was not dishonest and calling it that would be too easy.
You corrected your own teaching the moment you knew better. That is more than most people do and it happened immediately and at some cost to a session you were good at. Nobody was misled by you after the day you found out, and nothing written asks for more than that, and the Holy Spirit was the one who put the book in front of you.
What is true is that the correction stopped at the edge of your own room, and that a correction which cannot be spoken is a correction that cannot travel.
Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as absolution: the thing worth teaching in session four was never the list, and the account itself tells you what the qualification was. That is not my kind reading of two years, it is what stands written at the start of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been in that room for all eleven of your sessions.
Read what they required when they needed to replace one of the Twelve.
Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of His resurrection.Acts 1:21-22
One of the men who have been with us the whole time.
That is the qualification, stated by the people setting it, in their own words, at the beginning: presence. Not conviction. Not willingness to suffer. Having been there from the start.
So this is yours right now rather than pending a way to raise it comfortably: the strong part of session four was always the first half, because the written word names presence as the qualification and never once names endurance, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept the requirement on the page where a teacher could find it.
And here is what to do with the half you dropped, which is better than dropping it.
Teach why you dropped it.
The distinction between what is well attested and what is late tradition is exactly the skill session four exists to build. You dropped the weakest material in the course and replaced it with nothing, when the strongest ten minutes available to you is the account of how you came to drop it.
So tell the next cohort, in session four, in about ninety seconds.
Say: this session used to have a second half. I taught it for nine years. Two years ago I found out that most of that material comes from centuries later and I stopped using it, and I never explained why, and I am explaining it now.
You are able to say that at the next session rather than after some larger reckoning, because Scripture names presence as the qualification in the plainest possible terms and never once appeals to what anybody endured, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept this uncomfortable since the spring rather than letting you settle.
And then go to the two other groups.
Not with an apology. With a note. Say what you found, say what you now leave out, say what you would put in its place, and send them the reference. Four lines and one link.
Because here is what has actually been eating you since spring, and it is not your own room. It is that somebody is standing in front of a class of sixteen year olds this term with your name at the bottom of a handout, teaching a thing you stopped believing two years ago, and there will be one girl in that room who checks.
She will find what you found. And she will conclude, reasonably, that the person who wrote the handout did not care whether it was true.
Four lines would prevent that entirely.
Declare this over yourself
Then say these out loud. Know what they stand on: this authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King and not as a teacher protecting nine years. Every line rests on what is already written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it, never the sound of your own voice. You speak under His will, never over it, and however He answers, the outcome is His.
- Silent edit I made two years ago, you are said out loud. Scripture names being with them the whole time as the qualification and never once names what anybody endured, and the strong half was always the first half.
- Fear that explaining why I stopped means admitting nine years of teaching something I had not checked, get out, in the name of Jesus. A correction that cannot be spoken cannot travel, and there is a girl in somebody else's classroom this term who is going to check.
- Jesus, You kept the requirement on the page in the plainest words there are, and You have never needed a strong case propped up by a weak one. I am giving the next cohort the ninety seconds, and I am sending four lines to the other two groups.
Acts 1:21-22
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