Paul and Barnabas — What Happened Between These Two?
Are you ready for some writing instruction today? As a long-time English teacher, at both the high-school- and community-college level, I spent a lot of class time teaching my students to write. And one of the most common writing assignments was the compare-and-contrast essay where I asked my students to place two of something side by side: For example, I might ask them to write about cats versus dogs, or the Mets versus the Yankees, or the Democrats versus the Republicans.
As we prepared to work on these essays, I would stress that when they compared two items, they should be pointing out the similarities, but when they contrasted two items, they should be pointing out the differences.
I also stressed that sometimes, the assignment was purely objective; that is, to merely point out the similarities and differences without choosing one over the other in order to let the reader decide which is superior: cats or dogs.
At other times, however, the task might be persuasive, and the goal there is to convince the reader to side with the writer’s opinion that the Mets, for example, are clearly better than the Yankees.
So today, we’re going to go through a similar brainstorming exercise as we look at the lives of two key New Testament characters: Paul and Barnabas. As we do so, this…
