Our First Bible Study will be the Letter of Paul to the Philippians.
Welcome to our first On-Line Bible Study. We’re going to study Philippians, and we’ll do it at a rather slow pace. If you would like to slow it down or speed it up, please say so in your comments. There is a place for you to post them at the end of the page.
Below is a map showing Philippi and St. Paul’s second missionary journey. If you start at Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and go North, you will find Philippi and Neapolis (marked by the “4”). You can access this map at this link. You will notice that it opens in a new TAB. I will try to edit all of the links so that they will do that.
I ‘Googled’ Philippi and found this page of images about Philippi.
If you want to read the Bible online, there are several good sites. One that I use frequently is Bible Gateway So, to get started, we can look up Philippians on Bible Gateway and we find this webpage. Note that you can select from a large number of translations. There are also many other features available. Those who use a different website, please add your favorites in the comments. The purpose here is to learn from each other.
(By the way, many websites, including Bible Gateway, will ask you to “subscribe” or otherwise pay for extra features, including the removal of advertisements. I have made good use of Bible Gateway without subscribing. I do not forsee any situation where you would need to pay for a subscription to any website in order to participate in this Bible Study.)
Apple and Andorid will let you add an icon so that you can treat this as an “app”. You may find that helpful.
Please submit your comments, questions, observations in the COMMENTS section at the end of the page. These are “threaded” comments, so your reply to a comment will be placed under it. That reduces confusion. If you want to reply to a posted comment, click on the “Reply” that has an arrow. If you want to post a new comment, click in the box that says, “Enter your comment here…”
Due to the nature ot the Internet, your comments will be screened. To post a comment, you must be “logged in”. Currently, you can use your Facebook, Twitter or Google account, or you can set up a simple access with WordPress. Then, click on the appropriate icon: WordPress Account, Facebook Account, Google Account or Twitter Account in order to log in. It would be nice if we did not have to do this, but there are plenty of “Agents of Chaos” who would destroy our Bible Study.
You will note a menu at the top of the page. The chapter menus are “drop down” style. The Bible Study Sessions are in “Blog” format. Just pick the chapter section you would like to study.
The “Comments” Box is below the advertisement. Until we get a bit of funding, we will have to tolerate the advertisements.
COTR Bible Study 
Hello everyone! Looking forward to studying the Word with you.
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Here is something that may help with the introduction to Philippians: Acts chapter 16.
This is Paul’s second missionary journey. I have a note in one of my Bibles which states that Philippi was a Roman Colony: that is, it was Latin in culture, not Greek, So, it would seem that its citizens would have Roman Citizenship.
Another interesting sideline is that the Jews did not have a building (a synagogue) in which to worship.Instead, they congregated on a riverbank.
There’s much more to Acts 16. I enjoyed the way Paul dealt with the magistrates and officials of Philippi. For more about Roman Citizenship, note Acts 22:22-29. Wikipedia makes note of the Rights of a Roman Citizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship
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Hi this is Joann.
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Hi Joann! Welcome to the Bible Study.
Note to everyone: you might want to do what Joann did and let me know who you are. That way I can quickly approve your comment.
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This is a test comment. One thing it does is show how “Threaded” comments work. I clicked on the “Reply” with the arrow to put this comment in Joann’s ‘thread’.
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Excellent! The directions and your description are clear and I was able to get here easily. I will try the “app” feature. That would make it one touch to get started,
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Thank You. I use the “App” feature for Christopher’s Blog, for the COTR Website and many other Internet sites. One of the things I hope we can do here is strengthen our Internet skills so that we can use the Internet for Bible Study and to “make Disciples”.
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While I have read this several times, I just realized that what I know about Philippians is chapter 2: 6-11 and 4:7. So I now realize that there is much to learn here.
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