Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01156 The imprecatory psalms are those passages in the Psalter that call down divine destruction on enemies — “Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow” (Psalm 109:9); “O daughter of Babylon… blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (Psalm 137:8-9). The discomfort these…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01159 Progressive revelation and dispensationalism are not merely compatible positions that can be held alongside each other without difficulty. Progressive revelation is the exegetical foundation on which the dispensational understanding of Scripture is built. To understand why, it is necessary to be clear about what both terms actually mean and how they relate to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01157 The relationship between scholarly consensus and the plain reading of a biblical text is not a straightforward hierarchy in either direction. Neither blanket deference to scholarship nor reflexive dismissal of it serves the text well. When the two appear to conflict, the question of how to weigh them requires more careful reasoning than…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01163 The Documentary Hypothesis, also known as the JEDP theory, was the dominant critical framework for understanding the origin of the Pentateuch throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. In its classic form, articulated by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, it proposed that the first five books of the Bible were not written…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01165 KJV-Onlyism is the conviction that the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, is the uniquely preserved and authoritative Word of God in English, and that all modern translations represent corrupt departures from it. It is held with genuine sincerity and a real concern for biblical authority. It is also, on…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01166 If the Mosaic Law has ended for the believer as a covenant, the question naturally follows: in what sense does it still speak? Christians do not ignore Leviticus or treat the Decalogue as cultural artefact. The Old Testament law continues to address the church, but the manner in which it speaks is different…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01167 One of the most instructive parallels in the history of biblical translation is the parallel between the authority claimed for the Latin Vulgate by the mediaeval and Counter-Reformation Catholic church and the authority claimed for the King James Version by modern KJV-Only advocates. The parallel is not coincidental. Recognising it illuminates both positions:…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01168 The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus are two of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Christian Bible in existence. Both date from the fourth century AD, making them several centuries older than the manuscripts Erasmus used to compile the Textus Receptus in 1516. Their existence and content lie at the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60081 A Christian student entering a university biblical studies department for the first time can find the experience genuinely disorienting. Lecturers who have devoted their academic careers to the subject treat the multiple authorship of Isaiah, the post-exilic composition of Daniel, and the legendary character of the patriarchal narratives not as contested positions but…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01169 The New Testament has been transmitted in over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, along with thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and other ancient languages. This remarkable abundance of manuscript evidence is one of the strongest arguments for the New Testament’s textual reliability compared to any other work of antiquity. But not all…