Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1059 Walk into any Christian bookshop, and you will find shelves of children’s Bibles—colourful, illustrated retellings of Scripture aimed at young readers. Parents and grandparents buy them with the best intentions, hoping to introduce children to God’s Word in accessible form. But are children’s Bibles helpful or harmful? Do they prepare children for the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1060 Form criticism is one of those terms that seminarians encounter and ordinary Christians rarely hear—yet its influence on biblical scholarship over the past century has been profound. Understanding what it is, where it came from, and how to evaluate it helps believers engage thoughtfully with modern biblical studies whilst maintaining confidence in Scripture’s…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1061 If you’ve ever dipped into academic biblical studies, you’ll have come across something called “source criticism.” It sounds very scholarly and impressive, but what exactly is it? And more importantly, should we as Bible-believing Christians be concerned about it? Let’s have a look at what this method involves and how we should respond…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1062 Following on from source criticism, another method you’ll encounter in academic biblical studies is “redaction criticism.” If source criticism asks “what sources did the author use?”, redaction criticism asks “how did the author edit and arrange those sources?” It’s a question that sounds innocent enough, but as we’ll see, it can be used…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1063 If you’ve studied the Old Testament at any academic level, you’ve almost certainly encountered something called the “JEDP theory” or the “Documentary Hypothesis.” This theory claims that the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible—was not written by Moses at all, but was compiled from four different source documents centuries after Moses lived….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1064 When studying the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—you’ll quickly encounter discussions about how these three Gospels relate to each other. They share so much material, often in nearly identical wording, that scholars have long debated how to explain the similarities and differences. One popular explanation involves a hypothetical document called “Q.” But what…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1065 In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of scholars calling themselves the “Jesus Seminar” made headlines by voting on which sayings of Jesus in the Gospels were authentic. They used coloured beads—red, pink, grey, and black—to rate each saying, and concluded that only about 18% of the words attributed to Jesus in the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1110 When we pick up our English Bibles, we trust that the words we read faithfully represent what the apostles and prophets originally wrote. But behind every translation lies a fundamental question: which Greek manuscripts should translators rely upon? The Majority Text theory offers one answer to this question, and it has shaped how…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1111 When people learn that we possess over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, they often wonder why so many of these early witnesses survive only as fragments. Why do we have pieces of papyrus with just a few verses rather than complete books? The answer takes us into the ancient world of…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1114 Anyone who has read the Bible seriously has encountered passages that puzzle, trouble, or even disturb. Genealogies that seem pointless, prophecies that remain obscure, apparent contradictions between accounts, commands that seem harsh to modern ears, and theological statements that the greatest minds have debated for centuries. If God wanted to communicate clearly with…