Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1112. Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might expect, because the early church’s adoption of the codex over the scroll was one of the most striking cultural decisions the first Christians ever made….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes a source of real encouragement rather than concern about how much of the Bible has actually reached us intact. People sometimes hear that we possess…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1110. The Majority Text theory holds that the true wording of the Greek New Testament is best found by following the reading supported by the largest number of surviving Greek manuscripts, and if you have never met this idea before, it is worth understanding both its genuine strengths and its real limitations before you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1109. The Textus Receptus is the name given to a particular printed edition of the Greek New Testament that dominated the Protestant world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and if you have ever heard someone insist that the Textus Receptus is the only trustworthy Greek text, you deserve a clear and honest…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1108. Hebrew vowel points are the small dots and dashes printed above, below and inside the consonants of our printed Hebrew Bibles, and the question of when the Hebrew vowel points were added takes us into one of the more fascinating corners of textual history. If you have ever opened an interlinear Hebrew Old…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the human author himself consciously understood when he wrote it, a meaning only made clear later through subsequent revelation. I want to work through this carefully,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1107. Manuscript discoveries make headlines from time to time, a newly identified papyrus fragment, an early codex found in a monastery library, and each one raises the same anxious question in some readers, could a find like this overturn something Christians have always believed? It is worth answering plainly. No genuine manuscript discovery has…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1106. Biblical preservation is a doctrine people often assume promises far more than it actually claims, and getting the scope right matters enormously, especially once you learn that our thousands of New Testament manuscripts contain small variations between copies. Does that discovery threaten biblical preservation as a doctrine? Not once you understand what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1105. Grammatical irregularities do appear here and there in the Greek New Testament, and the book of Revelation is the most famous case, containing what specialists call solecisms, places where John seems to break standard Greek grammatical agreement, most noticeably around the throne room visions in the early chapters. If Scripture is inspired down…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1104. Old Testament quotations in the New Testament rarely match their source word for word, and if you line up Matthew’s citation of Isaiah next to your Old Testament text, you will often notice small differences in wording almost immediately. Sceptics sometimes present this as proof of error somewhere in Scripture. It is nothing…