Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1174. The Bodmer papyri are, alongside the Chester Beatty collection, among the most significant early witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament, and together these two collections have done more than almost anything else in the last century to close the historical gap between the apostles and our earliest substantial manuscript…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1175. The Muratorian fragment is one of the earliest surviving pieces of direct evidence for how the church recognised the New Testament canon, and it answers a question I am asked often, sometimes by sincere believers who have absorbed a popular but mistaken idea from films and bestselling novels: was the list of New…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1179. Wisdom literature occupies a strange and wonderful middle section of the Old Testament, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, and it is read badly more often than almost any other part of Scripture, precisely because readers bring the wrong expectations to it. Proverbs gets treated as a set of ironclad promises…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1180. Can an ordinary believer genuinely study the Bible well without ever learning a word of Greek or Hebrew? I get this question often, usually from someone who has just discovered how much technical vocabulary surrounds serious Bible study and has quietly concluded that real depth is reserved for people with a seminary transcript….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1181. The Alexandrian school of biblical interpretation shaped how the early church read Scripture for centuries, and understanding it helps explain why so much older commentary reads so differently from the careful, literal-grammatical-historical method I use and teach today. Centred firmly in the great intellectual city of Alexandria in Egypt, this school of thought…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1182. The Antiochene school of biblical interpretation stands as the great historical counterweight to the allegorical excesses I described in What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?, and its influence on how careful readers approach Scripture still matters today. Centred firmly in the ancient, historic Syrian city of Antioch, this tradition insisted on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1184. What is the book of Enoch, and is it Scripture? This question comes up more often than you might expect, usually prompted by the fact that Jude actually quotes it directly in his New Testament letter, which understandably makes people wonder whether the book itself deserves a place in the canon. It does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1185. What is the book of Jasher mentioned in Joshua and 2 Samuel, and should its brief, tantalising appearances in Scripture make us curious about a lost inspired text? The book of Jasher is referenced twice in the Old Testament, in Joshua 10:13 and 2 Samuel 1:18, as a source the biblical writers themselves…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1186. What is the Gospel of Thomas, and why does it keep surfacing in popular articles and documentaries about the “hidden” or “suppressed” gospels? The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, discovered among the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945, and it has become, in certain circles, a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1187. Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you soon notice they are telling one connected story, which is exactly why scholars group them together as the Synoptic Gospels. Turn the page to John and the atmosphere changes: the parables thin out, long personal conversations take their place, and the pace slows…