Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1023 The English Standard Version has become the working Bible of many evangelical churches, pulpits, and study desks over the past two decades. People often choose it because their pastor preaches from it or because a respected teacher recommends it, without quite knowing what kind of translation they are holding. Understanding the philosophy behind…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1182 If the Alexandrian school taught the early church to look beneath the words of Scripture for a hidden spiritual meaning, the school at Antioch taught it to honour the words themselves. The two traditions ran alongside each other for centuries, and the difference between them is not a dusty quarrel but a question…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1181 Long before the Reformation settled the church on a literal and grammatical reading of Scripture, two great centres of learning pulled the early church in different directions. One sat in Alexandria in Egypt, the other in Antioch in Syria, and the way each handled the Bible shaped Christian interpretation for centuries. To understand…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1187 Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you feel you are hearing three tellings of the same story. Turn to John and the air changes. The parables give way to long discourses, the crowds give way to searching conversations with individuals, and the whole pace slows down to dwell on a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1185 Twice the Old Testament pauses to point outside itself. When the sun stood still over Gibeon, the writer of Joshua adds that this is written in the book of Jashar. When David sang his lament over Saul and Jonathan, the writer of 2 Samuel notes that the song is recorded in the book…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1189 Open the New Testament and you are never far from the Old. The apostles quote it, allude to it, and build their arguments on it, returning again and again to the words this was to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet. They were Jewish men steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, and when…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1180 A faithful believer once told me she had stopped going to a midweek study because the leader kept reaching for the Greek, and she had begun to feel that the Bible was a locked room and only the scholars held the key. That feeling is more common than we admit, and it does…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1179 Open the middle of your Bible and you arrive in a different country. The thunder of the prophets has faded, the marching narratives of Kings and Chronicles have given way to something quieter and stranger. Here a father pleads with a son, a sufferer argues with God from an ash heap, a teacher…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 01166 To ask in what sense the Mosaic law still speaks to Christians today is to ask one of the most practical questions in the whole of biblical theology, because the answer shapes how we read more than half of our Bibles. The short reply is that the believer is not under the Mosaic…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1152 The date of the Gospels matters more than it first appears. If they were written generations after the events, by people far removed from the eyewitnesses, then doubts about their reliability gain a foothold, for legends can grow in the gap between an event and its recording. If they were written within the…