Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1144 The prophecy of Isaiah is one of the towering books of the Old Testament, quoted again and again in the New and treasured by the church for its vision of the suffering Servant who was pierced for our transgressions. Yet many modern textbooks divide it among two or three different authors writing across…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1143 For most of church history Christians took it for granted that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. The Lord Jesus and the apostles spoke of them as the books of Moses, the Jewish people had always received them so, and no one thought to argue otherwise. Then in the nineteenth…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1158 The short letter we call Second Peter has faced more doubt about its authorship than almost any other book in the New Testament. The letter names Peter as its writer in its opening line, yet critics have long argued that it came from a later hand writing in the apostle’s name. Since the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1155 Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry the name of Paul, from Romans through to the short personal note to Philemon. For most of church history these were received without question as the work of the apostle, read in the churches and treasured as Scripture. Modern scholarship has challenged several of them, suggesting…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1174 Alongside the Chester Beatty papyri, the other great treasure of early New Testament manuscripts is the collection known as the Bodmer papyri. These too carry us back to the early centuries of the church and provide some of the finest and fullest evidence we have for the text of the Gospels. For anyone…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1171 When people ask how we can be sure the New Testament has been handed down faithfully, the answer rests in large part on the manuscripts that survive. Among the most important of these are the Chester Beatty papyri, a collection that gave scholars some of their earliest direct windows into the text of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1078 Anyone who reads Matthew, Mark, and Luke one after another notices something straight away. These three Gospels tell much of the same story, often in the same order, and sometimes in almost identical words, while John stands apart with his own material and arrangement. The close agreement of the first three has led…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1184 Few ancient writings stir up as much curiosity as the book of Enoch. It promises secrets about fallen angels and the days before the flood, it claims the name of a man who walked with God and did not see death, and it is quoted by name in the New Testament letter of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07109 The question of whether Christians should obey the Levitical law comes up whenever a believer notices the rules about diet, clothing, festivals, and ritual purity in Leviticus and wonders if they still apply. The short answer is that the Christian is not bound to obey the Levitical law, because it was part of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07042 To ask how we apply Old Testament law today is to ask one of the most practical questions a Bible reader faces, because so much of Scripture is law and yet we plainly do not keep all of it. The believer is not under the Old Testament law as a binding covenant, and…