Examining the doctrine of Scripture—its inspiration, inerrancy, authority, canon, and interpretation.
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1145. The dating of Daniel is, more than almost any other Old Testament question, a straightforward test case for whether you believe God can tell the future. Conservative scholarship places the book in the sixth century BC, written substantially by Daniel himself during and shortly after the Babylonian exile, exactly as the book claims…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01152. When the four Gospels were actually written matters more than it might first appear, because a late date, decades after the events described, would leave room for legend to creep in before anyone wrote the story down, while an early date places the record within living memory of eyewitnesses who could still contradict…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01155. Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters bearing Paul’s name in the New Testament has been challenged by critical scholarship for well over a century, with roughly half of them, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, regularly labelled disputed or even pseudonymous in academic literature. I hold to full Pauline…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1158. Petrine authorship of Second Peter has taken more scholarly fire than almost any other claim in the New Testament, and I think the letter deserves better than the suspicion it usually receives. The letter opens in the plainest possible terms, naming Simeon Peter as its author, an eyewitness of the Lord’s majesty who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1171. The Chester Beatty papyri are among the earliest and most significant witnesses we possess to the text of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, and I want to walk through what they are, how they were found, and why they matter so much to anyone asking whether the Bible we read…
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…