Church history and the development of Christian doctrine.
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: 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: 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: 6 minutesQuestion 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from tiny papyrus fragments to complete parchment codices spanning many centuries of careful copying. No single manuscript reads identically to every other, which is exactly what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can be in the text of the New Testament sooner or later has to reckon with what these two documents actually say and where they came…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in English. For roughly a thousand years, the Latin Vulgate held almost exactly that place in the Western church, and watching how that claim was made,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1118. The silent years sit between Malachi, the last prophetic voice of the Old Testament, and the opening pages of Matthew, roughly four centuries in which the Bible itself records no new inspired prophecy. People sometimes assume this means God simply went quiet, stepped back from history, and left His people to manage without…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1019. Higher criticism has generated strong reactions in the church for more than two centuries, and having watched its effects on ordinary congregations over the years, I think those reactions are largely warranted. It is worth understanding precisely what this discipline is, where it came from, what conclusions it has reached, and why those…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1014. The truth we call progressive revelation answers a question that shapes the way you read the whole Bible, namely whether God handed down everything He wanted us to know in one go, or unveiled His truth and His purposes step by step across the centuries. It is no dry academic puzzle, because how…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10. Early church catechisms are something many evangelicals have either never heard of or quietly suspect of being a Roman Catholic invention, and both reactions miss a rich and useful history. Long before the Reformation produced its famous catechisms, the believers of the first few centuries were carefully instructing new converts in the faith…