Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8013. Named angels are far rarer in Scripture than most Christians assume. Ask around a congregation and you will hear Raphael, Uriel, sometimes Raguel or Sariel, and a general impression that the Bible contains a substantial roll of angelic names. It does not. There are two. Michael and Gabriel. That is the complete list…
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: 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 3058. People love a gap, and the so-called lost years of Jesus are one of history’s most famous. The Gospels give us his birth, the flight to Egypt, one arresting scene in the temple at age twelve, and then silence until his baptism at about thirty (Luke 3:23). Nearly two decades pass without a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1183. Is the book of Esdras a book we should read, and does it belong anywhere near our study of Scripture? People find the name confusing before they even reach the content, since several ancient books share it, and I want to sort out both the confusion and the underlying canonical question clearly. The…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1075. The Old Testament Apocrypha sits quietly on the shelf of most study Bibles that include it, and I get asked about it more often than you might expect, usually by someone who has just noticed that a Catholic or Orthodox friend’s Bible is a good deal thicker than their own. The question behind…