Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01153 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, beginning in 1947, was one of the most significant archaeological finds of the twentieth century for anyone who cares about the reliability of the Old Testament text. Before Qumran, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated to approximately the tenth and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01156 The imprecatory psalms are those passages in the Psalter that call down divine destruction on enemies — “Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow” (Psalm 109:9); “O daughter of Babylon… blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (Psalm 137:8-9). The discomfort these…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01157 The relationship between scholarly consensus and the plain reading of a biblical text is not a straightforward hierarchy in either direction. Neither blanket deference to scholarship nor reflexive dismissal of it serves the text well. When the two appear to conflict, the question of how to weigh them requires more careful reasoning than…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01163 The Documentary Hypothesis, also known as the JEDP theory, was the dominant critical framework for understanding the origin of the Pentateuch throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. In its classic form, articulated by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, it proposed that the first five books of the Bible were not written…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60081 A Christian student entering a university biblical studies department for the first time can find the experience genuinely disorienting. Lecturers who have devoted their academic careers to the subject treat the multiple authorship of Isaiah, the post-exilic composition of Daniel, and the legendary character of the patriarchal narratives not as contested positions but…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 0015 Among the most significant challenges facing the contemporary church is a movement that calls itself progressive Christianity. Unlike obvious heresies that reject Christian vocabulary entirely, progressive Christianity retains traditional Christian language while systematically redefining its meaning. It claims to represent an evolved, enlightened form of faith appropriate for modern people—a Christianity liberated from…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3052 You may have heard the phrase ‘the historical Jesus’ and wondered what it means. Is it different from the Jesus we read about in the Gospels? The term comes from academic scholarship and refers to attempts to reconstruct who Jesus was using historical-critical methods. For Bible-believing Christians, there is only one Jesus, the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3053 Every religion has its founder or key figure. Buddhism has the Buddha, Islam has Muhammad, Hinduism has its gurus and avatars. So what makes Jesus different? Is he simply one religious teacher among many, or is there something utterly unique about him? The answer matters enormously, because if Jesus is just another voice…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3058 The Gospels tell us about Jesus’ birth, his presentation at the Temple, the visit of the Magi, the flight to Egypt, and his family’s return to Nazareth. Then there is silence. Luke alone records a brief glimpse of Jesus at age twelve in the Temple. After that, nothing until his baptism at around…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 3059 Every few years, some book or documentary claims to have discovered evidence that Jesus was married. Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code popularised the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. In 2012, a fragment called the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” made headlines before being exposed as a modern forgery….