Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1074. Why these sixty-six books, and not more, and not fewer? It is a fair question, and one I would rather answer directly than wave away with an appeal to church tradition alone, since tradition, however venerable, is not itself the final ground of biblical authority. Having already looked at how the canon of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves no favours by either dismissing the question too quickly or panicking as though the whole edifice of Scripture rests on winning every single one of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1070. Biblical inerrancy is the conviction that Scripture, in its original manuscripts, is entirely true and without error in everything it affirms, and I want to give this doctrine the fuller Deep Dive treatment it deserves, because it sits underneath almost every other confidence a Christian holds. If the Bible cannot be trusted in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God’s Word, and I think it can bear the weight of honest scrutiny very well indeed. In a sceptical age, people rightly ask how we can trust a set…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels they considered authentic, using coloured beads, red for certainly authentic down to black for certainly not, and concluding that only around…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1045. Biblical archaeology occupies an unusual place in my ministry, because it sits right at the boundary between faith and physical evidence, and I find that boundary endlessly interesting rather than threatening. In 1868 a German missionary named Frederick Klein discovered a black basalt stone in Jordan bearing an inscription from Mesha, king of…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1016. Biblical coherence across roughly fifteen centuries of writing, in three different languages, by more than forty human authors in wildly different circumstances, kings, shepherds, fishermen, priests, prisoners and statesmen, is one of the most striking evidences for Scripture’s divine origin that I know, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves in ordinary…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1015. Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices, and the New Testament says Jesus has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1012. Scripture teaches that creation reveals God to every person on earth, whether they live under bright city lights or open desert skies, and that truth runs far deeper than mere sentiment. Stand under a clear night sky and look up, watch the sun lift over the hills, or consider the staggering detail packed…