Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1152 The date of the Gospels matters more than it first appears. If they were written generations after the events, by people far removed from the eyewitnesses, then doubts about their reliability gain a foothold, for legends can grow in the gap between an event and its recording. If they were written within the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1144 The prophecy of Isaiah is one of the towering books of the Old Testament, quoted again and again in the New and treasured by the church for its vision of the suffering Servant who was pierced for our transgressions. Yet many modern textbooks divide it among two or three different authors writing across…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1143 For most of church history Christians took it for granted that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. The Lord Jesus and the apostles spoke of them as the books of Moses, the Jewish people had always received them so, and no one thought to argue otherwise. Then in the nineteenth…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1158 The short letter we call Second Peter has faced more doubt about its authorship than almost any other book in the New Testament. The letter names Peter as its writer in its opening line, yet critics have long argued that it came from a later hand writing in the apostle’s name. Since the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1155 Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry the name of Paul, from Romans through to the short personal note to Philemon. For most of church history these were received without question as the work of the apostle, read in the churches and treasured as Scripture. Modern scholarship has challenged several of them, suggesting…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1078 Anyone who reads Matthew, Mark, and Luke one after another notices something straight away. These three Gospels tell much of the same story, often in the same order, and sometimes in almost identical words, while John stands apart with his own material and arrangement. The close agreement of the first three has led…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1145 Few books of the Old Testament have been argued over as fiercely as Daniel. Its detailed visions trace the rise and fall of empires with such accuracy that critics have insisted it must have been written after the events it describes, for on their assumptions no one could have foreseen them. The dating…