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: 6 minutesQuestion 1071. Biblical infallibility is a close cousin of biblical inerrancy, but the two words are not simply interchangeable, and getting the distinction right matters if we want to speak carefully about what kind of trust Scripture actually deserves. When we say the Bible is infallible, we are making a statement about its complete trustworthiness…
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 1064. The Q source theory proposes that Matthew and Luke, in addition to using Mark’s Gospel as a source, also drew on a second, now-lost document consisting mainly of Jesus’s sayings, a document scholars have never found and have simply labelled Q, from the German Quelle, meaning source, related to the Greek concept of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses at all, but were assembled centuries later from four originally separate, anonymous documents, labelled…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1062. Redaction criticism studies carefully how each Gospel writer selected, arranged, and shaped his received material to bring out a particular theological emphasis, and and of all the various higher critical methods I have addressed on this site so far, it is the one I find least troubling in itself, even though it grew…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we identify them? Luke himself tells us plainly that many had undertaken to compile a narrative before he wrote his own Gospel, having followed all things…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ministers now standing in British and American pulpits. I want to explain plainly what it is, where it came from, and why I regard it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1059. children’s Bibles are not simply acceptable for young children, they are, in my experience raising and teaching children over many years, one of the most effective tools available for building early familiarity with Scripture’s great story before a child has the reading stamina or vocabulary to engage the unabridged text directly. The concern…