Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1015 The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices; the New Testament says Christ has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples; the New Testament commands love of enemies. The Old Testament permits divorce in certain circumstances; the New Testament tightens the standard. If the same God inspired…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1017 Whether an unbeliever can understand the Bible has direct implications for evangelism, for how we engage with non-Christian friends around Scripture, and for how we understand the Holy Spirit’s work. The answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, and getting the nuance right matters both theologically and practically. What an…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1018 The phrase “textual criticism” can sound alarming, as though it describes scholars sitting in judgement on the Bible and finding it wanting. The reality is almost the opposite. Textual criticism is the scholarly discipline by which ancient manuscripts are compared in order to establish, as closely as possible, the original wording of the…
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: 3 minutesQuestion 01165 KJV-Onlyism is the conviction that the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, is the uniquely preserved and authoritative Word of God in English, and that all modern translations represent corrupt departures from it. It is held with genuine sincerity and a real concern for biblical authority. It is also, on…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01167 One of the most instructive parallels in the history of biblical translation is the parallel between the authority claimed for the Latin Vulgate by the mediaeval and Counter-Reformation Catholic church and the authority claimed for the King James Version by modern KJV-Only advocates. The parallel is not coincidental. Recognising it illuminates both positions:…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01168 The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus are two of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Christian Bible in existence. Both date from the fourth century AD, making them several centuries older than the manuscripts Erasmus used to compile the Textus Receptus in 1516. Their existence and content lie at the…
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: 4 minutesQuestion 01169 The New Testament has been transmitted in over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, along with thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and other ancient languages. This remarkable abundance of manuscript evidence is one of the strongest arguments for the New Testament’s textual reliability compared to any other work of antiquity. But not all…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1000 Let’s start where we always should – with what Scripture says about itself. When Jesus was being tempted by Satan in the wilderness, He responded with a statement that gets right to the heart of this matter: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth…