Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01176. The Nestle-Aland text is the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament that stands behind almost every modern English translation, the ESV included, and understanding what it actually is clears up a great deal of confusion about why contemporary Bibles sometimes differ from the King James at particular verses. It is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01173. The Textus Receptus and the modern critical Greek New Testament represent two different approaches to reconstructing the wording of Scripture, and understanding the difference between them clears up a great deal of confusion that otherwise fuels needless suspicion between believers who love the same Bible. Neither approach is a conspiracy against the other….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1050. The Johannine Comma is the name given to a few extra words that appear in 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James Version and nowhere in modern translations, and if you have ever noticed the difference and wondered what happened to the Trinity, you are asking exactly the right question. The King James…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01169. Greek manuscript families are the framework textual scholars use to make sense of the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today, ranging from tiny papyrus fragments to complete parchment codices spanning many centuries of careful copying. No single manuscript reads identically to every other, which is exactly what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01168. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the two oldest complete, or nearly complete, manuscripts of the Christian Bible that we possess, and anyone wanting to understand how confident we can be in the text of the New Testament sooner or later has to reckon with what these two documents actually say and where they came…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01167. Latin Vulgate authority is one of the most instructive parallels available when a church member insists that the King James Version alone is the preserved, authoritative Bible in English. For roughly a thousand years, the Latin Vulgate held almost exactly that place in the Western church, and watching how that claim was made,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01165. KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation. I want to be honest from the outset: I do not hold the KJV-Only position myself, and I think it rests on claims that do…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away at its foundations far more than most textbooks admit. I want to walk through what the hypothesis actually claims, what the Dead Sea Scrolls and…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1159. Progressive revelation is not simply a compatible partner to a dispensational reading of Scripture, it is the exegetical foundation the whole approach is built on. I want to unpack what both terms actually mean here, because I find that a great many objections to dispensational teaching come from people who have never been…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1157. The plain reading of a biblical passage is where I always start, and I have learned over the years in the pulpit that it is also where I should usually end up, even when a scholar somewhere is telling me otherwise. I get asked this question more than almost any other, usually by…