Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1124. Understanding Scripture is not always straightforward, and if you have ever hit a passage that made no sense at all, read it twice, maybe three times, and remained thoroughly confused, you are in very good company. This is a common experience, and it should not discourage you the way it often does. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1119. Old Testament prophets received God’s word through a range of different means, and Scripture itself is refreshingly candid about how varied that process actually was. Some received visions in the night. Some heard an audible or inwardly perceived voice. Some acted out symbolic dramas in public. What unites every genuine case is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1114. Difficult Bible passages are something every serious reader eventually meets, genealogies that seem endless, prophecies that stay obscure, apparent tensions between accounts, and commands that jar against modern sensibilities, and the honest question worth asking is why a God who wanted to communicate clearly would give us a book containing so much that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1113. Biblical manuscript materials range from stone and clay to papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and tracing what the prophets and apostles actually wrote on takes us right into the dust and workshops of the ancient world, reminding us that the eternal word of God reached us through thoroughly earthly, physical means. I find this…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1112. Scrolls and codices were the two great book formats of the ancient world, and the choice between them turns out to carry more theological weight than you might expect, because the early church’s adoption of the codex over the scroll was one of the most striking cultural decisions the first Christians ever made….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes a source of real encouragement rather than concern about how much of the Bible has actually reached us intact. People sometimes hear that we possess…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1110. The Majority Text theory holds that the true wording of the Greek New Testament is best found by following the reading supported by the largest number of surviving Greek manuscripts, and if you have never met this idea before, it is worth understanding both its genuine strengths and its real limitations before you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1109. The Textus Receptus is the name given to a particular printed edition of the Greek New Testament that dominated the Protestant world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and if you have ever heard someone insist that the Textus Receptus is the only trustworthy Greek text, you deserve a clear and honest…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1108. Hebrew vowel points are the small dots and dashes printed above, below and inside the consonants of our printed Hebrew Bibles, and the question of when the Hebrew vowel points were added takes us into one of the more fascinating corners of textual history. If you have ever opened an interlinear Hebrew Old…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1190. Sensus plenior, Latin for fuller sense, names a genuinely contested question in hermeneutics: can a biblical text carry a deeper, fuller meaning that God intended, beyond what the human author himself consciously understood when he wrote it, a meaning only made clear later through subsequent revelation. I want to work through this carefully,…