Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1175 One of the questions people often raise about the Bible is how the church decided which books belonged in the New Testament. Was the list settled late, by the vote of a council centuries after the apostles, as some popular books and films have claimed? The Muratorian fragment is one of the pieces…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1185 Twice the Old Testament pauses to point outside itself. When the sun stood still over Gibeon, the writer of Joshua adds that this is written in the book of Jashar. When David sang his lament over Saul and Jonathan, the writer of 2 Samuel notes that the song is recorded in the book…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 1184 Few ancient writings stir up as much curiosity as the book of Enoch. It promises secrets about fallen angels and the days before the flood, it claims the name of a man who walked with God and did not see death, and it is quoted by name in the New Testament letter of…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1186 Every so often a headline announces that scholars have uncovered a secret Gospel the church tried to bury, and the name that surfaces most often is the Gospel of Thomas. Popular books and documentaries present it as a suppressed witness to a different and more mystical Jesus, hidden away by a power-hungry church….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01068 When Christians speak of the Bible as “inspired,” they mean something far more precise than the casual sense in which we might call Shakespeare inspired or describe an artist’s best work as inspired. Biblical inspiration is a technical theological term describing how God produced Scripture through human authors, and understanding it is essential…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 10147 The question of who wrote the book of Revelation is not a matter of idle curiosity. The authority of the book depends upon it. If Revelation was written by the apostle John, the last surviving member of the Twelve, then it carries apostolic authority and takes its place as the capstone of the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60017 This is a question that comes from two very different directions. Some Muslims argue that the Qur’an confirms the truth of the Bible and even points people toward it. Some Christians argue that the Qur’an, by its own claims about previous scriptures, inadvertently supports the reliability of the Bible. The question is worth…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60053 Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code became a global phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies and generating a major film adaptation. Its influence extended far beyond entertainment, because Brown presented his fictional narrative as resting on historical fact, and millions of readers took the claims seriously. The book alleges that…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 8013 The question of named angels has attracted enormous speculation across Christian history, producing elaborate catalogues of heavenly beings drawn from sources ranging from the Apocrypha to medieval mystical writing. The more important question for those who take Scripture as the final authority is simply what the biblical text itself actually names, and the…