Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60202. Few sentences have done more damage than the claim that the Jews killed Jesus. It has been shouted outside synagogues, painted on walls, preached from pulpits, and used to justify expulsions, massacres and, eventually, an attempt to exterminate a people. So the question deserves a careful answer rather than a slogan in either…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60092. Slavery in Scripture is raised more often as an accusation than as a question, and I understand why. The charge is that the Bible not only tolerates slavery but endorses it, and that the transatlantic trade was therefore consistent with Christian teaching. If that were true it would be a very serious matter…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60109. Antisemitism is rising again in Britain, and I do not write that as a rhetorical flourish. Synagogue attacks, harassment of Jewish students on campuses, conspiracy theories that would have been recognised in 1930s Germany, and a great deal of it circulating among people who would be appalled to be called racist. So it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60087. The biblical canon is supposed, in a story that circulates endlessly online and was given a huge push by Dan Brown’s novel, to have been assembled by the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325, with inconvenient gospels burned and a divine Jesus voted into existence. It is a marvellous story….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60104. The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere else in Scripture or in any document we can date with confidence to the first century. That has not stopped people writing confidently about them,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60082. Word of Faith teaching reaches more people worldwide today than most historic denominations do, which is one reason I think it deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissive one. Its distinctive claims are familiar even to people who have never set foot in one of its churches: that faith is a force,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60062. Asking whether Roman Catholicism is Christian is a question that needs unpicking before it can be answered, because it is really two questions wearing one coat. Are individual Roman Catholics Christians? And does the Roman Catholic system, as officially defined, teach the gospel of the New Testament? Those questions have different answers, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60053. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, sold something in the region of eighty million copies, and left a residue of assumptions that is still with us two decades later. I still meet people who believe that the church suppressed rival gospels, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that the doctrine of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60009. Whether Peter in Rome is a historical fact or a later legend has been argued for five hundred years, and the heat in the argument comes from what is thought to hang on it, since the claim of the papacy is usually traced back to Peter as first bishop of that city. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New Testament itself, and it turns up again every few decades wearing new clothes and promising the same thing: secret knowledge for a special few. I…