Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1175. The Muratorian fragment is one of the earliest surviving pieces of direct evidence for how the church recognised the New Testament canon, and it answers a question I am asked often, sometimes by sincere believers who have absorbed a popular but mistaken idea from films and bestselling novels: was the list of New…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1181. The Alexandrian school of biblical interpretation shaped how the early church read Scripture for centuries, and understanding it helps explain why so much older commentary reads so differently from the careful, literal-grammatical-historical method I use and teach today. Centred firmly in the great intellectual city of Alexandria in Egypt, this school of thought…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1182. The Antiochene school of biblical interpretation stands as the great historical counterweight to the allegorical excesses I described in What Was the Alexandrian School of Biblical Interpretation?, and its influence on how careful readers approach Scripture still matters today. Centred firmly in the ancient, historic Syrian city of Antioch, this tradition insisted on…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2028. Trinity doctrine is, without much question, the single most distinctive claim Christianity makes about the very nature of God, and yet many Christians could not explain it clearly if asked. This Deep Dive sets out, at proper length and without shortcuts, what Trinity doctrine actually asserts, how it differs from the various errors…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2002. Different views on the Trinity exist even among careful believers who fully affirm Trinitarian orthodoxy, hold firmly to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and would never dream of calling themselves anything other than mainstream evangelical Christians. This surprises people who assume the Trinity is one settled doctrine with no internal variety at all. It is…
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 1118. The silent years sit between Malachi, the last prophetic voice of the Old Testament, and the opening pages of Matthew, roughly four centuries in which the Bible itself records no new inspired prophecy. People sometimes assume this means God simply went quiet, stepped back from history, and left His people to manage without…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1076. The Gnostic gospels turn up every few years in a documentary or a bestselling novel, usually with the claim that the church suppressed a truer, more mystical version of Jesus that these texts supposedly preserve. It is a compelling story, and I understand why it sells books. It is also, on the actual…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1073. The canon of Scripture, the settled collection of sixty-six books that make up our Bible, did not come together the way many people imagine, as though a committee somewhere sat down centuries after the events and voted particular books into existence. Understanding how the canon of Scripture actually formed reveals something wonderful about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four…