Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1077. Manuscript transmission is the unglamorous term for a question that genuinely keeps some people awake at night: how do we know the Bible we hold today says what was originally written, given that the ink on the original pages dried out and turned to dust many centuries ago? It is a fair question,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01067. Knowing the Bible is true, rather than just claiming it, requires a rather different kind of evidence to the question of whether it is God’s Word, and I think it can bear the weight of honest scrutiny very well indeed. In a sceptical age, people rightly ask how we can trust a set…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1118 When we turn from Malachi to Matthew, we cross a gap of some 400 years without a single word of inspired Scripture. After Malachi’s final prophecy, no prophet spoke, no Scripture was written, and God seemed strangely silent. These centuries between the testaments are often called the “silent years” or the “intertestamental period.”…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1113 The eternal Word of God came to us through very earthly materials. When prophets recorded divine revelation and apostles penned their letters, they used whatever writing surfaces were available in their day. Understanding these materials helps us appreciate both the humanity of Scripture’s transmission and the remarkable preservation of texts across millennia. Papyrus:…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01163 The Documentary Hypothesis, also known as the JEDP theory, was the dominant critical framework for understanding the origin of the Pentateuch throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. In its classic form, articulated by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, it proposed that the first five books of the Bible were not written…