Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 10152 The word “Maranatha” appears once in the New Testament, at the close of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!” (1 Corinthians 16:22). That final phrase, preserved in its original Aramaic as Marana tha, is one of the earliest…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60009 The question of whether Peter was in Rome matters for several reasons. Roman Catholics point to Peter’s presence in Rome as foundational to papal claims, whilst some Protestants have questioned whether Peter was ever there at all. What does the Bible actually tell us, and what can we know from history? What Scripture…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 13008 The history of the Christian church stretches across two thousand years, from the apostolic community in Jerusalem to the global faith of the present day. Understanding church history is not an optional extra for the serious believer. It provides context for the doctrines we hold, warns against errors that have been tried and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1076 Every so often, a documentary or news headline will announce some “lost gospel” that supposedly reveals the “real” Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Philip—these texts get trotted out as if they might overturn two thousand years of Christian faith. So what are these documents, and should…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1112 If you could visit a first-century synagogue or a wealthy Roman’s library, you would see something quite different from our modern books. Scrolls dominated the ancient world, rolled up and stored in jars or on shelves. Yet remarkably, Christians adopted a different format almost from the beginning: the codex, the ancestor of our…