Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of all to the apostles’ teaching. Three thousand people had been baptised in a single day. A small band of disciples had become a movement overnight….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0037. It is a fair question, and the answer turns on the apostolic teaching that filled the gap before the New Testament was gathered into one book. The earliest Christians did not walk around with a leather-bound Bible containing all sixty-six books. The church was born at Pentecost, and the Gospels and letters were…
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 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…