Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60078. Whether the Gospel accounts accurately record what Jesus said is the question underneath a great many others, and it deserves a proper answer rather than an assertion about inspiration. I believe these books are the inspired word of God. But that is a conclusion I hold alongside the historical evidence rather than instead…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60029. Every so often someone tells me that the historical Jesus never existed, that He was invented by the early church out of older myths, and that the whole thing is a construction. It circulates online, appears in popular books, and lands in the inbox of Christian students at university with an air of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8043. The name Beelzebub turns up in the Gospels on the lips of people trying to destroy Jesus, and it has a long history behind it before it ever gets there. It began as the title of a local god in a Philistine city, picked up a sneer along the way, and ended up…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8040. When Jesus cast out demons the Gospels almost never tell us where they went, and the silence is consistent enough to look deliberate. Luke records crowds of deliverances in a single sentence and moves straight on to the preaching. There are a few hints, and they are worth gathering. But I want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8039. The question of demons and animals arises from one specific incident in the Gospels, and it is worth examining that incident carefully rather than speculating around it. A herd of pigs on a hillside near the Sea of Galilee is the whole biblical evidence, and a great deal has been built on rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8037. The phrase unclean spirits runs right through the Synoptic Gospels and the book of Acts, and most readers slide past it as a synonym for demons. It is a synonym, but it is not an accidental one. The word chosen tells us how Scripture wants us to think about these beings, and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07062 Judas Iscariot was never saved. I hold that with more confidence than I hold most things, because Jesus Himself said so in several ways, and the alternative would require us to believe that a man could be chosen, indwelt and forgiven and still be described as one who was lost from the beginning….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1162. Biblical parables are, in my experience, some of the most loved and most misread passages in the whole Bible, because readers are tempted to hunt for a hidden meaning behind every single detail rather than asking what one main point Jesus was actually making. I want to give you the method I use,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1078. The synoptic problem is the scholarly puzzle of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap so closely in wording, order, and even sentence structure in places, and yet differ from each other in the details each writer chooses to include or leave out. Read the feeding of the five thousand in all three Gospels…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01152. When the four Gospels were actually written matters more than it might first appear, because a late date, decades after the events described, would leave room for legend to creep in before anyone wrote the story down, while an early date places the record within living memory of eyewitnesses who could still contradict…