Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3015. The transfiguration of Jesus is one of the strangest and most wonderful scenes in the Gospels, the moment when the ordinary appearance Jesus had worn for thirty years briefly gave way to something the disciples could barely describe. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record it, and each writer clearly regarded it as too…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3002. Whether there were genuine brothers of Jesus has been argued over for most of Church history, largely because of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity. Once you set that later tradition aside and simply ask what the text says, the answer stops being complicated. The Gospels and epistles speak about siblings…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1072. Bible contradictions are one of the first objections any believer meets once they start talking about their faith with a sceptical friend, and I think we do ourselves no favours by either dismissing the question too quickly or panicking as though the whole edifice of Scripture rests on winning every single one of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01065. The Jesus Seminar is the name given to a group of scholars who, through the 1980s and 1990s, made headlines by literally voting on which sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels they considered authentic, using coloured beads, red for certainly authentic down to black for certainly not, and concluding that only around…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1064. The Q source theory proposes that Matthew and Luke, in addition to using Mark’s Gospel as a source, also drew on a second, now-lost document consisting mainly of Jesus’s sayings, a document scholars have never found and have simply labelled Q, from the German Quelle, meaning source, related to the Greek concept of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1062. Redaction criticism studies carefully how each Gospel writer selected, arranged, and shaped his received material to bring out a particular theological emphasis, and and of all the various higher critical methods I have addressed on this site so far, it is the one I find least troubling in itself, even though it grew…