Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4072 One of the most remarkable statements in Paul’s letters about the Holy Spirit appears almost in passing in the middle of his argument about the Spirit’s role in revealing God’s wisdom. In 1 Corinthians 2:10, Paul writes: “for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” The phrase “the depths of God”…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04033 If the Bible is the Word of God, and if its authority depends on its divine origin, then the mechanism by which God produced it matters enormously. Scripture’s own testimony is that the Holy Spirit played the decisive role in the process of inspiration, ensuring that human authors writing in their own styles,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60084 The Gospel of Thomas is regularly cited in documentaries, popular books, and online discussions as evidence of suppressed early Christianity — a hidden text that the orthodox church buried in order to control what people believed. The reality is considerably different, and understanding what Thomas actually is matters for anyone who wants to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 01173 Few questions in biblical studies generate more heat in certain Christian circles than the debate between the Textus Receptus and the modern critical Greek New Testament. Some regard this as an arcane academic dispute that ordinary believers need not trouble themselves with. It is anything but. The text of the Greek New Testament…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01176 For anyone who wants to understand how modern Bible translations are produced, or why a translation like the ESV sometimes differs from the King James Bible at particular points, the answer almost always involves the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. This is the standard scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament in widespread academic…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01183 The name Esdras is the Greek and Latin form of Ezra, and two books bear this title in various versions of the Old Testament: 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras. Neither belongs to the Protestant canon, but the question of whether they are worth reading at all deserves a considered answer rather than a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60087 The claim that Constantine created the Bible appears regularly in popular sceptical discussions, was given wide circulation by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, and resurfaces periodically in online conversations as though it were settled historical fact. It is not. The claim is historically wrong in virtually every detail, and Christians should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01205 Anyone who reads John’s Gospel and then turns to Revelation notices something immediately. The Gospel and the epistles flow in relatively polished, elegant Greek. Revelation does not. Sentences break grammatical rules. Case endings that should follow standard Greek convention do not. Scholars have catalogued dozens of what are technically called solecisms — violations…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4062 The cessationist and continuationist debate turns, at its heart, on a single exegetical decision: are prophecy and Scripture the same category of thing? If they are, then genuine prophecy today would mean adding to the Word of God — an obvious impossibility given that the canon is closed. But if prophecy and Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 13011 Gnosticism was not a single, tidy system but a collection of interconnected religious ideas that shared enough common assumptions to pose a recognisable and serious threat to the apostolic gospel. Its appeal lay in what it claimed to offer: a deeper, hidden knowledge of spiritual reality available to those initiated into it. In…