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: 6 minutesQuestion 1047. Septuagint quotations appear throughout the New Testament far more often than most readers realise, and noticing this raises a fair question. If Jesus and the apostles regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as the very word of God, why do so many of their citations follow the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text underlying…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4115. The gift of hospitality is one that sits interestingly between what we would normally classify as a spiritual gift and what Scripture presents as a universal Christian obligation. That tension is worth taking seriously rather than dissolving too quickly in either direction. I want to start with the scriptural picture, then work through…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1161 Jesus and his first followers were Jewish men who spoke Aramaic in their daily lives and read the Hebrew Scriptures in the synagogue. It seems natural, then, to expect that the books written about them and by them would be set down in Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet the entire New Testament has come…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1175 One of the questions people often raise about the Bible is how the church decided which books belonged in the New Testament. Was the list settled late, by the vote of a council centuries after the apostles, as some popular books and films have claimed? The Muratorian fragment is one of the pieces…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1178 A large part of the New Testament is made up of letters. Paul wrote thirteen of them, and there are further letters from James, Peter, John, Jude and the writer to the Hebrews. These epistles contain some of the richest teaching in all of Scripture, the great expositions of grace, the calls to…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1187 Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you feel you are hearing three tellings of the same story. Turn to John and the air changes. The parables give way to long discourses, the crowds give way to searching conversations with individuals, and the whole pace slows down to dwell on a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1158 The short letter we call Second Peter has faced more doubt about its authorship than almost any other book in the New Testament. The letter names Peter as its writer in its opening line, yet critics have long argued that it came from a later hand writing in the apostle’s name. Since the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1155 Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry the name of Paul, from Romans through to the short personal note to Philemon. For most of church history these were received without question as the work of the apostle, read in the churches and treasured as Scripture. Modern scholarship has challenged several of them, suggesting…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1174 Alongside the Chester Beatty papyri, the other great treasure of early New Testament manuscripts is the collection known as the Bodmer papyri. These too carry us back to the early centuries of the church and provide some of the finest and fullest evidence we have for the text of the Gospels. For anyone…