Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04030 The ministry of the Holy Spirit changes significantly between the Old Testament and the New Testament era. This is not a change in the Spirit Himself, who is eternally God and eternally the same, but a change in the manner and scope of His operation. Understanding this distinction matters for reading the Bible…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 02061 Many readers come to the Bible with the impression that the God of the Old Testament is harsh and judgemental while the God of the New Testament is loving and gentle. This perception has fuelled everything from second-century Marcionism to modern dismissals of the Old Testament as sub-Christian. The reality is that the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1014 Whether God revealed Himself and His purposes all at once or incrementally across time is not a minor academic question. It shapes how we read the whole Bible, how we understand the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and why certain things were clear to some believers that were opaque to others….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1077 We do not possess the original manuscripts of any New Testament book. What we have are copies of copies. For some people, this raises an unsettling question: how do we know that the text we read today accurately reflects what the apostles actually wrote? Has the message been corrupted through centuries of hand-copying?…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1076 Every so often, a documentary or news headline will announce some “lost gospel” that supposedly reveals the “real” Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Philip—these texts get trotted out as if they might overturn two thousand years of Christian faith. So what are these documents, and should…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 1104 When New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, the wording sometimes differs from what we find in our Old Testament. Does this mean there are errors in Scripture? If the Bible is inerrant, should we not expect quotations to match exactly? The Nature of the Question Anyone who reads Scripture carefully notices that…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1047 If you have ever compared an Old Testament quotation in the New Testament with the Old Testament passage itself, you may have noticed that sometimes the wording does not match exactly. This is not a translation issue in your English Bible—it reflects the fact that the New Testament authors frequently quoted from the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 1111 When people learn that we possess over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, they often wonder why so many of these early witnesses survive only as fragments. Why do we have pieces of papyrus with just a few verses rather than complete books? The answer takes us into the ancient world of…
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…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01168 The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus are two of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the Christian Bible in existence. Both date from the fourth century AD, making them several centuries older than the manuscripts Erasmus used to compile the Textus Receptus in 1516. Their existence and content lie at the…