Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60009. Whether Peter in Rome is a historical fact or a later legend has been argued for five hundred years, and the heat in the argument comes from what is thought to hang on it, since the claim of the papacy is usually traced back to Peter as first bishop of that city. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New Testament itself, and it turns up again every few decades wearing new clothes and promising the same thing: secret knowledge for a special few. I…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 1161. Koine Greek was the language God chose to carry the New Testament to the world, not the Hebrew of Moses and the prophets, and not the Aramaic Jesus almost certainly spoke day to day. That choice was not an accident of history so much as an instance of providence working through history, and…
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 01155. Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters bearing Paul’s name in the New Testament has been challenged by critical scholarship for well over a century, with roughly half of them, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, regularly labelled disputed or even pseudonymous in academic literature. I hold to full Pauline…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1158. Petrine authorship of Second Peter has taken more scholarly fire than almost any other claim in the New Testament, and I think the letter deserves better than the suspicion it usually receives. The letter opens in the plainest possible terms, naming Simeon Peter as its author, an eyewitness of the Lord’s majesty who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1187. Read Matthew, Mark and Luke one after another and you soon notice they are telling one connected story, which is exactly why scholars group them together as the Synoptic Gospels. Turn the page to John and the atmosphere changes: the parables thin out, long personal conversations take their place, and the pace slows…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1197. The authorship of Hebrews is the oldest literary puzzle in the New Testament, and honesty requires me to say at the outset that nobody can answer it with certainty. The book itself is anonymous. Unlike Paul’s letters, which open by naming their author, Hebrews simply begins with a majestic statement about God speaking…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1111. New Testament papyri fragments survive from the ancient world in far greater number as small scraps than as complete books, and once you understand why, this fact becomes a source of real encouragement rather than concern about how much of the Bible has actually reached us intact. People sometimes hear that we possess…
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…