Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04113. Whether God still does miracles today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually by someone who has either just watched a television healing programme with deep suspicion or just heard a testimony from a friend that they cannot quite explain away. My answer is a careful yes,…
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 1063. The JEDP theory, also called the documentary hypothesis, is the most influential and, in my judgement, the most damaging conclusion that source criticism has ever produced. It proposes that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses at all, but were assembled centuries later from four originally separate, anonymous documents, labelled…
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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1061. Source criticism asks a question that is, on the surface, entirely reasonable: did the authors of biblical books draw on earlier written documents, and if so, can we identify them? Luke himself tells us plainly that many had undertaken to compile a narrative before he wrote his own Gospel, having followed all things…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1060. Form criticism is not a phrase you will hear from the pulpit very often, yet its fingerprints are all over the seminary training that shaped a great many ministers now standing in British and American pulpits. I want to explain plainly what it is, where it came from, and why I regard it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4111. Water baptism does not sit in the same fixed relationship to the Holy Spirit’s coming everywhere we look in Acts, and that surprises people the first time they notice it. Sometimes the Spirit falls before water baptism, sometimes after, and once, through the laying on of apostolic hands, considerably after. If you try…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4109. Sign gifts are often assumed, even by thoughtful Christians, to have belonged exclusively to the twelve apostles, as a kind of one-off credential to authenticate their unique office. Philip’s ministry in Samaria makes that assumption very hard to sustain. Luke tells us plainly that unclean spirits came out of many who were possessed,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4108. The spirit reception pattern that runs through Acts 2, 8, 10, and 19 is one of the more rewarding things to trace through the whole book, because Luke is not simply recording four unconnected incidents. He is showing his readers, one carefully placed scene at a time, how the Holy Spirit brought four…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4107. Simon Magus is one of the more unsettling figures in the book of Acts, precisely because he looks, for one brief moment, like a genuine convert. Luke tells us plainly that Simon believed and was baptised along with the rest of the Samaritans who responded to Philip’s preaching (Acts 8:13). And yet within…