April 21, 2019
The resurrection of Jesus is central to the Christian faith, but why does it matter? Why think of it as just another of many miraculous/supernatural events? Why not see it as a mere historical oddity? Why does it matter so much to Christianity? What is the significance of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead?
Here are just a few reasons it is significant:
April 21, 2019
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was the central message of the early church and the basis of Christian hope. But why should we believe that a man was raised from the dead 2000 years ago when we were not there to witness it, and when our uniform experience says that dead people always stay dead? While many people think the resurrection of Jesus is something you either choose to believe or choose to reject based on your personal religious tastes, the fact of the matter is that there are good, objective, historical reasons to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
Historians must do two things: establish the historical facts, and then find the best explanation for those facts. When it comes to the life of Jesus, the primary source material for the historian is the New Testament (NT) gospels and Paul’s writings because they include the testimony of early disciples who witnessed the events in question or knew those who did, and they provide the most detail about Jesus’ life.
April 4, 2019
Another clay seal (bulla) bearing the name of a Biblical person has been unearthed in the City of David. The tiny clay seal was found in the remains of a large housing structure that had been destroyed by fire in the sixth century B.C. The seal reads, “[belonging to] Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King.” Nathan-Melech appears once in the Bible, in 2 Kings 23:11, and is said to be an official in the court of King Josiah. (more…)
March 9, 2019
While there is much discussion regarding the fidelity of the transmission of the NT text, very little attention is given to the OT. I’ve long been looking for a good book dedicated to OT textual criticism, written from the perspective of a conservative text critic, so I was happy to come across John F. Brug’s Textual Criticism of the Old Testament.
Brug does a great job of explaining the manuscript resources, how text critics go about establishing the original text, ancient and modern criticism of the text, and many examples of the variants with a fair assessment of which are original. What I was particularly interested in is his explanation of the differences between the Greek translation and the Hebrew, as well as the differences in names and numbers in parallel passages such as Kings and Chronicles.
The book is under 200 pages, so it’s very digestible. I would highly recommend this as an intermediate introduction to OT textual criticism.
January 21, 2019
I recently finished Everett Ferguson’s Baptism in the Early Church. This massive tome of 860 pages thoroughly explores the theology and practice of baptism in the first five centuries of the church. What follows is a brief summary of Ferguson’s main findings.
Origins
Baptism was a big deal to the early Christians. It was modeled on John’s practice, as well as Jesus’ example and command. Unlike Jewish and pagan precursors which saw ritual washings as related ritual purification, Christian baptism was intended for spiritual cleansing and moral transformation.
Ceremony
Great pomp and ceremony developed very early around the church’s practice of baptism. While traditions differed from region to region as well as over time, in general, baptism was performed in the nude, via triple immersion, with the laying on of hands, exorcisms, renunciation of the devil, anointing with oil, confession of the creed, post-baptismal eucharist, and the wearing of a white garment. (more…)
January 7, 2019
In the parting words of Paul’s first letter to the church at Thessalonica, he admonished them with several imperatives, including “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5:17).
Many Christians have struggled to make sense of Paul’s admonition because it’s evident that we cannot literally pray without ceasing. At the very least, we would have to stop praying when we go to sleep at night. Even if Paul was only talking about our conscious hours, one cannot pray while they are talking to other people, concentrating on their work, etc. Many Christians, wanting to affirm the sense of “continual prayer,” have taken this verse to mean that we should continually be in “a spirit of prayer.” This is often construed along the lines of always having a prayerful attitude even when we are not praying to God (which should be a frequent affair throughout one’s day). What exactly a prayerful attitude is, is not entirely clear. Others take it to mean that we should pray about everything.
December 30, 2018
Probably the most-cited argument against the existence of a theistic God is the logical form of the problem of evil, which argues that the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil because an all-good God would want to prevent evil and an all-powerful God could prevent evil, and yet evil exists. From this, it follows that God is not all-powerful, not all-good, or more likely does not exist at all. There could be a world in which God exists, or there could be a world in which evil exists, but there can be no world in which both God and evil exist. Since it’s empirically evident that evil exists, God does not.
