Month: January 2018

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] In our previous instalment, we saw that the Gospels testify very clearly both to the divinity and humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. In this final instalment in our short series, we will see whether the same can be said of the Christian writers outside the New Testament in the

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] In the first instalment of this short series of posts, we showed that Sir Leigh Teabing’s conspiracy theory version of early Christian history, as presented in The da Vinci Code, simply doesn’t stand up to a moment’s serious consideration. In this second part, we shall examine a number of

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] One of the more popular conspiracy theories about Christianity over the past 40 years has been the claim that the Emperor Constantine ‘invented’ the divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. But does this claim have any basis in fact? So the theory goes, until

“Away with the Atheists,” declaimed the second-century Christian martyr Polycarp when ordered by the proconsul to recant his faith in Jesus Christ. I couldn’t help being reminded of this famous remark as the Independent Online yet again recycled a story via Facebook claiming, “Atheists are less tolerant than religious people, study claims.” The disappointingly brief

I recently read the Lausiac History of Palladius, a 5th-century work describing the ascetic exploits of the desert monks of Egypt and other places. I was struck reading it, by how the idea of ‘sainthood’ has changed over the centuries. In this post we will briefly explore three different historical conceptions of ‘sainthood.’ Today we