Category: History

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons was one of the great theologians of the Christian Church in its first two centuries. He asked the question, “How was it that the Lord Jesus Christ saved the human race?” and came up with the idea (prompted by Paul in Romans chapter 5) that Christ relived obediently every stage of

[<<] [Contents] [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] [Part 11] The Christian faith is not infrequently derided as irrational, delusional, fairyland. Though such arguments are sometimes made in an intellectually vigorous manner, I would argue that at least as often such

[<<] [Contents] [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] [Part 11] [>>] The Christian faith is not infrequently derided as irrational, delusional, fairyland. Though such arguments are sometimes made in an intellectually vigorous manner, I would argue that at least as often

Please note a correction to the post, “When did the Bible become the Bible? — Part #2 (The Old Testament)” (19 Dec 2018). In that post I stated that, During the 2nd century B.C. the Jewish books were translated en masse for the first time. The story goes that this was at the request of

[Part 1. New Testament] [Part 2. Old Testament] A friend once asked me, “When did the Bible become the Bible?” That is not a trivial question to answer, and I told him so at the time. There is not one single point in time at which you can say, “That’s when the Bible became the

[Part 1. New Testament] [Part 2. Old Testament] A friend once asked me, “When did the Bible become the Bible?” Although that is a question with a fairly well-understood answer historically, it’s not a simple, straightforward answer to relate; it’s one that, to be properly understood, requires some time to explain (and I told him

I have corrected a mistake in the previous articles, “Clement of Rome’s New Testament” (14 Feb 2018) and “Four things Clement of Rome tells us about early Christianity” (27 Feb 2018). Towards the end of ‘Clement of Rome’s New Testament’ I summarized the New Testament books quoted, or alluded to, by Clement in his letter1

One of the Christian historical questions about which there is a great deal of misunderstanding and misinformation is when the New Testament became the New Testament. In other words, when did the 27 individual books get collected together into what we now know as ‘the New Testament’? I will write about this in a subsequent

I have discovered and corrected an erratum on my previous post, “Why the difference between the Old Testament canon in different Christian traditions?” (3 Sep 2018) The article in question can be found here. The paragraph in question read: It would appear that Orthodox Judaism accepted as divinely inspired Scripture only books which had been

It is sometimes falsely claimed that the Church arbitrarily selected the 27 books of the New Testament in the fourth century. While it is true that the 27 books of our New Testament were not formally recognized as ‘the New Testament’ until near the end of the fourth century, and our earliest canon list containing