Category: History

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

Christians have often wondered what happened to the Apostle Paul. Tradition has it that he was beheaded during the reign of the Emperor Nero between 64 and 68 A.D. But is this tradition reliable? In this post we assess the early evidence for what happened to Paul. 1.) Paul in the New Testament We have

[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

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

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] In our previous post in the series we looked at the so-called ‘Longer Ending’ of Mark’s Gospel and how the Diatessaron provides evidence in favour of its authenticity. In our final post in this series, we shall make three final observations from Tatian’s

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] Last time round we saw several instances where the text of the Diatessaron supports some of the New Testament’s marginal or disputed readings; and one instance where it very clearly didn’t. In this the fifth post in our series, we shall consider what

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] In our last post we observed that there is clear evidence that over the centuries a process of ‘harmonization’ of the Diatessaron text had occurred, whereby the text had accrued passages from the standard biblical text in the course of transmission. In this

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] In this third post in the series, we look at some more things we learn from the Diatessaron, a second-century harmony of the Gospels by Tatian. You can find a description of the Diatessaron, and of its author, in the first post in