Tag: #bible

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

It is well known that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation of the Bible translates the opening words of John’s Gospel as, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.” In this post we consider whether that translation is correct, or the translation of mainstream

[Comparison table] [Why the difference?] In our previous post (29 August), we compared the canon of the Old Testament books in four different Christian traditions: the Protestant Old Testament, the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Slavonic Bible used by the Russian Orthodox Church. You can find our comparison of the different Old Testament

[Comparison table] [Why the difference?] What are the differences between the Old Testament used by Protestants, Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Slavonic Bible used by the Russian Orthodox Church? All of these Christian traditions use an identical New Testament consisting of the 27 books listed by Athanasius in his Easter Letter of

[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

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] In this post we continue to look at some 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 previous post in this series here.