Tag: #history

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

[Chapters 1—3] [Chapters 4—8] [Chapters 9—13] Contents Introduction Chapter 1. Thanks to God for your faith Chapter 2. Christ’s true passion Chapter 3. Christ possessed a body after his resurrection Chapter 4. Beware of these heretics Chapter 5. Their dangerous errors Chapter 6. Unbelievers in the blood of Christ shall be condemned Chapter 7. Let

[Chapters 1—3] [Chapters 4—8] [Chapters 9—13] Contents Introduction Chapter 1. Thanks to God for your faith Chapter 2. Christ’s true passion Chapter 3. Christ possessed a body after his resurrection Chapter 4. Beware of these heretics Chapter 5. Their dangerous errors Chapter 6. Unbelievers in the blood of Christ shall be condemned Chapter 7. Let

[Chapters 1—3] [Chapters 4—8] [Chapters 9—13] Amongst the very earliest Christian writings we have in our possession after the New Testament itself, are seven letters written by Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, who was martyred by being fed to wild beasts in Rome around A.D. 107. Whilst on his way to Rome, under Roman

If you’ve read certain bestselling conspiracy novels, you may be forgiven for thinking that the earliest centuries of Christianity are shrouded in mystery, rather like the Dark Ages, and we really can’t know what the earliest Christians believed. “History is always written by the winners,” as the character Sir Leigh Teabing scurrilously claims in one

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

In his treatise On the Flesh of Christ, the North African Christian theologian Tertullian (c. 145-220 A.D.) argues that in Jesus, the Son of God truly became a human being, truly taking on our human nature in the womb of the virgin Mary. He argues this against numerous heretics who taught that the Son of