Tag: #scripture

Last week I commented on a beautiful passage by the second-century Christian theologian Irenaeus (c. 180 A.D.) showing his belief in both the full humanity and the full divinity of Christ. One of the things that comes across loud and clear in that passage is that, for Irenaeus, Christian faith is biblical faith. Before we

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

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

[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

On Tuesday BBC Two opened this month’s inevitable series of programmes on the Reformation with a very fair and informative history of the Reformation by David Starkey. Entitled “Reformation: Europe’s Holy War,” the programme recounted the early history of the Reformation — beginning with an obscure German friar named Martin Luther who rose to fame

The early Christian theologians frequently interpreted Scripture in multiple different senses. For example, they often draw the distinction between the plain meaning of a passage, and its ‘spiritual’ sense. What’s important to realize is that any passage of Scripture can be interpreted in both senses. There is not a mutual exclusivity between the plain sense