Today, roads are so commonplace that they often seem like a mundane part of everyday life. We use them to travel quickly from place to place, facilitate the import and export of goods and services, and perform other routine tasks. In ancient times, especially during the Roman Empire, roads served far more significant purposes. The…More
Take The Text Seriously
PSA: You can’t consider the biblical text a historical document and then try to exempt it from historical criticism. That would be called having your cake and eating it too. All i am saying is learn to take the biblical text seriously not just religiously.More
The Historical Foundations of the Christian Faith
“Is it not…important to measure one’s own faith by the faith of the first witnesses or if need be to have it corrected from there?…Thus the insistence on the character of faith as [a] decision and the need to venture it [gives] rise to the danger of losing sight of the historical foundations when talking…More
“The Bible”
No one in Paul’s period would have ever seen a ‘Bible.’ Individual texts or discrete collections (such as Psalms, or Proverbs, or various prophets) were bound together as separate scrolls. The scriptural texts in themselves, further, were unstable: Qumran’s library of twenty-one Isaiah manuscripts, for example, preserves over 1,000 individual textual variants. Other books, non…More
Historical Documents and “Divine Guidance”
Some people will make you think that in order to understand the biblical text you have to be guided or filled by the “Holy Spirit” (from here on HS). Putting aside the fact that no one knows what the heck that even means (I’ve never met a single person who can properly defend that position…More
