It is true that there is wide spectrum of opinions when it comes to interpreting the Bible. Different opinions are not unique to biblical studies – scholars disagree about how to interpret Plato or Hume – but the disagreement is often far more pronounced amongst biblical scholars. One reason for this is that people have [...]
Answers about Bible
Equally I could ask why they should be named. Is it to satisfy our modern ideas of what is right about publishing books? God is not bound by modern publishing conventions.
Before we look at the answer to this question, it’s worth remembering that the names of the books of the Bible aren’t necessarily inspired, although they are convenient (like the addition of chapter and verse numbers1). A lot of the books of the Bible are named after the person who wrote them, the recipients of [...]
The Bible makes some strong statements about people distorting Scripture: There are some things in them [Paul's letters] that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. (2 Peter 3:16) For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this [...]
The first thing to say is that the existence of God is different from the existence of, say, trees or chairs. The existence of a tree is usually so obvious that you don’t need to present arguments — almost nobody would dispute the existence of tree that was right in front of them. God is [...]
The devil’s Bible is a name given to a 13th century manuscript also known as Codex Gigas (or Giant Book). The name “Devil’s Bible” came about because of a large illustration of the devil it contains (shown below). (Of course, there is nothing in the Bible that supports this image of the devil, or even [...]
This is a contentious area, with different scholars holding strong and conflicting views. The table below presents the traditional view which provides the earliest dates based on the events recorded in each book and their traditional authorship.
We’ll deal with both of these questions in turn: How did the NT canon become established? As each new part of the New Testament (NT) scriptures was written it would have become accepted by the Christian community because it was written by people they knew were authoritative.1 In this way the traditional canon of NT [...]
The Pentateuch is a collective name for the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Pentateuch is from Greek, and it means “five-volumed [book]“. Another name for these books is the Torah (Torah is Hebrew meaning ‘instruction’ or ‘teaching’).
There are 1189 chapters in the Bible, so the middle chapter is the 595th chapter which is Psalm 117 (not Psalm 118 as is often claimed). It is harder to identify the middle verse because the number of verses varies depending on the Bible version used. In any case, identifying the middle of the Bible [...]
