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Understanding The New Testament: Inspiration, Canonisation, And Historical Context

...isquoting Jesus, If he (Bruce Metzger) and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement — maybe one or two dozen out of many thousands. … [T]he essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. The flawed view of inspiration as a series of momentary “supernatural writing sessions” creates an expectation that anything “spiritual” written by an apostle or associate had to be preserved. This mindset suggests that missing letters indicate...

What is Monarchical Trinitarianism?

...ation. As Jesus said in John 5:19–23, “the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.”, similar also to how Jesus said that only the Father knows the hour of the End, and that the Son doesn’t know (Mark 13:32). The One True God Central to Monarchical Trinitarianism is the recognition of the Father as the One True God, or άυτόθεος (autotheos), meaning self-existent. He is the uncaused, unbegotten source of divinity, from whom the Son and the Spirit derive their being. The early Fathers were clear that this does not diminish the divinity of the Son and the Spirit bu...

Ancient Amulet Rewrites History Of Christianity In Europe

...New discovery proclaims Jesus as “Son of God” a century earlier than previously thought. An exciting archaeological discovery has recently come to light: researchers have unearthed an 1800-year-old silver amulet in Frankfurt, Germany. This amulet provides the earliest known evidence of Christianity north of the Alps and disrupts previously held ideas about the spread of the faith, namely that Christianity didn’t get to the German region around the fourth century. The amulet, dating from approximately 230 to 270 AD, was found in 2018 beneath the chin of a man’s skeleton during excavations at a Roman burial site near the former town of Nida, now part o...

Before The Pumpkins: The Road To The Lions

...hild whom Jesus held in his arms in Matt. 18:2, though this cannot be verified as Ignatius himself never states it. A more trustworthy tradition 4tells us that he was a disciple of the Apostle John, and this lineage can be felt in his writings. His letters echo the same themes and emphasis on Christ as John does in his Gospel around the incarnation, never failing to highlight the physical nature of Jesus as well as his divine which can be seen with such statements like “Jesus Christ our God” (Epistle to the Ephesians). During the reign of Emperor Trajan (around AD 107), Christians were increasingly viewed as enemies of the Roman order. Refusing to worship t...

Jesus was a pagan copy, and other Christmas myths

...It's that time of year again when certain groups of people like to share memes and videos that apparently "prove" Jesus to be a carbon-copy of ancient Egyptian gods. This has been debunked so many times, yet it's still so pervasive on social media, mindlessly shared over and over again. This myth about Jesus being a copy of other pagan "dying-and-rising gods" doesn't have its roots in Egyptian legend, but rather in the claims of a film called Zeitgeist. A quick search online will bring up many websites which have gone through the claims of this film with a fine tooth comb, and debunked each one. Here's one such example, which lists out the major claims and giv...

It’s Not Your Job To Convert Anyone

...On Sunday it was St Andrew’s Day and I was in church listening to a sermon about Andrew (and the namesake of our church), that often overlooked disciple, meeting Jesus for the first time. In John’s Gospel, it says: John 1:40–42One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’… He brought Simon to Jesus. As I sat there listening to our vicar speak about evangelism and how we should be more like Andrew in bringing people to meet Jesus, something from many, many years ago flickered to life in the back of my mind. A realisation I had lo...