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Lent, Lament and Lockdown

Lent is a time of self denial and of giving things up, and also a period of lament in the lead up to Easter where we remember the Passion and death of Christ before we celebrated the glorious Resurrection.  Often this is a personal affair on the discipline side of things, even if it's a practice shared within your church community, but this year has been so very different. With the outbreak of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, the whole world has slowly gone into lockdown country by country, creating a strange sort of global “Lent” where everyone is having to practice self control and self denial. This has been underpinned with a sense of lament at the way thi...

Does Christmas have pagan origins?

For most people, the question of the origins of Christmas is probably far from their minds. Some may recognise and give a cursory glance towards the Biblical narrative on the birth of Jesus as something to do with it (although a 2017 study showed that almost 1 in 20 Brits thought Easter was the birth of Jesus!);—but in some Christian circles the question (accusation?) that “Christmas is pagan” is at the forefront of their minds. Table of Contents When was December 25th celebrated? The Christian Calendar Concluding Thoughts Bonus Information Further Reading & Sources: As time goes on and we move further and further into the future,...

The Deity of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew - Part 2

Matthew's theme - The divine presence of Jesus This is a guest post by “KingsServant”, see Part 1 here. Having covered Matthew’s introduction to his gospel in his nativity account, we will now consider the way Matthew “bookends” the gospel by beginning his work with the promise of God dwelling with his people (fulfilled in the incarnation) and ending it in the same way with Jesus’ comforting promise never to leave his followers. This theme of Matthew begins with his quotation of Isaiah 7:14, which we have already analysed in the previous article with regard to how it reveals Matthew’s teaching that Jesus is God. As noted before, in Matthew...

The Eighth Day

What is the “eighth day” you may ask; surely we know there are only seven days in a week! But in ancient times, Sunday – which was also known as the first day of the week, was also referred to as the eighth day by Christians. This day was considered a holy day from the earliest of times by Christians (despite some weak arguments that Constantine, or the Pope, “changed the Sabbath” some 400 years later), and this was because it was the day on which Christ rose from the dead! I will make a beginning of the eighth day, that is, a beginning of another world. For that reason, also, we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, the day on which Jesus rose aga...

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...

The Coming Kingdom of the Son of Man

The importance of context of what's being said, and to whom, in Scripture. I came across this image the other day (in the header above; see larger here) that links together three parts of Matthew’s Gospel to highlight the connection which many often miss, or read as separate events. I like the image because it shows that when Jesus spoke these things, he would have been saying them directly to the disciples and others who were listening to his teaching, and not in some cryptic, ambiguous dictation to a prophetic scribe, devoid of all context and meaning to those around him at the time. Update Feb 2017: I am adding some additional information to this to dis...