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The Coming of Jesus: The Olivet Discourse – Part 2

...  The Desolation One of our earliest extra-Biblical sources for showing how the destruction of Jerusalem was seen as the fulfilment of Matt 24 etc. amongst the early Christians comes from the Epistle of Barnabas (not the be confused with the much later 14th century forgery called “the gospel of Barnabas”). This, along with other early texts known as “the Didache” and the "Shepherd of Hermas”, were books commonly given to new converts to read during the first century (Shepherd was even considered as Canon by various Early Church Fathers, such as Irenæus). As an intriguing side-note, the 4th century “Codex Sinaiticus” included Barnabas an...

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...

An Examination of Conditional Immortality (Part Two)

...Welcome to Part Two of my study and examination of Conditional Immortality (aka Annihilationism). If you missed part one, you can read that one here. As with part one, this will be a long post as there is still much ground to cover before we can really grasp the bigger picture about what Scripture teaches. So with that said, I’ll pick right up where we left off. In part one, I covered a lot of New Testament texts, a few Old Testament passages, plus a look at what some of the earliest church leaders also wrote on the topic to the early church. In this one, we will be looking at a few more Old Testament examples and how they relate to the imagery used in Revela...