Subtitle: What’s politics got to do with it? (Got to do with it?)

Jesus’s preaching on the Kingdom of God was absolutely surprising to the original audience. Many of his parables were such that they taught about some aspect of the Kingdom that was against the common conception of what the Kingdom was supposed to look like. In this brief series, I will be looking at some of those misconceptions
Read the rest of this entry

Subtitle: If the Kingdom of God is here, why are the Romans still here also?

Jesus’s preaching on the Kingdom of God was absolutely surprising to the original audience. Many of his parables were such that they taught about some aspect of the Kingdom that was against the common conception of what the Kingdom was supposed to look like. In this brief series, I will be looking at some of those misconceptions.
Read the rest of this entry

Trisagion (“thrice holy”)

Ἅγιος ὁ Θεός
Ἅγιος ἰσχυρός
Ἅγιος ἀθάνατος
ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς 

“Holy God,
Holy [and] mighty
Holy [and] immortal
Have mercy on us”

The trisagion is an ancient hymn that is part of the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, called the “Divine Liturgy”. It is sung during the Liturgy of the Catechumens, so called because in the early church, the service was divided between that which the catechumens (those people who were learning the faith in ‘classes’ before baptism) could attend, and that which was for members of the church only. The transliteration is as follows:

“Hagios ho theos
hagios ischuros
hagios athanatos
eleêsan hêmas”

The NLT Study Bible @ Amazon.com

Well, the NLT has certainly been making its way around the blogs lately. A good portion of this sudden notice being given is due, I’m sure, to the release of the NLT Study Bible in September. I have been looking forward to it ever since I heard the announcement, and was able to get my hands on a review copy thanks to Laura Bartlett and the folks at Tyndale House Publishing.
Sean Harrison, general editor for the NLT Study Bible, recently answered the question “what makes the NLTSB different from other Study Bibles?” with this:

“Some study Bibles focus on helping people to accept a particular doctrinal system, while others focus on “personal application.” Others simply provide interesting details about the context, language, grammar, etc., without asking how that information will impact people’s understanding of the text. Still others focus on a particular type of study methodology—topical study, word study, etc. Our goal, by contrast, was to provide everything we could that would help the readers understand the Scripture text more fully as the original human authors and readers themselves would have understood it.”
-Sean Harrison, How is the NLT Study Bible Different?”

Read the rest of this entry

The following quote from the publisher’s note to the readers in the NLT Study Bible, and I think it hits the nail right on the head:

“The goal of any Bible translation is to convey the meaning and content of the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts as accurately as possible to contemporary readers. The challenge for our translators was to create a text that would communicate as clearly and powerfully to today’s readers as the original texts did to readers and listeners in the ancient Biblical world.”

I have updated the translation of 1 John through chapter 2, verse 23. In so doing, I realized that this theme doesn’t allow comments on pages- so if you want to leave a comment or suggestion, please feel free to do so on this post.

Per the discussion from a few posts back, I have decided to go with “because” in verses 12-14, with a footnote. Feel free to leave a comment.

I’m currently updating the look to my blog. I loved the old design, but there were a few hang-ups after the upgrade.

This was previously posted at my old blog. I had mentioned that I would post it again earlier and am finally getting around to it. This is part 2 of a 2 part series.

In the last post on Luke and Matthew’s account of the death of Judas, I looked at the differing accounts to see if there was a contradiction. I showed that there was not a contradiction for several reasons: The first reason is that Luke’s account of Judas falling presupposes that Judas was at some height in order to fall. This is confirmed by Matthew’s account of Judas hanging himself. Because one account does not exclude the possibility of the other, there is no contradiction. The second reason is that while we can (and, I believe should) take both as historically correct, we can also see possible typological allusions to the Old Testament in Matthew. While I definitely think Matthew uses some typology, I think we should take both accounts as historically accurate because 1)both authors include other details, which seem to point to a historical reality, and 2) both books are written in genres with a historical bent.

In this post, I want to look at some other details that both authors include that also appear at first glance to be contradictory: Who actually bought the field, and who prophesied the events. Here are the two accounts:
Read the rest of this entry

This was previously posted at my old blog. I had mentioned that I would post it again earlier and am finally getting around to it. This is part 1 of a 2 part series.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the apparent contradiction between Luke and Matthew’s accounts of the death of Judas. This discrepancy has long been one of the main issues involved in the debate on the doctrine of inerrancy- the belief that the Bible, in the original writings, are without error due to the superintendence by the Holy Spirit. On a superficial look, it seems that these differences would be contradictory and that the idea of inerrancy is defeated. Here are the accounts:

“And throwing the money down into the temple, Judas left and hanged himself.”
Matthew 27.5

“Judas bought a field a field with the reward he got from his wrong-doing, and falling head-first, his body burst open in the middle and his intestines spilled out.”
Acts 1.18

Read the rest of this entry

As most of my readers probably already know, the website dedicated to the codex Sinaiticus was launched recently. You can go there by clicking here. The website is gorgeous. The designers did a fantastic job with the look, and it is very accessible as well. The manuscript viewer did well on Firefox 3 (though Eric at Archaic Christianity had some issues).

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the text of their “about” page:

“Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament. The hand-written text is in Greek. The New Testament appears in the original vernacular language (koine) and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. In the Codex, the text of both the Septuagint and the New Testament has been heavily annotated by a series of early correctors.

The significance of Codex Sinaiticus for the reconstruction of the Christian Bible’s original text, the history of the Bible and the history of Western book-making is immense.”

Included books at the time of this post:
1 Chronicles
2 Esdras
Esther
Tobit
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Psalms
Mark