Before the Enlightenment, the canonical Gospels were thought of as, among other things, written copies of the past. The documents and the history beneath them were taken to be, for all practical Christian purposes, identical. Modernity, however, has inserted a… Read More ›
The Qur’an is not a work of literary narrative, as is the Bible. As a scripture that provides guidance (huda) and a reminder (tadhkira) to humankind, it gives more emphasis to spiritual edifications than to providing a full account of… Read More ›
Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) was an Italian Catholic priest and Doctor of the Church. He was an immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism. The Catholic Church reveres Thomas Aquinas as a saint and as… Read More ›
Why the four gospels and the accounts in Acts may not be quite what they seem. Peter Enns (American Evangelical biblical scholar and theologian) explains why: Over at Mere Student, John Oliff posted on the Greek historian Thucydides’s (c.460-c.395 BC) take on the… Read More ›
Here is an extract from the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. The relevant entry is entitled The Gospel according to St Matthew. It reads in part as follows, The Gospel is probably to be dated c. AD 80-90, and unlikely… Read More ›
Christians have always assumed that the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John were really spoken by him (in Aramaic of course, not English). Leading and highly respected reference works (authored mainly by Christian scholars) have for a… Read More ›
QUESTION: You mention in your book Forgeries and Counter Forgeries that John most likely did not write the Gospel attributed to him as he almost certainly could not write in Greek. I seem to remember you writing that the Greek of that… Read More ›
New Testament scholar Maurice Casey once claimed that “The Gospel attributed to St. John is the only New Testament document in which the deity and incarnation of Jesus are unequivocally proclaimed.” This statement is somewhat misleading. If the proclamation of… Read More ›