Bill Pratt | March 22, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt Perhaps you’ve read or heard that the New Testament (NT) books were produced at the same time as other Christian writings, and that these other writings were unfairly and unceremoniously kicked out of the NT canon. Is this true? New Testament professor Michael J. Kruger says no. In his blog post, [...]
Bill Pratt | March 8, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt Lest anyone forget, Christianity was born out of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew and his disciples were Jews. Immediately after Jesus died, and his teachings were carried forward by his disciples, they continued to attract mostly Jewish followers. The Book of Acts even reports Jewish priests and Pharisees joining the movement [...]
Bill Pratt | December 19, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt There is a misconception, popularized by books like The Da Vinci Code, that the way the books of the Bible were chosen consisted of politically infused church councils voting on the books they liked, and voting out the books they didn’t like. However, a careful reading of church history totally disproves [...]
Bill Pratt | August 22, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Canonization of the New Testament did not happen overnight. The books of the New Testament were written over several decades, with the final books probably being completed just before A.D. 100. However, documents traveled slowly 2,000 years ago, and it took many years for the books, later to be recognized as the New [...]
Bill Pratt | August 6, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 we looked at Professor of New Testament Daniel Wallace’s first two arguments for the interdependence of the synoptic gospels (the first three gospels). Now we pick up with his third and fourth arguments. The third argument is the agreement in parenthetical material. Wallace quotes Robert H. Stein, who [...]
Bill Pratt | August 3, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt It seems clear that the first three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – are interdependent. That is, they share common literary and oral sources. Daniel Wallace, Professor of New Testament Studies, lays out the case for this interdependence in an article called “The Synoptic Problem.” Most Christians have given this [...]
Darrell | July 23, 2012
I recently had a conversation with a Christian on Facebook regarding some of the passages in the Bible that refer to Mary. During the conversation, I referred to Mary as The Mother of God (Theotokos). This brought a rather stern reaction from him. He stated, “Mary isn’t the Mother of God. God is not born [...]
Bill Pratt | July 11, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt A common complaint about the reliability of the letters and books contained in the New Testament is that we don’t know, for sure, who wrote all of these documents. In particular, the four Gospels are singled out as being anonymous since there is nothing in the text of the four Gospels [...]
Bill Pratt | June 13, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this series, we looked at a blog post written by Timothy McGrew where he presents external and internal evidence for the authorship of the fourth Gospel. Part 1 summarized the external evidence, and part 2 will summarize the internal evidence. McGrew starts off the presentation of the internal [...]
Bill Pratt | June 11, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt There is much hay made in skeptical circles of the fact that none of the four Gospels were signed by an author, that if we reconstruct the original texts from the copies we have, there are no sentences in the texts that explicitly say something like, “This Gospel was written by John, son of [...]
