Bill Pratt | December 27, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Although the author did not record his name within the text itself (a common practice in the ancient world), the first book found in the New Testament (NT) has historically been attributed to the writing of Matthew, a tax collector and one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. Although some NT [...]
Bill Pratt | November 15, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Some of the atheists that have commented on the blog have expressed skepticism at the existence of Jesus, claiming that there is very little or even no good evidence for him being a real historical figure. My response has been to point out that Jesus is the most well attested historical [...]
Bill Pratt | April 8, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman wrote in his book, Misquoting Jesus, that his Christian beliefs began to fall apart when he realized that there was a mistake, an error, in the Gospel of Mark. Now, I think that the alleged mistake is not a mistake, but let’s assume for a [...]
Bill Pratt | January 6, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we discussed Simon Greenleaf’s conclusion that the Gospel writers’ testimony about Jesus Christ should be considered true, based on the canons of legal evidence, an area in which he was an undisputed expert. Some skeptics, however, have argued that the standards for judging the credibility [...]
Bill Pratt | January 4, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt I recently read a short book entitled The Testimony of the Evangelists by Simon Greenleaf. Greenleaf was one of the most respected American jurists of the nineteenth century. He taught law at Harvard University and wrote a judicial classic, Treatise on the Law of Evidence. This work was used as a [...]
Bill Pratt | December 12, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt For the last several years, a lot of hay has been made concerning the Gospel of Thomas, an alleged fifth Gospel only discovered in 1945. A few New Testament scholars have tried to make the case that the views espoused in Thomas represent a competing strain of Christianity that was suppressed [...]
Bill Pratt | November 11, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt In my frequent conversations with non-Christians, I hear the following kinds of statements: “I can’t believe what the Bible authors wrote because they were religiously motivated.” The idea seems to be that if you are religious, you will not be able to tell the truth about historical events. You will twist [...]
Bill Pratt | August 12, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Textual critics are the scholars who study the manuscript evidence for the New Testament and determine which readings among the various manuscripts are likely to be the original (see previous post for background). Although the vast majority of the variants are simple spelling or word order errors made by copyists, there [...]
Bill Pratt | August 8, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Christians are often confused about this question, so I want to give a quick summary. The 27 books of the New Testament (NT) were originally written in the common Greek language of the first century. They were all hand-written, likely on papyrus. These hand-written manuscripts were then copied, by hand, for [...]
Bill Pratt | August 3, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have been having an interesting discussion with a gentleman on the issue of the empty tomb. We’ve touched on some of the evidence, but I decided to present a brief synopsis of William Lane Craig’s arguments for the empty tomb (from Jesus under Fire). Here goes! The historical credibility of [...]
