Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
The context (the surrounding Bible verses) will enable us to understand what the author meant, not what we think, feel, or believe. The context also runs throughout the Bible, so if our view of a verse is at odds with other Bible verses elsewhere, we must rethink our view, as the Bible does not contradict itself.
The drift in modern translations is to produce a colloquial Bible with a simple vocabulary and syntax. What lies behind this drift? Some of the prefaces answer the question. The assumption is that the Bible itself is a simple book intended for people of limited education and intelligence.
Many find the Bible hard to understand. Would you like help to understand the Bible? Free Bible blog articles are available for you. So seek help to understand what you are reading. Seek out those who study the Bible with a humble attitude.
Many don't know that out of the millions of Christian books, most by far are liberal to moderate. For example, out of the 1,200+ books available on biblical hermeneutics right now, all but about 20 are liberal to moderate.
The city of Smyrna was located approximately thirty-five miles north of Ephesus. It was a prosperous city with a population of over one hundred thousand in John’s day (c. A.D. 95). That location had been inhabited for over three thousand years and no one knows for sure who founded Smyrna or exactly when it was established.
Have you ever been quoted out of context? Sometimes people quote something you said, but by ignoring the context of what you said they can claim that you said something different—sometimes exactly the opposite of what you actually meant! We often make this same mistake with the Bible.
We have grammatical-historical-interpretation and grammatical-critical-historical interpretation. The former preserved objectivity in interpretation, the latter subjectivity. The former preserved the integrity and trustworthiness of the Bible writers and the text; the latter made both the Bible writer and the text untrustworthy. In other words, New Hermeneutics, with its pseudo-scholarship has done nothing more than weaken and demoralize people’s assurance in the Bible being the inspired and fully inerrant Word of God.
The origin of the word “Bible”; determining which books truly and legitimately belong in the Bible as the inspired Word of God; rejection of the Apocrypha. Looking at many of the divine pieces of evidence that have determined the canonicity of the rightful books of the Bible.
There are 320 Greek New Testament direct quotations passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. According to a listing published by Westcott and Hort, the combined total of quotations and references is some 890. (The New Testament in the Original Greek, Graz, 1974, Vol. I, pp. 581-595)
Hands down, the Greek Septuagint version is the most important of the early versions of the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, it is the first translation. The Greek Septuagint is abbreviated as the Roman numeral LXX (meaning, “Seventy”).