Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
Dr. Bart D. Ehrman has issues in several areas that drug him down from being a conservative evangelical Christian to an Agnostic and now an atheist. What can we learn from his missteps that led to his abandoning the faith?
It is said of the Kr/family 35 Text-Form that it is the most precise and uniform grouping of New Testament manuscripts ever produced. What does that mean exactly? This will be answered extensively toward the end of the article.
“THIS is big. A lot of people are going to be upset.” “This changes the history of early Christianity.” (Andrew Cockburn, “The Judas Gospel,” National Geographic, May 2006, p. 91) These overly dramatic in the extreme statements came from scholars who, with open arms, welcomed, the publication of the “Gospel of Judas.” Did these predictions come true?
Textual variants in the New Testament are the subject of the study called textual criticism of the New Testament. Textual variants in manuscripts arise when a copyist makes deliberate or inadvertent alterations to a text that is being reproduced.
Why was it so difficult to be a scribe in the first century A.D.? How was the scribal work done? What were the writing materials that were in use at that time? How are we to understand inspiration and inerrancy? Were both Paul and Tertius inspired, or just Paul? If Paul alone was inspired, how does the imperfection of Tertius affect inerrancy? What about Phoebe, what role did the carrier have in the process? What about the publishing, copying, and distributing process? We will answer all of these questions and more as we deduce or conclude (information) from evidence and reasoning about Tertius' role as a scribe.
Was there really an epistle to the Laodiceans, and, if so why is it not in our Bibles? Some scholars maintain that the letter to the Ephesians was not specifically to those at Ephesus but rather it was a general letter to the Ephesians and the Laodiceans, mentioned at Colossians 4:16. In addition, they say, is that the words “which are at Ephesus” found in most translations of Ephesians 1:1 are an addition to the text. They argue the letter that we know as Ephesians was a general epistle sent to the churches in Asia. Are they correct?
Throughout the first 17 centuries of Christianity, the reliability of the Gospels was never really questioned in any serious way. However, especially from the 19th century forward, a number of scholars have viewed the Gospels, not as the inspired, inerrant Word God, but as being invented by men. Also, they have rejected that the Gospel writers had firsthand knowledge about Jesus Christ.
‘An easy and elegant skepticism is the attitude expected of an educated adult.’—British Philosopher Bertrand Russell. Skepticism is generally a questioning attitude or doubts towards one or more items of putative knowledge or belief or dogma. It is often directed at domains, such as the supernatural, morality, theism, or knowledge.
In full consciousness and fulfillment of Jesus’ oft-repeated promise to guide them unto “all the truth,” the apostles claimed divine authority for what they taught orally and in their writings.
The sad state of affairs is that textual scholarship as a whole is unwittingly or knowingly moving the goalposts for some unknown reason. In textual criticism, it is now the earliest knowable text, the sociohistorical approach to New Testament Textual Studies, and, the newest trend of trying to redate our earliest NT papyri.