Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
Discover our articles from the Birth of Jesus to His Death. Journey through the life and ministry of Christ.
Oral Tradition is both sharply distinguished from written tradition and yet closely connected with it. Many literary traditions are based on oral traditions, making it necessary to investigate how transitions were made from one to the other.
The Mishnah is an authoritative collection of exegetical material embodying the oral tradition of Jewish law and forming the first part of the Talmud.
The Sanhedrin was the supreme judicial council of Judaism with 71 members, located in Jerusalem. It figures prominently in the passion narrative of the Gospels during Jesus’ trial and appears again in Acts as the judicial court which investigates and persecutes the growing Christian church.
Degenerate and corrupt though the mass of Judaism was, yet the Old Testament economy was the divine institution preparatory to the Christian redemption, and as such received deepest reverence from Christ and his apostles, while they sought by terrible rebuke to lead its unworthy representatives to repentance.
“Salvation is of the Jews.”1 This wonderful people, whose fit symbol is the burning bush, was chosen by sovereign grace to stand amidst the surrounding idolatry as the bearer of the knowledge of the only true God, his holy law, and cheering promise, and thus to become the cradle of the Messiah.
The second emperor of Rome. He was born in 42 B.C.E. as the son of Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla.
Though we cannot state with perfect accuracy the date either of the birth or death of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, both may be inferred within narrow limits. When he is first mentioned, on the occasion of Stephen’s martyrdom, he is called a young man, and when he wrote the Epistle to Philemon he calls himself Paul the aged.
The records of this year which we possess are extremely meager, comprising only two or three incidents, which may be here enumerated, especially as they form a kind of program of His future work.
Little could the Jewish people know that He about whom they were speculating, and praying was growing up in a carpenter’s home away in despised Nazareth. Yet so it was. There He was preparing Himself for His life, ministry, and death.
It might have been expected that He would find a nation saturated with the ideas and inspired with the visions of His predecessors, the prophets, at whose head He might place Himself, and from which He might receive an enthusiastic and effective cooperation. But it was not so.
