In 1415, a church council gathered in the city of Constance. One of the items on their agenda was a heresy trial. In addition to ending a decades-long multiplicity of popes, the Council of Constance concluded that two particular priests had turned into heretics and that both of them must be burned. There was, however, […]
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Church History: Father’s Day without a Father and the Unsung Stanzas of Amazing Grace
Today, for the fourth year, I experience Father’s Day as a father but without a living father. My father passed away in the late summer of 2011. As far back as I can remember, his favorite hymn was “Amazing Grace.” I do not recall this song ever being sung without it drawing tears from his eyes. […]
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Apologetics: A New Teaching Series on How We Got the Bible
A few weeks from now, Rose Publishing will release a new book and video series entitled How We Got the Bible. The topic of the book and video series is—you guessed it!—how we got the Bible. (Click here for a quick peek at the video production process.) Here are a few of the topics I cover in […]
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Apologetics: Why the “Lost Gospels” Were Lost
In 1945, a farmer named Muhammad ‘Ali al-Samman found a trove of ancient codices while searching for fertilizer. He and his brothers returned home with the thirteen papyrus books. That’s when his mother apparently used a few of the papyri as kindling in their stone oven.[i] Most of the texts, however, survived the kindling pile and […]
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Apologetics: Early Testimonies about the New Testament Gospels
In an earlier blog post, I explored the evidence that the four New Testament Gospels were linked with the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the time they first began to circulate in the churches. In this post, I want to dig a bit deeper into specific first- and second-century testimonies about the authorship of the […]
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Apologetics: Who Really Wrote the Gospels?
So who really wrote the Gospels? How do we know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John dictated the books that bear their names? According to skeptics, these four first-century personalities had little or nothing to do with the four New Testament Gospels. One scholar of the more skeptical sort has described the process in this way:
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Apologetics: Were the Gospels Written While the Eyewitnesses Were Still Alive?
“The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen,” Richard Dawkins declares in The God Delusion, “more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Bartholomew, and Mary Magdalene. … The Gospels that didn’t make it were omitted by…ecclesiastics perhaps because […]
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Church History: The Story of the Real Santa Claus
Today, St. Nicholas is mostly known as a paunchy old geezer who spends one night each year breaking into people’s houses and stealing cookies before escaping to an Arctic hideaway where elves do his work for him. Kind of creepy when you think about it. The good news is that none of this was what […]
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