How do we know if the testimonies preserved about Jesus in the New Testament Gospels were intended to be taken as historical testimony in the first place? It is possible, after all, that the Gospels that came to be included in the New Testament were never meant to describe actual occurrences. Perhaps they were written […]
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Apologetics: Were the Stories of Jesus Based on Pagan Parallels?
Pagan parallels to Christianity! Is it possible, as some people claim, that the stories of Jesus were based on Pagan myths? It’s an accusation that’s been around a long time. Even in ancient times, critics of Christianity noticed some parallels between Christian beliefs and pre-Christian myths. In the late second century, a philosopher named Celsus charged, “The […]
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Apologetics: Who Wrote the Gospels?
Open your Bible to the table of contents and take a look at the list of books in the New Testament. There, you’ll find the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John leading the list. But were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really the ones who wrote the Gospels? If so, how do we know?
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Culture: Why Pay Taxes?
This week, millions of Americans will once again endure the filing and, in some cases, the payment of taxes—three months late, this time around, due to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. Taxation has never been particularly popular among Americans, having once incited several dozen Bostonians to dress up as Mohawk warriors and toss tea […]
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J. Warner Wallace: A Cold-Case Detective Looks at the Gospels + “Another Brick in the Wall” (Pink Floyd)
What happens when a cold-case detective applies his investigative skills to the New Testament Gospels? Find out as Timothy meets up with award-winning detective and bestselling apologetics author J. Warner Wallace. In addition to being a detective and apologist, Wallace is also a guitarist, bassist, and—Timothy is thrilled beyond words to discover—a fan of Steve […]
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Study: Read through the Greek New Testament in a Year
After a few years of using other Bible reading plans, I’m returning in 2020 to a plan that I’ve used in the past to read through the New Testament in Greek each year. The plan that I’ve found most useful for that is one from Denny Burk, which is based on a plan prepared by […]
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Rob Plummer: The Perplexing Problem of When Quirinius Governed Syria + “The Living Years” (Mike + the Mechanics)
This week’s episode covers the birth of Jesus, death, resurrection, and everything in between! It’s only a few days until Christmas 2019—a celebration which, this year, Timothy has very helpfully renamed “The Star Wars: Episode IX After Party.” At some point between now and Christmas Day, millions of people throughout the world will hear these words […]
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Apologetics: Fragments of Otherwise Unknown Gospels
Gnostic Gospels and other unorthodox texts receive a lot of attention in popular media. The Gospel of Judas and the forged Gospel of Jesus’ Wife both became major news stories, for example, and a wide array of Gnostic texts are mentioned in novels like The Da Vinci Code that feed on bizarre conspiracy theories. It’s worth remembering, however, that there are […]
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Apologetics: The Providence of God in Persecution
In his article “For Whom Were the Gospels Written?,” Richard Bauckham points out that a small minority group experiencing alienation and opposition in its immediate social context could compensate for its precarious minority position locally by a sense of solidarity with fellow believers elsewhere and a sense of being part of a worldwide movement destined […]
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Jonathan Pennington: What Are the New Testament Gospels and Why Should We Trust Them? + “We Are the World” (USA for Africa)
According to bestselling religious scholar Reza Aslan, the New Testament Gospels “are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life.” The Gospels are, Aslan claims, fictional compositions from early Christians who re-imagined a Jewish revolutionary named Jesus as an ethereal Christ of faith. But is it really reasonable to read […]
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Timothy Paul Jones and Garrick Bailey: Three Chords Goes to the Movies: Avengers: Endgame
In the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby began creating comic book storylines that were interconnected in a shared universe and told a single story through many individual stories. In the early twenty-first century, that’s what Marvel Studios decided to do through the films that became the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first of these films was released in 2008. Now—eleven years and twenty-two films later—all of these storylines have culminated in a single film, Avengers: Endgame. In this special episode of Three Chords and the Truth, Garrick Bailey and Timothy Paul Jones take a careful look at Avengers: Endgame.
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Rob Plummer: How Did Judas Iscariot Really Die? + “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” (Blue Öyster Cult)
One of the most difficult dilemmas in the entire Bible has to do with how Judas Iscariot actually died. According to Matthew’s Gospel, Judas Iscariot hanged himself, and priests purchased the field where he died for 30 pieces of silver. But, according to the book of Acts, Judas fell headfirst in a field that he had acquired and his intestines burst out. So which is it, and what does this mean for how we read the New Testament? Today, in the Three Chords segment of the program, Dr. Robert Plummer joins Timothy and Garrick to discuss the fate of Judas Iscariot. In the Truth segment, your intrepid cohosts discuss a Christian theology of death by examining “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by the Blue Öyster Cult.
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Rob Plummer: Are There Historical Evidences of Supernatural Signs On the Day that Jesus Died? + “American Pie” (Don McLean)
According to the New Testament Gospels, the death of Jesus was accompanied by all sorts of signs and wonders, including supernatural happenings connected with the temple in Jerusalem. But is there any evidence outside the New Testament that any of these events really happened? As it turns out, there could be. That’s what Garrick and Timothy explore in this episode with renowned New Testament scholar Dr. Rob Plummer.
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Timothy Paul Jones and Garrick Bailey: The Cross and the Lynching Tree + “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Jimi Hendrix)
What happened to the body of Jesus after his death on the cross? According to the New Testament Gospels, his body was buried in a tomb and raised on the third day. And yet, according to some scholars, the body of Jesus was abandoned and consumed by wild beasts. So how do we know that Jesus was actually buried? That’s one of the questions that we’ll explore in the first half of the program. In the second half, we’ll search for truth in a song that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock and discover a yearning for justice that God has placed in every human heart that leads us to protest injustice. Then, we’ll reach inside the Infinity Gauntlet and pit Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters against Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
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Apologetics: Jesus of Faith, Jesus of History, or Jesus of Eyewitness Testimony?
“The more I probed the Bible,” Reza Aslan declares in the introduction to his bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, “the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of history” (xix). The result of this discovery—at least in Aslan’s estimation—is that the New Testament Gospels should be […]
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Apologetics: New Heresies Are Rarely New
At least once or twice every year—usually around Christmas and Easter—popular magazines and blogs seem to go out of their way to locate some shocking fact that supposedly debunks what Christians believe about Jesus. In most cases, these supposedly-shocking data are recycled from one of the many failed quests for the historical Jesus that have ebbed and […]
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Apologetics: Can We Trust the New Testament Gospels?
The witch’s knife plunged deep into the lion’s heart, and the majestic creature quivered and died. For a few seconds, complete silence descended on the movie theater. A slight sniffling beside me broke the stillness, and that’s when I heard my 9-year-old daughter whisper a rather profound word of wisdom to her friend—wisdom that reminds […]
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Church History: Who Decided Which Books Belong in My Bible?
Suppose that you became a Christian in the second century A.D. You’ve heard the story of a divine being who died on a cross and rose from the dead. Through baptism, you’ve openly identified yourself with his followers. Now, you want to learn more about this deity. Yet you quickly realize that some people who […]
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Apologetics: Did Christians Create Their Faith Or Did the Faith Form Christians?
What factors actually formed the New Testament and the faith of the early church? Conspiratorial reconstructions suggest that church leaders selected texts that preserved and expanded their own political powers. If so, what shaped the early church were books and theological beliefs that were chosen with the goal of control. The problem is, the […]
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Apologetics: Was Scripture Modified to Oppose Women and Jews?
According to Dr. Bart Ehrman, in his book Misquoting Jesus, there exists a category of New Testament alterations which includes changes that occurred because copyists “who were not altogether satisfied with what the New Testament books said modified their words to make them … more vigorously oppose heretics, women, Jews, and pagans.” Yet he fails to come […]
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