Studies on the Fringe of Christianity
The answer to the title of this essay is, yes! Jesus was dead for a full three days and three nights, and that fact can be established from Jesus’ own words. The Bible tells the story of a time the Pharisees, who had accused Jesus of collusion with the devil, asked him for a sign …
People had only one name, during Biblical times. To distinguish between people of the same name, a description was often used. Jesus was a common Jewish name in Judea, so our Savior was called ‘The Nazarene’, after the city in which he lived.1 Likewise, the Mary of this study was from the town of Magdala2 …
The Bible scholar Robert Baker Girdlestone was accurate when he stated, “The difficulty of the translator usually begins with the name of God . . . it has caused perplexity, if not dissension, in the case of many new translations.”1 This dilemma is caused by many problems inherent to the Hebrew language and the facts …
I’ve tried to write this article several times, over the last couple of years, and always ended up putting it aside “until later.” Even this time I started to repeat my frustration, realizing that even a few thousand words could not explain this subject properly, but I persevered by believing what scant information I could …
The New Testament book of Ephesians was written to the Christians in Ephesus and explains what the Christian Church is and how its members should behave. Most commentators credit the apostle Paul with authorship, but there is some debate about that. And although many dates have been given, it was probably written between 60–63 A.D. …
There is a biblical interpretation system, called dispensationalism, that identifies basic time periods or historical ages in which God dispensed methods of organization, law, and government to humankind. A popular Bible dictionary indicates that the word dispensation comes from the Greek oikonomia which means “management” and the first definition listed is “the method or scheme …
The patriarch of the three Abrahamic religions is the prophet Abraham, from which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim a shared ancestry. This story about him begins in Mesopotamia at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1900 BC), when Abram (Abraham’s name before God changed it) was called by God to become the …
Scientists have said that early humans swung from trees a couple of million years ago and they now indicate that this theory has been confirmed, according to a recent article in the journal PaleoAnthropology. Fossils of Australopithecus sediba, discovered in South Africa, had fueled a scientific debate for the last 10 years, but “now researchers …
In a restaurant a few days ago, I overheard a small group of people discussing the account in the Gospels, when Jesus confronted a Canaanite woman. What really caught my attention though, was when one person said, “I don’t think Jesus should have made such a mean racist comment to someone asking him for help.” …
Do you believe in ghosts? According to the Huffington Post, nearly half of Americans do. A HuffPost poll “shows that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, or that the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.”1 In the U.K., 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts, …