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Here is a small map showing Corinth, the isthmus, and the two seaports east (Cenchreae) and west (Laecheum) which served Corinth. The modern day canal through the Isthmus did not exist in Paul’s day—- While the canal was begun to be dug in Nero’s day, in fact it was not completed prior to Napoleon’s day! In Paul’s day little ships were placed on carriers and dragged across the two miles of the isthmus on a road called the diolkos. One… Read more

Very little was left of Corinth when the Romans leveled in the 2nd century B.C., except the ancient temple of Apollo, seen here… There were however in Paul’s day shops like the one which can be seen here… And as the previous post showed, a major theater and an odeon as well to keep the folks entertained. Out in front of the theater was found an inscription stone. This one… Notice the inscription is in Latin and reads ‘Erastus for… Read more

“The past is like a foreign country, they do things differently there”. This is all too true, and far too much of the trouble with modern interpretation of the Corinthian correspondence today has to do with what I will call bad visualization. So as something of a corrective here are some schematics of what Paul’s Corinth, around A.D. 50 will have looked like. What these schematics (mostly found in guide books on Corinth or study Bibles) have in common is… Read more

Sometimes the critics are just plain out to lunch, or in this case, off on a pub crawl. This is one of those times. The new movie with Simon Peg (aka Scotty in the Star Trek reboot), Martin Freeman (aka Watson and also Mr. Hobbit) and several other familiar British faces on the surface might have been a fun, and funny movie. Its given a 90% rating by critics and its been out several weeks now. The premise is simple—… Read more

[The following is a post by my friend and brother in ministry— Timothy George] It was called “The Magic City,” “The Pittsburgh of the South” (because rich ore deposits had led to the development of a strong steel industry), the most segregated city in the country. After 1948, Birmingham, Alabama was increasingly called “Bombingham.” That was the year several African-American families moved into a hitherto whites-only neighborhood called Smithville, soon to become known as “Dynamite Hill.” Dynamite was readily available… Read more

In 1824, in the knobby hill portion of central Kentucky between Springfield and Bardstown, Father Theodore Bardin gave a large farm to a group of ‘sisters’ (i.e. nuns) so that they could build a convent and a life together. Now there are a variety of monastic communities in Kentucky, perhaps most famously the monks of Gethesemane Abbey. Much of middle Kentucky was settled by Catholics, and more specifically Irish Catholics who only brought their faith to the ‘western frontier’ as… Read more

One of my very favorite series of texts dealing with original sources that illuminate the NT is the series now published by Eerdmans entitled New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity. It is a series originating out of the ancient history department at Macquarrie University in Sydney Aus. and is loaded with all sorts of inscriptions, many of them unpublished before now that helps us understand the linguistic and social context of the NT. Below is a helpful review of Vol. 10… Read more