…and God said “Let there be a Bible and let it be perfect and let no one challenge anything in it.” I’m not sure on which day out of six, YHWH made this decree but surely it was originally a part of the Genesis story. Surely. Otherwise, why would some Christians believe that a book, written BY MEN and copied over and over BY MEN and translated over and over BY MEN could possibly be perfect and without challenge as... Read more
In John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Slough of Despond is the metaphor used to portray the difficulties experienced by the protagonist, Christian, as his sins and his guilt weigh him down, sinking him deeper and deeper into the allegorical bog. It is a vitally important thing for America and the world to make an effort to understand how deeply our national ignorance and arrogance have carried us into the modern version of the Slough of Despond so that... Read more
January 6, 2024 War accompanies practically every effort of mankind either as either a cause or a result. One cannot pick up a newspaper, turn on the television or connect to the internet without seeing some report of war in some corner of the world. Whether in the Middle East or in Eastern Europe or in Africa or in India or even in Ireland, it seems that, as a species, we are constantly at war with someone somewhere. What makes... Read more
12/30/2023 About two years ago, I started to study and write about Biblical history and the many interpretations people have made of the Bible. I had no clear idea at the time where this was leading. Originally, I had thought I would write a book outlining what I believe to be important from say…creation on down. As I began to study and learn, I quickly realized that that was unlikely to happen, given that I have a limited number of... Read more
We all know the Christmas story: Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men, the king, infanticide, assorted animals, lots of angels. Do the two versions found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell the same story? Are there other versions of the story not in the Bible? Only the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the Bible relate the story of Jesus’s (more correctly Yeshua’s) birth. We are not concerned here with why the other two canonical gospels, the... Read more
Everyone knows Jesus was born of a virgin. The Bible says so. Right? Well…it might not be quite that simple. Let us see what the Bible actually says about that. Two of the four canonical gospels assert that Jesus Christ, the Christian Messiah, was born of a virgin mother. There is no further mention of the subject in the text of the Bible that has come down to us. What does the Gospel of Matthew say? In the Gospel of... Read more
Are Christians required to believe in the “Truth” of the Bible? In the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, do Christians profess a belief in the inerrancy of the Holy Bible? Let us take a look and see. What does the Apostles’ Creed actually say? The Apostles’ Creed most likely originated in the fifth century CE as a version of the earlier Roman Creed. It is shorter than the Nicene Creed adopted in 381 and is, like the Nicene Creed, Trinitarian... Read more
Does God tell us what we are allowed to eat and not eat? Do our religious beliefs inform our food choices or do we rely solely on cultural norms? Western religious traditions provide some guidance as to which kinds of meat are deemed edible, but that guidance is incomplete. In the Hebrew Bible, many kinds of animals are deemed unclean and therefore unfit for human consumption. The camel, the rabbit, the hyrax, the pig, marine animals lacking fins and scales,... Read more
In my last article, I introduced the concept of false prophets and posed the question whether the self-proclaimed apostle Paul (Saul of Tarsus) could be considered a false prophet. Let us examine the definition we are using to describe what we mean by prophet. Prophet: one who utters divinely inspired revelations: such as often capitalized: the writer of one of the prophetic books of the Bible capitalized: one regarded by a group of followers as the final authoritative revealer... Read more
How easy is it to spot false prophets in scripture and elsewhere? The Bible, in The Torah, the Prophets, the Gospels and the Epistles, warns the faithful, whether Jews or Christians, that false teachers and false prophets who claim to know the mind of God, will appear from time to time and attempt to lead people away from the true faith. The Open Bible website lists more than 50 examples from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. We will... Read more
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