The Christmas story is as old as time. We’ve heard it a hundred times, we’ve seen it, we’ve sung it. But how well do we know it really? Test yourself against these twelve questions. The questions Test yourself with these questions, then scroll down to see how well you went. The answers according to history I’ve […]
Archaeology continues to reveal new insights into Jesus’ boyhood town and the culture of its inhabitants.
Some people have their bucket list – the things they want to do before they kick the bucket. And occasionally you hear people ask “What would you do if you knew you had one day to live?” The answer is often something wild – eat junk food, drink expensive wine, go crazy, self-indulge. This evening […]
Most christians have been taught to reverence the Bible. This has been especially true of Protestant christianity. The Reformation was built on the doctrine of sola scriptura (by scripture alone). And when conservative christianity felt threatened by evolution, liberal theology and modernist thinking in the 19th century, it developed a statement of “the fundamentals”, one […]
Larry Hurtado is retired New Testament scholar, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He has continued hs scholarly work since retiring.
I have been re-reading NT Wright’s chapter on the “The Surprise of Resurrection” in Jesus: the final days, where he corrects some doubtful christian ideas about the resurrection, and offers reasons why we should regard the gospel accounts as basically historical.
How much do you and I know about Jesus? How much of it is really the truth about him? The obvious answer is that we know more about him than most ancient figures, because we have quite a few accounts of his life and teachings. But everyone seems to read them differently. In my previous […]
The young adults in the group we lead asked us what it means to follow Jesus in 2018. The study and discussion took us in some interesting directions. This is what we learnt together.
The facts about Jesus are clearly stated in the gospels, and they don’t change, but people have so many different understandings of him. The Catholic Jesus or Orthodox Jesus is not the same as the evangelical Protestant Jesus, or the Jesus of liberal Protestant theologians. I think there is probably some truth in all portraits, […]
A couple of weeks back I reviewed Kenneth Bailey’s Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, a book I have found revelatory about Jesus. I have gained many helpful insights from it. Today, some new understandings about one of my favourite gospel accounts – Jesus in the synagogue at the start of his ministry, when he made […]