The Canon
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So many times we hear from those we try to share the good news of Christ with that the gospels are just hearsay, written long after the time of Jesus, and are not eyewitness accounts. Where do they get this idea? They get it from many modern scholars, but not from the actual evidence of the text! They conclude that the gospel accounts are unreliable. Is this conclusion justified? The idea that the gospels are documents that are far removed from original eye witnesses by a long process of anonymous communication of oral tradition is a popular idea today. Some modern scholars also view...
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Have you heard someone teach that the book of Isaiah had two different authors? That there were two Isaiahs? This "Second Isaiah " theory has become popular among some modern scholars, who can't accept the idea that God could actually predict the future. In chapters 40-66 of Isaiah, many predictions were made about Israel's Babylonian Captivity, which occurred in 587 B.C. However, the time of the prophet Isaiah was in the 700's B.C., and so the critics had to come up with a second Isaiah that wrote chapters 40-66 sometime after the Babylonian Captivity, and then just made it appear that...
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As is acknowledged by biblical scholars across the board, there have been copying errors during the transmission of the New Testament. These errors resulted in many variants between the manuscripts. So the question is this: don’t some Bible scholars such as Dr. Bart Ehrman point out that the Bible contains hundreds of thousands of variant readings and that this means we have error-filled copies and nothing close to the originals? Dr. Bart Ehrman in his book Misquoting Jesus does indeed say the Bible has up to 400,000 variants and therefore we have more variants than there are words...
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, , In the New Testament, the apostle Peter is credited with the authorship of two letters, or epistles. Yet if you read many modern commentators on the Bible, they hold the view that Peter really didn't write the Second Letter of Peter attributed to him, but some other later author did. In essence, they charge that this second letter is a forgery. Why do they think this? They give three main reasons: 1. It was not quoted for a long time after it was supposedly written. The first quote is by church father Origen who lived in the late second-mid third century. 2. The style and vocabulary...
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The book of Ezra talks about the return of Israel to its homeland after being exiled to Babylon, and the subsequent rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. Closely related to the book of Ezra is the book of Nehemiah, who came about 13 years after Ezra and led in the rebuilding of the Jerusalem city walls. The time of writing of this little book of Ezra covers the time of Ezra's return to Jerusalem bout 458 B.C.E. and is traditionally thought to have been completed around 400 B.C.E at the latest, with only a small amount of editing after Ezra's work. But some modern critics want to call it a late...
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Were there extra books in the Old Testament that have been hidden, and are only in some bibles but not others? Why aren't all bibles the same? If you look in a New American or Jerusalem edition of the Bible, you will find 12 extra books in the Old Testament part of the Bible, commonly referred to as the "Apocrypha" which means "hidden". They consist of the books of Wisdom, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Additions to Esther, Suzanna, Bel and the Dragon, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, and Song of the Three Children. (There are also other books not included in any bible that are considered...
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Bible critics often say that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch), but that it was written by several authors at a much later time. Perhaps in your college religion class, your professor told you that only naive people believe that Moses actually wrote any of the Bible, but now we modern scholars know better? The question is, do they really know this for a fact? We've seen in a previous article that Archaeology shows writing existed in Moses's time and confirms the antiquity of the Pentateuch. But there is plenty of other kinds of evidence that support...
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As we saw in the previous article on the Documentary Hypothesis, pastors and seminarians are still being taught that rather than Moses, four guys known as J, E, P, and D wrote the first five books of the Bible (The Pentateuch). We saw how flawed their methods were. But why is this still being taught? Does archaeology support the JEDP Hypothesis? The JEDP theory ignores archaeology and claims that there couldn't have been writing at the time of Moses in 11500-1400 B.C.E. Remember, they dated the documents of the Pentateuch at 850 B.C.E. at the earliest. But we have the following discoveries: The...
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In many of our seminaries today, it is taught that the first five books of the Bible (The Pentateuch) were not composed by Moses or revealed in any supernatural way, but rather were written by many different authors who were inventing the Jewish Law and history for political reasons. Each supposedly wrote with his own style and vocabulary. Then editors and redactors supposedly combined them into what we have today. This theory was first proposed in the late 1700's and developed fully by the late 1800's into a complicated "modern" account of how the Pentateuch was written. The theory...
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Did Judas the traitor really write his own gospel? This one is really good fodder for conspiracy theorists. But don't go looking for the "real truth" in this document just yet. The “Gospel of Judas” is written in Coptic, and the earliest copy dates from about the third century. When it was found, the news media and popular books portrayed it as a new discovery, but this false gospel was known all the way back in the days of Irenaeus in the second century. Irenaeus mentioned the Gospel of Judas in his work Against Heresies and called it invented history, written by a Gnostic...
© 2012 Vince Latorre, The Bible Can Be Proven