κηρυσσων την βασιλειαν του θεου και διδασκων τα περι του κυριου ιησου χριστου μετα πασης παρρησιας ακωλυτως. The underlying meaning of this blog is this: the essential unity of Christians worldwide regardless of race, nationality, or religious denomination. There are real disagreements among us but there is a small remnant in every authentically Christian gathering. The Holy Spirit is leading His remnant into deeper understandings of the "meat" of the Gospel and not just the "milk."
9 December 598 BC/BCE: Death of Jehoiakim/Eliakim (608-598 BC/BCE), ascension
of his son, Jehoiachin/Jeconiah (ruled 597 BC/BCE), as King of Judah
(for a three-month and ten-day reign). Jehoiachin is held captive in Babylon for 37
years. The Sheshbazzar, “prince of Judah,” mentioned in Ezra is believed to have been Shenazzar, a son of Jehoiakin. This man would have been the uncle
of Zerubbabel, an ancestor of Jesus.
Ezra 1:8ff, 5:1-2,14, 2:63; 1 Chronicles 3:18; 2
Kings 23: 1-24:16.
Almost everyone acknowledges that the original text documents
of the New Testament have been lost. The originals were written on perishable
materials and were hand copied onto other perishable materials to be distributed
among the churches. Constant use, environmental factors, and sheer age led to
the degradation of the documents which had to be recopied repeatedly. What we
now have has been reconstructed from thousands of early textual fragments and the
earliest known full copies of the books.
In the 120 pages of his book, The New Testament
Documents: Are They Reliable?, F.F. Bruce presents a detailed but highly
readable statement about the proofs that the modern New Testament as it stands
represents as much as a 99.9 percent recovery of the original documents. Through
the comparison of numerous copies, scribal errors and intentional editing can
be detected and rejected. The oldest copies and those with the hardest to accept meaning (and therefore most likely to be "corrected" by the scribe) are
favored.
Comparing the extant New Testament documents to those of secular antiquity, Bruce shows that the texts of the Christian scriptures are actually far better attested than those of universally accepted secular books.
______________________________
F.F. Bruce, who died in 1990, was a highly influential British conservative evangelical biblical scholar and university professor. He wrote numerous books and articles. https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802867230/f-f-bruce/
Information you will need to search for this book: Bruce, F.F., The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Downer’s Grove, Ill: Inter-Varsity Press, 5th ed., 1960).
A similar book with a very apologetic bent is:
Sala,
Harold J., Why You Can Have Confidence in the Bible (Eugene, OR: Harvest
House Publishers, 2008). (This is an
apologetics book comparing the extant biblical documentation to that of
classical documents from antiquity.)
___________________________________________________________________
A general caution: books may give you wonderful new
insights and explanations of subjects, but you should never base your Christian
beliefs on any one book or the teachings of one person, no matter who they are.
All teachings must be consistent with scripture. Read as the Bereans did, with
discernment. “… for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the
Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.” Acts
17:11 NASB
Any doctrines must be consistent with the historical
full body of Christian thought. Doctrines or teachings inconsistent with
scripture in any way must be rejected. You would not eat cheese which had a
fuzzy fungus growing on it.
Free over the air television in the
United States is advertiser supported.
During the United States NCAA
National Basketball Tournament (we call it “March Madness”), the television
viewership numbers are enormous. As a result, companies pay large sums of money
to run 30 second commercials for their products during the broadcasts. The link
below is one of the commercials: for AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph.
At every game during the
tournament, vendors gather to sell memorabilia relating to the participating
college teams: hats, caps, shirts, jerseys, sweatsuits, flags, banners,
magazines, figurines, toys, and other doodads. Doodads, that is a good slang
word meaning little ephemeral items that your children will insist that they
must have but which they will discard, break, or lose as soon as they get home. In the South, we also call
them doohickeys or whatchamacallits. Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doodad
defines doodad as “an often small article whose common name is unknown
or forgotten: gadget.”
In the commercial in the link below, the vendor is obviously trying to avoid the cost of paying royalty licensing fees to the universities. He is selling counterfeit items. His main problem is that his counterfeits are glaringly obvious. The university names are spelled incorrectly, or the colors on the items are not the colors associated with the university. His counterfeits include: Unsee instead of UNC (The University of North Carolina), Gonzaza instead of Gonzaga University, Markett instead of Marquette University, Oregano instead of The University of Oregon, and Dook instead of Duke University.
Not all counterfeits are as obvious as these and, sadly, they also occur in spiritual matters. There are spiritual counterfeits which have arisen from well-intentioned ignorance and stupidity, or from peculiar mis-readings of the biblical texts, or from secular concerns being forced into the scriptural interpretation (eisegesis).
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Pope Francis has died and the process
of selecting a new pope has begun. Today, the puffs of smoke from the Vatican
chimney were black. The Conclave’s first
vote to elect the next pope did not produce enough votes for a single
individual to be selected. Traditionally, black smoke from the chimney means
that the Cardinals must take at least one more vote, and probably more than
that. White smoke means, “We have a Pope!”
Many people believe that this is the origin
of the English-language idiomatic expression of surprise, Holy Smoke!
Surprisingly, this does not seem to be the case.
Holy Smoke! is a minced oath. (I will talk about minced oaths in another post). The fact-checking website Snopes.com (I will talk about Snopes.com in another post) says that the belief mentioned above is false. Snopes.com/fact-check/holy-smoke/
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known written mention of holy smoke was in The Epiphany, a 1627 poem written by Sir J. Beaumont and it references the burning of incense. The earliest known use of holy smoke as an exclamation or expletive was in 1892, by Rudyard Kipling in his The Naulahka.
Attalia Acts
14:25 Antalya, Turkiye
Cenchrae Romans
16:1 Kechries, Greece
Harosheth Haggoyim Judges
4:13 El-Ahwar, Israel
Kir of Moab
Isaiah 15:1 Al
Karak, Jordan
Laish/Leshem
Judges 18:29 Tel Dan,
Israel
Joshua 19:47
No-Amon/Thebes Ezekiel
30:16 Luxor/Al Uxxor, Egypt
Nahum 3:8
On/Awen Genesis 46:20 Heliopolis,
Egypt
Pi-beseth/Bubastis Ezekiel
30:17 Tell Basta, Egypt
Sarepta 1 Kings 17:9 Sarafand,
Lebanon
Obadiah 20
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