Dr Paul Allen

Christianity would not exist without the belief of the earliest Christians that God raised Jesus from the dead. As the Apostle Paul famously declared: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” ( 1 Cor 15:17 NRSV ). But for many Christians, the importance of the resurrection seems simply to be that it validates the more fundamental saving work of Christ, namely, his atoning death on the cross. While the cross is indeed absolutely central to how Christ saves, the earliest apostolic teaching in the book of Acts gives  Jesus’s resurrection pride of place  in how God accomplishes salvation. What follows are four reasons—drawn from the apostolic sermons in Acts—why the resurrection is foundational to the Christian faith. Table of contents 1. The confirmation of Jesus 2. The enthronement of Christ 3. The outpouring of the Spirit 4. The reign of the king Conclusion 1. The confirmation of Jesus Acts teaches that  Jesus’s resurrection...

You will be confronted with a difficult decision.   The Gospels —and especially the three Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke—have many of the same stories, some in nearly identical language. I had to decide whether I would teach each Gospel individually or whether I would teach the four together, combining them into a single “life of Christ” or “harmony of the Gospels.". I looked to see what other professors were doing and found that both approaches are quite common. Both also have a long history in the church. The most important early attempt to bring the four together into one story was the  Diatessaron  (meaning “through the four”), a harmony of the Gospels produced by the early Church Father Tatian around AD 170. Tatian’s work was very popular in its day and became the primary text of the Gospels in the Syrian church until around 400. In the end, however, the church chose to retain the four individual Gospels. This was the right decision both theologically and ...