Dr Paul Allen

Qumran in the West Bank, Middle East. In this cave the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. In dieser Höhle in Qumran wurden die Schriftrollen gefunden. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In the 1948 printing of his excellent book Our Bible and Ancient Manuscripts, Sir Frederic Kenyon , the textual scholar, had this to say, “There is indeed no probability that we shall find manuscripts of the Hebrew text going back to a period before the formation of the text which we know as Massoretic. We can only arrive at an idea of it by a study of the earliest translations made from it… ” (cited by Pfeiffer, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, p. 107).  At the same time his book was being printed, discoveries began in 1947 that would render any further statements like Kenyon’s impossible. Until this time, scholars had only the clay tablets of Babylon and the Egyptian papyri to help them understand background information on the Bible, since no ancient Old Testament manuscripts were known to have surv...

TEMPLE Mount : It’s the hill at the heart of much of the Middle East ’s turmoil. Now, for the first time, archaeologists say they have found evidence of King Solomon’s temple . The veracity of the Old Testament ’s accounts of King Solomon building the First Temple has long been questioned. While remnants of the Second Temple abound, only uncertain hints of an earlier structure have previously been found . The Bible states Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II . This has been dated to about 587BC. The Second Temple, remnants of which include the Jerusalem’s famous Wailing Wall, was razed by the Romans about AD70. But the Times of Israel is today reporting a secret archaeological excavation  on Temple Mount has unearthed the first ever artefacts conclusively dated to the First Temple — some 2600 years ago. The paper says the dig was done with the permission of the Islamic organisation that administers the 7th Century Dome of the Rock , from which t...

The heat was on. The Smyrna police hunted for Polycarp , the revered bishop of that city. Already they had put other Christians to death in the arena; now a mob cried for the leader. Polycarp had left the city and was hiding out at the farm of some friends. As the soldiers moved in, he fled to another farm. Though the aged churchman felt no fear of death and had wanted to stay in the city, his friends had urged him to hide, perhaps fearing that his death would demoralize the church. If so, they were quite wrong. When the police reached the first farm, they tortured a slave boy to learn Polycarp’s whereabouts. Then they rushed, fully armed, to apprehend the bishop. Though Polycarp had time to escape, he refused. “God’s will be done,” he resolved. Instead, he welcomed his captors as guests, offered them food and asked for an hour alone to pray. He took two hours. Some of the captors seemed sorry to be arresting such a nice old man . On the way back to Smyrna, the police chief ...

Previously, we looked at the word “modest” in the New Testament and walked through  1 Cor. 12:23  and  1 Tim. 2:9  and ended up closing the post with a little discussion of what “ not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire ” meant.   The question arose as to what braided hair with gold and pearls indicated in ancient Roman culture , and the comment was made there is an evangelical myth that such things indicated that a woman was a  prostitute .   I suggested that such was not the case, and today’s post will be the first part of a two-part answer to that question.  In this post we’ll take a look at women’s clothing in Roman culture, and the following post will take a look at women’s hairstyles . Hopefully the next two posts will lay to rest some evangelical myths about hair and clothes in the New Testament era. In Roman culture, one didn’t find the same sort of wild variety in clothing, and little changes in style....

To answer our question from a historical standpoint, we must first determine what facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth can be credibly established on the basis of the evidence and second consider what the best explanation of those facts is. At least four facts about the fate of the historical Jesus are widely accepted by NT historians today. Fact 1: After His crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb. This fact is highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus’ tomb was known in Jerusalem to Jews and Christians alike. New Testament scholars have established the fact of Jesus’ entombment on the basis of evidence such as the following:    Jesus’ burial is attested in the information (from before A.D. 36) that was handed on by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5.    The burial story is independently attested in the source material that was used by Mark in writing his Gospel.     Given the understandable ...