Dr Paul Allen

The so-called hard sayings of Jesus entered Christian vernacular in 1983 with the publication of F.F. Bruce ’s book of the same name. But individuals have been grappling with the teachings of Jesus long before the don of twentieth century British evangelical biblical scholarship wrote his now-famous work. After Jesus’ bread of life discourse in John 6 , several professed followers of Christ abandoned His band of disciples because they were offended by what they dubbed His “hard sayings” (vv. 60–65). Not everyone was as put off by the words of Christ. The Apostle Peter responded to the very same “offensive” words with confidence, exclaiming, “You have the words of eternal life” (v. 68). How shall we respond to the hard sayings of Jesus? Even a cursory reading of John  6:22 –71 will reveal a host of interpretative challenges. Jesus’ sermon touches on doctrines as wide-ranging as the Trinity, election and reprobation, the purpose of His mission, the nature of faith, t...

English: This is a map of first century Iudaea Province that I created using Illustrator CS2. I traced this image for the general geographic features. I then manually input data from maps found in a couple of sources. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar. The Acts of Jesus. HarperSanFrancisco: 1998. p. xxiv. Michael Grant. Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels. Charles Scribner's Sons: 1977. p. 65-67. John P. Meier. A Marginal Jew. Doubleday: 1991. p. 1:434. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Titus 2:11–14 In the bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail , the authors claim that in A.D. 303 Emperor Diocletian destroyed all Christian writings that could be found. That’s why, they assert, there are no New Testament manuscripts prior to the fourth century. Later, Emperor Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, which allowed the “custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their material as they saw fit.” It was at this point that “most of the crucial alter...