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...

English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) EVERY PERSON COMES TO THE matter of homosexuality with an established opinion, which has been shaped by a worldview. By worldview I mean a person’s concept of self, the world, and everything else. Every worldview encompasses what one views as real, the nature of truth, how we come to know what is true, and how we define what is “good” in an ethical sense. One’s worldview determines whether homosexuality is perceived as right or wrong. My own worldview is founded upon my confidence in the existence of a creating and governing God . This God has spoken or communicated both in general revelation through the created order and in the special revelations of Scripture and His Son, Jesus Christ . General revelation includes the complexity of the design and creation of the human body, the awareness of the spiritual self and conscience, and the unfolding of a plan that is shown through history. Reality encompasses both seen and unseen...

Lucas Cranach, 1558 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith ( 1 Cor 15:14). Jesus’ resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity. On it, the Christian faith either stands or falls. It signals the defeat of death (1 Cor 15:26, 55), presents Jesus as the first fruits of the coming resurrection (1 Cor 15:14), and displays the ultimate importance of every human being (1 Cor 15:22). While most of us readily agree that Jesus’ resurrection is central to our faith, how many of us could explain to a non-Christian friend why we believe that the resurrection actually happened? If the thought of defending the resurrection of Jesus to a friend or family member makes your stomach turn, fear not. There are lots of reasons why we know that we can trust what the Bible teaches us. Here are just a few that you may find helpful. The Reliability of the New Testament : The New Testament documents and in particular the gospels, are reco...

English: Bust of Auguste Comte in Place de la Sorbonne, Paris. Italiano: Busto di Auguste Comte in Place de la Sorbonne, Parigi. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Psalm 19 “The heavens declare the glory of God , and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (v. 1). Metaphysics is the study of that which transcends the physical realm accessed by our five senses . Every worldview has its own answer to the single most important metaphysical question: What principle makes sense of the diversity of creation? Is there something that explains the existence of the universe and demonstrates how the tremendous variety of “things” (dogs, stars, flowers, sand, and so on) all fit together as pieces of the whole? Christian theology has always said that this unifying principle is the Creator who stands above all things. God is the one who makes sense of everything. Non- Christian philosophers have suggested that an abstract concept, such as reason serves as the unifying principle. The nineteenth-...

Recently some Bible College students from a particular church, went to a cemetery, laid on the tombstone of Aimee Simple McPherson (pentecostal speaker from California ) to try to receive a transfer of her Holy Spirit anointing to themselves.  ON WHAT SCRIPTURAL BASIS CAN THIS BE JUSTIFIED? Their actions somehow appear to be linked to an event from 2 Kings 13:21.  During the spring, the usual season of beginning campaigns in ancient times. Predatory bands from Moab generally made incursions at that time on the lands of Israel . The bearers of a corpse, alarmed by the appearance of one of these bands, hastily deposited, as they passed that way, their load in Elisha ’s sepulchre, which might be easily done by removing the stone at the mouth of the cave.  According to the Jewish and Eastern custom, his body, as well as that of the man who was miraculously restored, was not laid in a coffin, but only swathed; so that the bodies could be brought into contact. The...