Dr Paul Allen

Samuel Emadu “That’s the thickest book I’ve ever seen!” My friend and I were discussing the differences between Christianity and Mormonism. He’d just pulled the Mormon “Quad” out of his locker, and I was amazed at its heft. Roughly two and a half inches thick, this collection of Mormon scriptures includes the KJV Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. As we continued our conversation, one thing was clear: the Bible may have been bound alongside the other Mormon scriptures, but it didn’t carry the same authority. What Do Mormons Believe About the Bible? Article 8 of the Mormon Articles of Faith reads, “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.” Mormonism doesn’t view the Bible and the Book of Mormon equally. The Bible’s status as God’s Word is relativized by the phrase “as far as it is translated correctly.” The Book of Mormon is the word of God;...

Does the Bible contain contradictions, inexact measures, and perhaps actual errors? And, if so, does this mean that the Bible isn’t real history? There’s something about coming to the end of a film or book and finally understanding the baffling details that have previously made no sense. Like the "Last kingdom" - Different incidents are explained, problems are ironed out, and everything comes to a satisfactory ending. But viewers or readers hate stories that conclude with unanswered questions and inconsistencies, so editors try to eradicate any such untidiness. So well-edited books leave no loose ends and contain no contradictions. Critics of the Bible sometimes mistake it for this kind of literature. They know the claim that the Bible is inspired by God (2 Tim 3:16), so they think that its narrative should be tidy, self-explanatory, and self-consistent. However, ancient historians know that potential contradictions and apparent mistakes are normal in true histo...

The Bible was written at a time when the means for sharing documents were far different from the technology we have today. When the church in Thessaloniki received a letter from the apostle Paul in the mid-first century, the believers there would have read it aloud in their gatherings, and then devoted followers who recognized the value of Paul’s words would have produced handwritten copies of the letter to pass around to a wider audience. By the end of the first century, Paul’s letters were being copied as a collection. Copying manuscripts Hand-copying of the Pauline corpus continued through the centuries, until Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in fifteenth-century Germany. With some variation, this process of repeated hand-copying happened with every book in the Bible—the New Testament books in Greek, and the Old Testament books in Hebrew and Aramaic. In addition to these original language manuscripts, Christians translated their sacred texts into other languages. The Old...