MORE BAD NEWS FOR CHRISTIANS EVERYWHERE—the year was 175 or perhaps 180, when along came a man, and his name was Celsus. Christianity’s first noted intellectual tormenter had likely been raised in a Jewish home, possibly even Christian. He had been on the inside. He...
AMONG THE MANY DECORATIVE ACCUSATIONS heaved upon the infant Christian faith, one particular claim was presented, rather early on, which can be deemed as true. Christians refused to worship the gods. As early as 111 AD, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia along...
IN A WAY, JOB AND HIS THREE FRIENDS were severely handicapped intellectuals. When Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar heard of the evil that had befallen him, they made an appointment together to mourn at his side. We quickly read: “When they lifted up their eyes, afar off,...
TO SAY “KANSAS IS AS FLAT AS A PANCAKE” would be to speak an inaccuracy, for Kansas, you see, is flatter than a pancake. Actually, according to the meticulous research and findings of Dr. Dobson and Campbell, it’s only the ninth flattest state in the continental...
IT IS NO SECRET THAT JOB, LIKELY WRITTEN centuries before the Law of Moses, is a flat earth book. Geocentricism abounds. But there’s far more to Job than most contemporary connoisseurs of Scripture are willing to admit. Theologians have long noted that Job ascribed to...
WE ARE GIVEN NO INDICATION THAT JOB DISAGREED with Bildad and Zophar’s descriptions of the dead man for the very reason that Job wished to heap such an existence, if we can even define it in such terms, upon himself. Whereas Zophar embossed our minds with imagery of...
IT WAS ZOPHAR THE NAAMATHITE’S TURN TO SPEAK. Though the loftiness of the wicked reaches the heavens, he assured his friends, they are at best delusional, for the limits of the Almighty are as high as the heavens, His measure longer than the earth, and His depths...
IT WAS BILDAD THE SHUHITE’S TURN TO SPEAK. Fire and brimstone mark the former habitation of the wicked, he told the suffering Job. To this we may rightly conclude, where there is fire and brimstone, there are no people. Job and his friends held no persuasion to the...
AFTER DISASTER FELL UPON THE MAN FROM UZ, we quickly read, “Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth (Job 3:1).” Among his few loyal friends, Job wailed: 9 “Let the stars of its twilight be darkened; Let it wait for light but have none, And let it not see...
“Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book!” (Job 19:23) FOR THE MEDIEVAL COMMENTATOR, HE WAS A LEPER, while some modern scholars’ finger scurvy as the culprit. And it has been suggested that no less than fourteen diseases are attributed to...
UPON HIS OWN DEATH A MILLENNIA EARLIER, King David would, as he himself wrote, “go down into silence.” It is David who once penned: “for there is no mention of you in death. In Sheol who will give you thanks? (Psalm 6:5).” The writer of 1 Kings records: “So David...
IF THE TRUE SACRIFICIAL DEATH OF JESUS IS UNTHINKABLE, it is only because human religion has made it permissible to find dogmatic detours and attain the alternative. That the only begotten Son of God should become flesh, grow and mature as a man, suffer as a man, and...
CONFUSION OFTEN SURROUNDS THE DISSIMILARITIES between soul and spirit, and yet the Bible gives us a clear distinction. If the theologian has his way, Christ’s conscious ghost immediately left His body at the cross. Whether He ascended or descended to heaven in the...
NOW FROM THE SIXTH HOUR UNTIL THE NINTH HOUR, precisely 12 noon until 3 pm in Roman time, Matthew records darkness over the whole land while Jesus hung on the device of His crucifixion. It was about the ninth hour, he wrote, when Jesus cried in a loud voice: “Eli,...
PONTIUS PILATE washed his hands of the entire affair. The trial of Jesus had likely been conceived by all parties involved, both His accusers and authorities, as a kangaroo court. Jesus was a non-citizen of Rome, which entitled him to no rights before the law...
ONE CANNOT help but wonder, in the midst of his desperation, if the honorable captain of the kings host in Syria had already gashed himself with knives, perhaps even commissioning others to perform the sacred rites, only to be told by the high-priest that Baal was...
THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR TRANSLATING the bulk of Hebrew Scripture into the Latin text we know today as the Vulgate never could erase the guilt of his lifelong love affair with Virgil, Plato, Cicero, and Homer. Like the sarcophagus of Heine’s dream some fifteen-hundred...
HEINRICH HEINE WAS NOT WELL. In May of 1848, the German-Jewish writer, known for his lyric poetry set to music by such composers as Schumann and Schubert, suddenly fell paralyzed. Heine would not recover. Further musings were confined to bed, a sickly pulpit for the...
THE LONGER I’VE BEEN IN THE FAITH; THE MORE I MATURE; and the firmer I become on various doctrinal positions—everything from eschatology and cosmology to graceology and doxology—I find myself succumbing to an ever-deepening fear of the Lord on the understanding, and...
"On the dark bottom of the great salt lake Imprisoned lay the giant snake, With naught his sullen sleep to break." Poets of the North, Oelenschlaeger. THAT frank writer, Montaigne, says:— “Yet on the other side it is a sottish presumption to disdain and condemn that...
IT IS CERTAINLY remarkable to consider that preaching was expressly prohibited among blacks during the first 25 years of Reverend Jasper's ministry, and yet the Southern gentleman preached. For more than fifty years of his life, John J. Jasper was a slave. Regardless,...
“For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Psalm 6:5) LAZARUS WAS NOT WELL. BUT THAT’S SOMEWHAT of an understatement. Fact is, Lazarus was dying, and everybody knew it. His sisters Mary and Martha sent a currier...
THE KILLING of the Philistine giant Goliath by the shepherd boy David did not go over nearly as well as one might expect. The initial twist to the plot is that the King of Israel wanted the child whom the Prophet Samuel had anointed dead. There were of course other...
EDEN'S VISION had failed, and that is putting it lightly. Yahweh’s created image and the sons of God who had copulated with the daughters of men had failed so miserably in their commissioned tasks that “it repented the LORD that He had made man on the earth, and it...
MY READER is likely well informed regarding my desire to honor the Textus Receptus, the Greek New Testament by which both the King James Bible stands upon and the Reformation took flight—though I am not beholden to it. The bad blood pitted against the Codex...
A HUNDRED and fifty years ago Saul took his own life and now the wicked King Ahab of Israel has asked Jehoshaphat king of Judah if he would agree to join him at Ramoth-gilead for battle. Jehoshaphat is legally related through the marriage of his son to Ahab and...
“THEN SAMUEL TOOK THE HORN OF OIL, and anointed David in the midst of his brethren, and the Spirit of Yahweh came upon him from that day forward (1 Samuel 16:13).” Though we are not intimately told about the judicial sessions going on behind the scene in heaven, the...
ASKING SUCH inconsequential questions as “How many angels dance on the head of a pin” has long been accredited to the sort of arguments of absurdity, or reductio ad absurdum in Latin, which aided and abetted in the crippling of medieval scholasticism while the Turks...
THE HEBREWS were still hopelessly captive in Babylon when the Prophet Daniel had a rather hopeful vision. “As I continued looking,” he wrote of heaven, “a multitude of thrones were set up and the Ancient of Days took His seat amongst them.” Much earlier on, the Bibles...
IT IS A LITTLE KNOWN FACT THAT THE CELESTIAL HALO, which has adorned the portraits of so many heavenly-residing saints, did not originate with the Christian religion. For this we must first look to the Egyptian Mysteries; to the hidden knowledge of Zarathustra; to the...