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“The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has rather been found difficult and left untried.” —Chesterton I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.The story of Jesus is either the greatest event in history or the cruelest hoax. If it is a hoax, then the whole of the Christian message crumbles together with the hopes of those multitudes of lives built on his name. The apostle Paul said: “And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of...

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION Reliable as what?' asked a discerning reviewer of the first edition of this little work, by way of a comment on the title. His point, I think, was that we should be concerned with the reliability of the New Testament as a witness to God's selfrevelation in Christ rather than with its reliability as a record of historical fact. True; but the two questions are closely related. For, since Christianity claims to be a historical revelation, it is not irrelevant to look at its foundation documents from the standpoint of historical criticism. When the first...

A sixty-seven year old proud atheist friend of mine recently interjected the sweeping statement “all religion is irrational” into one of our conversations. I replied, not with a direct rebuttal but, instead, with the unexpected question, “who is Jesus Christ?” He replied, “I don’t know.” If I were to ask some of you why I pulled that question out of left field you might also reply with a bewildered “I don’t know.” So keep reading. Please. If you have never really pondered the question “who is Jesus Christ?” then you simply cannot consider yourself to be a committed intellectual –...

Whenever there's an archaeological discovery related to the Bible, conflicting interpretations by various experts can leave a believer's head spinning. Take the discovery in Israel of a palace from the era of King David earlier this year. An archaeologist from Hebrew University in Jerusalem said there's "unequivocal evidence" that David and his descendants ruled at the site. But critics, including some committed believers, say it could have belonged to other kingdoms and that David's palace likely would have been in Jerusalem some 18 miles northwest. Still others claim there is no archaeological evidence that David even existed. Similar confusion ensued...

Former muslim offers powerful apologetic of Christ's death and resurrection. Medical doctor and historian was looking to confirm that Allah was God and Mohammed his true messenger by trying to ascertain that the story of Christ's death and resurrection was a myth. Instead, he found that the records supporting the Bible about Jesus were far more complete and written closer to Jesus' life on earth, while the records regarding Mohammed appeared much later left much to be disputed. Christians can learn a LOT about your own faith in this video! VERY INTERESTING! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaYR4G7oRiw

A few years ago I began posting brief reflections on movies, music and culture on YouTube, probably the most watched Web site in the world. In my mind, this exercise resembles St. Paul's venture onto the Areopagus in Athens, preaching the Gospel amid a jumble of competing ideas. YouTube is a virtual Areopagus, where every viewpoint—from the sublime to the deeply disturbing—is on display. Never as a Catholic teacher or preacher have I addressed less of the "choir.” The most numerous responses have come to my pieces on atheism and belief. I have made a video called Why Do We...

The moment I uttered these words, my burden rolled off my back and I knew that I was free. Joy now flooded into my heart and I began to praise the Lord. He had taught me a new song. by Moshe Radcliff [On September 25th H.R. Moshe Radcliff died. His testimony appeared in the Presbyterian Standard (July-September 1998) and is published by kind permission.] I was born into a Jewish family in prosperous Vienna, Austria on the 5th April 1930. Although my parents did not strictly observe the Jewish religion, father took my brother and me to synagogue occasionally. Mother...

We look back in time, and say the universe is 15 billion years old. But as every scientist knows, when we say the universe is 15 billion years old, there's another half of the sentence that we rarely bother to say. The other half of the sentence is: The universe is 15 billion years old as seen from the time-space coordinates of the earth. The key is that the Torah looks forward in time, from very different time-space coordinates, when the universe was small. Since then, the universe has expanded out. Space stretches, and that stretching of space totally changes...

There is an oft-quoted phrase in Christian circles that goes “faith begins where reason ends” and I’m perfectly fine with that statement as it is. The problem I have is that a lot of people who use this phrase to defend their faith do not really go to the end of reason. They stop short of the end, refusing to take reason past a certain point, and declare that faith is now the operative agent. I, myself, have been guilty of this many times in the past. When I reached a point when I wasn’t able to understand some theological...

Although Joseph Smith said God had pronounced the completed translation of the plates as published in 1830 correct, many changes were made in later editions. There are at least 3,913 changes, and not all of them minor or merely grammatical. The LDS Church suggests that the changes are unimportant, but actual examination does not bear this out, especially when one considers that the Golden Plates were supposedly translated letter-by-letter by the power of God (H. of C. 1, pp. 54-55). Spelling or grammatical errors are one thing, but changes in doctrine and errors in consistency and common sense are quite...

I enjoy collecting information about studies that relate to some aspect of the Bible. Over and over, social science data tends to confirm the Scriptures. A new study verifies the truth revealed in Paul’s statement in the Bible that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Paul didn’t say that money is the root of evil---although I’ve heard people misrepresent the Bible as supposedly saying that. Nor did he say it’s the lack of money that is the root of evil, although I’ve heard some people say that’s what it should say. Yet I’ve known...

A Reluctant Israeli Public Grapples With What Scholarship Reveals About the Old Testament's Version of History/b> "If Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David aren't proven, how am I supposed to live with that?" The agonized question came from the crowded back row of an auditorium at Ben-Gurion University, during a conference titled "Has the Biblical Period Disappeared?" It expressed the shiver that went down Israel's collective spine at the end of last year, as puzzled scholars saw Israel's lay population jerked into awareness of the last two decades of biblical archaeological and historical research. Just as Israelis have had to...

Warning: this is very obscure and somewhat turgid. Only read it if you are Biblically and historically hardcore. Dear Rev. Know-it-all, Apollos is said to have “vigorously refuted the Jews in public, establishing from the scriptures that the Messiah is Jesus.” Do you know any resource where the argument that Apollos made can be found? Thanks, Judy Eizer Dear Judy, First let’s look at the passage you quote from Acts the 18th Chapter (24-28):  Now a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man had been instructed in...

I’ve read with interest Francis (Frank) Beckwith’s book, Return to Rome, because like him, I was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, attending parochial schools through my primary grades and a preparatory school run by a Benedictine monastery throughout my high school years. And, like Dr. Beckwith, in my teens I turned away from the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity altogether but was converted in my early twenties and began attending a Protestant Evangelical church. And for the past thirty seven years I have been a committed Evangelical Protestant. I was also quite interested in reading Dr. Beckwith’s book because he...

Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Here are four things that modern scholars, including skeptical scholars, almost universally agree on. (This is a very brief summary of the original): 1. Jesus died and was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. 2. A group of women found the tomb empty on Easter morning. 3. Over 500 people really and truly believed that they saw Jesus alive. 4. The Christian faith exploded to all the known world in a very short period of time thereafter. The best explanation for these events is that Jesus really did rise from the...

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ (33 A.D.) is the most attested historical fact of the ancient world. In addition to the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is also widely attested by Greco-Roman and Jewish writers. Closely related, history also confirms that the tomb of Jesus Christ on that first Easter morning was indeed empty. Every vested party knew where Jesus was buried after he died. Yet on Easter, the tomb was found empty, and nobody has ever been recovered ...

Every once in a while, we hear a false charge. A charge that has significance during this Lenten season of 2013. It's an old lie that seems to keep resurfacing. The accusation is that supposedly there is no historical reliability to Jesus as a person. In other words, we supposedly can't know for sure that He even existed historically. That is so false. For example, Will Durant, the great historian who wrote the series, "The Story of Civilization," noted in the volume, "Caesar and Christ," that if the same criterion by which some philosophers claim Jesus didn't really exist as...

Most people seem to assume that the universe is chock full of intelligent life. But what if we ARE alone in the Universe? So far all SETI searches have shown no evidence of other civilizations out there. If you have devoted your life to searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, you are probably wasting your time. The more I study about the formation of the earth, the more convinced I am that the earth is pretty much a freak occurrence whose conditions for life or intelligent life exits nowhere else. So what are the theological implications of this?...

A Jewish class on why Jews do not accept Christianity. I post for Jews to self-educate and for Christians to understand the Jewish point of view--not that it matters (that they do.)

What to Say When Someone Says "The Bible Has Errors" By Jonathan Dodson Most people question the reliability of the Bible. You’ve probably been in a conversation with a friend or met someone in a coffeeshop who said: “How can you be a Christian when the Bible has so many errors?” How should we respond? What do you say? Instead of asking them to name one, I suggest you name one or two of the errors. Does your Bible contain errors? Yes. The Bible that most people possess is a translation of the Greek and Hebrew copies of copies...