Recommend-a-blog (35)

I haven’t done one of these recommendation posts in a couple of years for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is the incredible site churn that has occurred on the Web since late 2013 when Bernie, IC and I began blogging here. Linking to other people’s worthwhile work is a moving target, quite impossible to maintain. If you still believe the bromide “The internet is forever”, well … stop. It just ain’t so, unless what you have posted is terminally embarrassing. In that case, you can guarantee it will not be going anywhere soon. Somebody’s got a backup to the backup to the backup on a server somewhere, and your great, great grandchildren will probably read it and weep. Or laugh uproariously.

The good stuff? That disappears faster than a Hollywood marriage. Grrr.

Division and the Preservation of the Bible

People often complain that Christians are divided. Denominationally, intellectually, interpretationally, geographically and/or racially divided. Some even take this as evidence the claims of Christ are untrue.

I take a little different tack on that subject. In 2014, I wrote about the reasons Christians are divided. In 2015, I even wrote about the good that occasionally results from these divisions.

If I keep coming back to the subject, it’s not because I want to repeat myself but because so many people see it as a major problem.

Division and the Preservation of the Bible

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Help! They Changed My Bible!

Bible translations have a way of changing over time, and it can make some Christians quite frantic.

Textual criticism is a discipline about which many believers know very little. The average regular churchgoer can probably tell you that the Bible was written primarily in Greek and Hebrew, not English (and the average reasonably intelligent person might simply assume it), but beyond that basic piece of information, how our Bibles came to us is not all that widely understood.

Given the quality of history courses in the average high school since 1970, fewer still know that when we speak of “the originals”, they are not sitting in some airless, climate-controlled museum display case. Would they be shocked to discover such manuscripts no longer exist and have not existed for centuries? Probably not, with a few seconds consideration.

But no, they don’t exist so far as we know. Some people are fine with that idea.