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Jan 4, 2011 · Biblical Illiteracy. January 04, 2011. by Pastor Chuck Swindoll. During my days serving as a pastor in New England, I heard of a teacher named Thayer S. Warshaw who quizzed a group of college-bound high school juniors and seniors on the Bible. The quiz preceded a Bible as Literature course he planned to teach at the Newton (Massachusetts) High ...
Mar 24, 2024 · The legend of Peter and Mark might be apocryphal, but it captures a very real ancient dynamic: people who were illiterate, people who had visual impairments, people who suffered from arthritis or...
- Candida Moss
- Oral Tradition
- Original Manuscripts: Hebrew Bible
- Original Manuscripts: Greek New Testament
- The Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter
- Translation History
It is often assumed by scholars that oral traditionamong early Israelite communities is where the contents of the Bible originated. This, of course, cannot be proved with documented manuscripts, so it is difficult to point to a specific date or year when the stories found in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the “Old Testament,” began to exist...
There has been debate about when the Hebrew Bible began to be written down, but the oldest possible manuscripts of a biblical text archaeologists have found are the Ketef Hinnom Scrolls, which were written in the seventh century BCE. They read in Hebrew, “May Yahweh bless you and keep you; May Yahweh cause his face to Shine upon you and grant you P...
The New Testament texts are easier to trace since these letters and narratives were better preserved by early Christians. Although there are debates on the exact dating of each New Testament book, it is agreed that all the books found in the canonized New Testament were written between 48 and 125 CE. The first unified collection of New Testament bo...
It was not until the late fourth century that the collection of books in the New Testament were first recognized as “canonical” alongside the Hebrew Bible. In 367 CE, the church father Athanasius wrote his Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter, in which he acknowledged what is called the “closed canon” of the Bible. Although disputed by others, his letter ult...
The Latin Vulgatewas translated by St. Jerome in 382 CE. This was the first complete Latin version of the entire Old and New Testaments plus the Apocrypha, translated for use in the Latin-speaking church at the time. Although there were other Latin versions of the Bible before this, the Vulgate standardized them. Additionally, different versions of...
May 8, 2014 · Undoubtedly, at least one reason is a decline in knowing God, significantly influenced by biblical illiteracy. If a person is to be known by what he or she determines to reveal about him or herself, then the correlation between biblical illiteracy and a diminished knowledge of God is evident.
May 29, 2014 · New Testament scholar David Nienhuis summarizes his understanding of the situation in an article titled “The Problem of Evangelical Biblical Illiteracy: A View from the Classroom”: For well over twenty years now, Christian leaders have been lamenting the loss of general biblical literacy in America. ….
Nov 29, 2022 · This Palgrave Pivot examines the history of literacy with illiterate and semi-literate people in mind, and questions the clear division between literacy and illiteracy which has often been assumed by social and economic historians.
Mar 4, 2019 · Throughout the gospel narratives, Jesus skillfully cites Scripture no less than 78 times. His biblical literacy did not occur by osmosis. In his early years, he frequented the Jewish temple and “sat among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”. He “grew in wisdom” (Luke 2:46-47).
