TORTURE -- INFANTICIDE -- BRUTALITY -- MURDER The World Would Never Be the Same "The execution of Jesus was a crime born of the streets, the barracks, the enclaves of the privileged, and the smoke-filled back rooms of religious and political power brokers. Its meaning lives in these places still." It is the most fiercely debated murder of all time. Its symbol is worn by billions of people worldwide. Its spiritual meaning is invoked daily in time-honored rituals. In Killing Jesus, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Mansfield masterfully recounts the corrupt trial and grisly execution of Jesus more than two thousand years ago. Approaching the story at its most human level, Mansfield uses both secular sources and biblical accounts to bring fresh perspective to the human drama, political intrigue, and criminal network behind the killing of the world's most famous man
Nothing is more important than what a person believes about Jesus Christ. To understand Christ correctly is to understand the very heart of God, Scripture, and the gospel. To get to the core of this belief, this latest volume in the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series lays out a systematic summary of Christology from philosophical, biblical, and historical perspectives—concluding that Jesus Christ is God the Son incarnate, both fully divine and fully human. Readers will learn to better know, love, trust, and obey Christ—unashamed to proclaim him as the only Lord and Savior. Part of the Foundations of Evangelical Theology series.
When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultraconservative views of the Bible. Since the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament they are reading an exact copy of Jesus's words or Saint Paul's writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time, Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament as closely as possible. Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes -- alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.
The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.
Examine for yourself the historical context of your Christian faith as seen through first-century eyes, so you can clearly say with Paul, "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Galatians 6:14).
Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.
This addition to the field of New Testament Greek study aids is the most useful analytical lexicon available. The Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament contains an alphabetical arrangement of every Greek form found in the major printed editions of the Greek New Testament: UBS, Nestle-Aland, and the Majority Text. Consequently, ANLEX is not a lexicon of a single edition of the New Testament; rather it is a lexicon of the New Testament's language in all its manuscript forms. A distinguishing feature of this and companion volumes is the use of grammatical tags. The analysis is "tagged" throughout with abbreviations that provide pertinent grammatical information. ANLEX's analysis is superior to traditional parsing because of the authors' expertise in modern linguistics. In addition, ANLEX provides new and original definitions in modern, descriptive English for each root word.
Few treatments of the death of Jesus Christ have made a point of accounting for the gruesome, degrading, public manner of his death by crucifixion, a mode of execution so loathsome that the ancient Romans never spoke of it in polite society. Rutledge probes all the various themes and motifs used by the New Testament evangelists and apostolic writers to explain the meaning of the cross of Christ. She shows how each of the biblical themes contributes to the whole, with the Christus Victor motif and the concept of substitution sharing pride of place along with Irenaeus's recapitulation model.
Suggests that Jesus survived the crucifixion, went to Egypt, then settled in France • Reveals new discoveries that show the beginnings of Christianity in Egypt • Presents historical and archaeological research that proves a connection between Jerusalem, Egypt, and Rennes-le-Château in the south of France • Posits Rennes-le-Château as the actual location of Jesus Christ’s tomb, and that writings by him will be found there Jesus did not die on the cross. He survived and went to southern France with his wife, Mary. This possibility is proposed by Graham Simmans, who spent many years on a quest to find the real beginnings of Christianity. Simmans believes that the spread of Christianity beyond Jerusalem was tied to Jesus’s survival of the crucifixion and his subsequent emigration to Europe. Using Coptic and Jewish sources, including the Talmud, that allow a glimpse of the Christian philosophy espoused by Jesus, he contends that true Christianity was brought into France, Britain, and Spain from first century Egypt and Judea, not fourth- and fifth-century Rome. His investigation shows that after a time in Egypt, Jesus settled in Rennes-le-Château, a sophisticated and cosmopolitan center of spiritual diversity. It was a natural move for Jesus to settle in the Narbonne area of France--an area already heavily settled by Jewish and Gnostic groups. Here, safely outside the reach of the cultural dictatorship of the Roman Church, the Gnostic secrets he taught survived the centuries. Later, the Knights Templar centered their activity in the Languedoc region around Rennes-le-Château, where, within the Jewish communities, a well-connected and influential opposition to Rome already existed. This resistance to Rome gave rise to a religious culture that included elements of Gnostic, Pythagorean, and Kabbalistic teachings. Until the Crusades against the Cathar heretics reasserted the dominion of Rome, the culture that flourished around Rennes-le-Château embodied the true essence of Christ’s message.
