Why does God Allow
Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
Should God’s existence be
proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should the Bible and God Be Proven
Fideism vs WCG.htm
Does the Bible teach blind faith? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Gospel of John Theory of Knowledge.htm
How Do We Know That the Right Books Are in the Bible
and that the Bible Is Historically Reliable?
Is
the Bible from God or just from men?
Many skeptics have long questioned the historical reliability of the
Bible. They also have questioned which
books are included in it. Let’s briefly
survey why the Bible is historically reliable, including why conservative
Christians regard the Bible as infallible, why the right books were chosen to
be in the Bible, and why it’s logical to believe that the Bible doesn’t have
historical errors in it.
Is
the whole Bible, in the original manuscripts, the inerrant, infallible word of
God? What does the Bible itself
say? When debating His fellow Jews
about His identity, He cited one text, and justified the conclusion He drew by
noting, “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). If the text (Psalm 82:6) Jesus cited might
have been wrong (say) 1% of the time a priori, His generalization would
have been wrong. Likewise, Paul told
Timothy: “All Scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness” (II Timothy 3:16). Although the church historian Samuele
Bacchiocchi argues that no Biblical writer affirms all of Scripture is
inerrant, this reasoning is like asking a fish in the ocean to be conscious
about its water supply: It’s so utterly
taken for granted, so axiomatic, it need not ever be explained. By definition, by the nature of His
character and attributes, an almighty, all-knowing God who cannot lie (Hebrews
6:18) doesn’t inspire errors. Nor would
He allow shoddy research or sloppy writing by His prophets to garble His
revelation to mankind.
The
Christians who believe the Bible is partially wrong think illogically
theologically. After all, the cause
(i.e., a perfect God) wouldn’t produce a defective product (i.e., written
revelation) as a direct effect. As
Gleason Archer comments: “The sovereign
Lord who could use the wooden staff of Moses to bring down the ten plagues upon
Egypt and part the waters of the Red Sea can surely use a fallible human
prophet to communicate His will and His truth without blundering or confusion
of any kind” (“Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties,” p. 28). Now Dr. Bacchiocchi, a church historian,
objects to such reasoning: “The nature
of the Bible must be defined inductively [Says who?—EVS]—that is, by
considering all the data provided by the Bible itself—rather than
deductively—that is, by drawing conclusions from subjective premises” (p.
45). Is it a “subjective premise” that
if God is almighty, all knowing, and all-loving, the revelation this God gives
humanity can be transmitted through otherwise fallible human instruments
perfectly? It’s sound deductive
theology for Archer to conclude: “The
inerrancy of God’s written Word as it was originally inspired is a necessary
corollary to the inerrancy of God Himself” (“Encyclopedia,” p. 28).
Dr.
Bacchiocchi, who thinks the Bible is partially incorrect, sets up and knocks
down a straw man when arguing: “This
absolute view of inspiration . . . results in a ‘dictation’ view of inspiration
that minimizes the human factor. . . . We believe that Bible writers were God’s
penmen, not the pen of the Holy Spirit” (pp. 43, 45). But inspired authors having different writing styles is perfectly
compatible with inerrancy since factual accuracy in matters of doctrine,
morality, history, and science can be preserved through varying vocabulary and
syntax choices in a written document.
Using one of Dr. Bacchiocchi’s own (bogus) examples of a “contradiction”
in parallel Old Testament passages (II Sam. 24:25; I Chron. 21:25), the style
of either (or both!) Biblical writers wouldn’t have been cramped had the Holy
Spirit whispered “the correct figure in the ears of the two writers” (p. 44).
Is
the Bible historically reliable? By the
two parts of the bibliographical test for judging whether a document is
historically reliable, the New Testament is the best attested ancient
historical writing. Some 24,633 known
copies (including fragments, lectionaries, etc.) exist, of which 5309 are in
Greek. The Hebrew Old Testament has
over 1700 copies (A more recent
estimate is 6,000 copies, including fragments). By contrast, the document with the next highest number of copies
is Homer's Iliad, with 643.
Other writings by prominent ancient historians have far fewer
copies: Thucydides, History of the
Peloponnesian War, 8; Herodotus, The Histories, 8; Julius Caesar, Gallic
Wars, 10; Livy, History from the Founding of the City, 20;
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 8.
Tacitus was perhaps the best Roman historian. His Annals has at the most 20 surviving manuscript copies,
and only 1 (!) copy endured of his minor works.
The
large number of manuscripts is a reason for belief in the New Testament,
not disbelief. Now, a skeptic could
cite the 1908-12 Catholic Encyclopedia, which says "the greatest
difficulty confronting the editor of the New Testament is the endless variety
of the documents at his disposal."
Are these differences good reason for disbelief? After all, scholars (ideally) would have to
sift through all of its ancient manuscripts to figure out what words were
originally inspired to be there. In
order to decide what to put into a printed version of the New Testament, they
have to reconstruct a single text out of hundreds of manuscript witnesses. Actually, the higher manuscript evidence
mounts, the easier it becomes to catch any errors that occurred by
comparing them with one another. As
F.F. Bruce observes:
By
the two parts of the bibliographical test, the New Testament is the best
attested ancient historical writing.
Some 24,633 known copies (including fragments, lectionaries, etc.)
exist, of which 5309 are in Greek. The
Hebrew Old Testament has over 1700 copies
(A more recent estimate is 6,000 copies, including fragments). By contrast, the document with the next
highest number of copies is Homer's Iliad, with 643. Other writings by prominent ancient
historians have far fewer copies:
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 8; Herodotus, The
Histories, 8; Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, 10; Livy, History from
the Founding of the City, 20; Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars,
8. Tacitus was perhaps the best Roman
historian. His Annals has at the
most 20 surviving manuscript copies, and only 1 (!) copy endured of his minor
works.
The
large number of manuscripts is a reason for belief in the New Testament,
not disbelief. Now, a skeptic could
cite the 1908-12 Catholic Encyclopedia, which says "the greatest
difficulty confronting the editor of the New Testament is the endless variety
of the documents at his disposal."
Are these differences good reason for disbelief? After all, scholars (ideally) would have to
sift through all of its ancient manuscripts to figure out what words were
originally inspired to be there. In
order to decide what to put into a printed version of the New Testament, they
have to reconstruct a single text out of hundreds of manuscript witnesses. Actually, the higher manuscript evidence
mounts, the easier it becomes to catch any errors that occurred by
comparing them with one another. As
F.F. Bruce observes: “Fortunately, if
the great number of mss [manuscripts] increases the number of scribal
errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so
that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original
wording is not so large as might be feared.
The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics
of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of
Christian faith and practice.”
Having
over 5300 Greek manuscripts to work with, detecting scribal errors in the New
Testament is more certain when comparing between its manuscripts than for the
Caesar's Gallic Wars with its mere 10 copies, long a standard work of
Latin teachers to use with beginning students.
The science and art of textual criticism has an embarrassment‑‑of
riches‑‑for the New Testament.
Is
there any evidence for the New Testament being written in the first
century? After all, liberal scholars,
atheists, and agnostics normally have said the New Testament was written long
after the time Jesus and his disciples (students) lived. And if the New Testament was written around
(say) the year A.D. 150, how could you trust what was in it? Since Jesus died in the year A.D. 31, a gap
of a hundred or more years would mean that all the eyewitnesses would have died
by then. You would be left with
believing in stories passed down over three or more generations. This creates major obstacles to believing in
it, as the game "whispering lane" implies. If you played this game in elementary school, you might remember
how the first kid would be told a message by the teacher. Then the rest of the class would pass the
message along from one kid to another.
The final kid to hear it rarely, if ever, correctly got the full,
original message. Does a similar
problem confront believers in the New Testament when judging whether it is an
accurate record for the life and ministry of Jesus and his disciples?
Recently
among scholars a move away from a second-century composition date for
the New Testament has developed. For
example, Biblical archeologist William Foxwell Albright remarks: "In my opinion, every book of the New
Testament was written by a baptized Jew [Luke presumably would be an exception‑‑EVS]
between the forties and eighties of the first century A.D. (very probably
sometime between about A.D. 50 and 75)."
Elsewhere he states:
"Thanks to the Qumran discoveries [meaning, the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which first were uncovered in 1947 in the West Bank of Jordan], the New
Testament proves to be in fact what it was formerly believed to be: the teaching of Christ and his immediate
followers between cir. 25 and cir. 80 A.D." Scholar John A.T. Robertson (in Redating the New Testament)
maintains that every New Testament book was written before 70 A.D.,
including even the Gospel of John and Revelation. He argues that no New Testament book mentions the actual
destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by Rome, it must have been all
written before that date. If the New
Testament is a product of the first century, composed within one or two generations
of Jesus' crucifixion, worries about the possible inaccuracies of oral
transmission (people telling each other stories about Jesus between
generations) are unjustified. As
scholar Simon Kistemaker writes:
“Normally,
the accumulation of folklore among people of primitive culture takes many
generations: it is a gradual process
spread over centuries of time. But in
conformity with the thinking of the form critic [a school of higher criticism
that studies how oral transmission shaped the present organization of the New
Testament], we must conclude that the Gospel stories were produced and
collected within little more than one generation.”
In cultures where the written word and
literacy are scarce commodities, where very few people able to read or afford
to own any books, they develop much better memories about what they are
told, unlike people in America and other Western countries today. For example, Alex Haley (the author of Roots)
was able to travel to Africa, and hear a man in his ancestors' African tribe,
whose job was to memorize his people's past, mention his ancestor Kunta Kinte's
disappearance. In the Jewish culture in
which Jesus and His disciples moved, the students of a rabbi had to memorize
his words. Hence, Mishna, Aboth, ii,
8 reads: "A good pupil was
like a plastered cistern that loses not a drop." The present-day Uppsala school of Harald Riesenfeld and Birger
Gerhardsson analyzes Jesus' relationship with His disciples in the context of
Jewish rabbinical practices of c. 200 A.D. Jesus, in the role of the authoritative teacher or rabbi, trained
his disciples to believe in and remember His teachings. Because their culture was so strongly
oriented towards oral transmission of knowledge, they could memorize amazing
amounts of material by today's standards.
This culture's values emphasized the need of disciples to remember their
teacher's teachings and deeds accurately, then to pass on this (now) tradition
faithfully and as unaltered as possible to new disciples they make in the future. Paul's language in I Cor. 15:3-8 reflects
this ethos, especially in verse 3:
"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I
also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures
. . ."
Correspondingly, the apostles were seen
as having authority due to being eyewitness guardians of the tradition since
they knew their Teacher well (cf. the criterion for choosing an apostle listed
in Acts 1:21-22; cf. I Cor. 9:1).
Furthermore, the words of Jesus were recorded within a few decades of
His death while eyewitnesses, both friendly and hostile, still lived. These could easily publicly challenge any
inaccuracies in circulation. As scholar
Laurence McGinley writes: "The
fact that the whole process took less than thirty years, and that its essential
part was accomplished in a decade and a half, finds no parallel in any [oral]
tradition to which the Synoptic Gospels [Mark, Luke, and Matthew] have been
compared."
Scholars
have in recent decades increasingly discredited dates that make the New
Testament a second-century document. As
Albright comments: "We can already
say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of
the New Testament after about A.D. 80, two full generations before the date[s]
between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of
today." This development makes the time gap between the oldest surviving
copies and the first manuscript much smaller for the New Testament than the
pagan historical works cited earlier.
The gap between its original copy (autograph) and the oldest
still-preserved manuscript is 90 years or less, since most of the New Testament
was first written before 70 A.D. and first-century fragments of it have been
found. One fragment of John, dated to
125 A.D., was in the past cited as the earliest copy known of any part of the
New Testament. But in 1972, nine
possible fragments of the New Testament were found in a cave by the Dead Sea. Among these pieces, part of Mark was dated
to around 50 A.D., Luke 57 A.D., and Acts from 66 A.D. Although this continues to be a source of
dispute, there's no question the Dead Sea Scrolls document first century
Judaism had ideas like early Christianity's.
The earliest major manuscripts‑‑Vaticanus and Sinaiticus‑‑are
dated to 325-50 A.D. and 350 A.D. respectively. By contrast, the time gap is much larger for the pagan
works mentioned above. For Homer, the
gap is 500 years (900 b.c. for the original writing, 400 b.c. for the oldest
existing copy), Caesar, it's 900-1000 years (c. 100-44 b.c. to 900 A.D.),
Herodotus, 1300 years (c. 480-425 b.c. to 900 A.D.) and Thucydides, 1300 years
(c. 400 b.c. to 900 A.D.). Hence, the
New Testament can be objectively judged more reliable than these pagan
historical works both by having a much smaller time gap between its first
writing and the oldest preserved copies, and in the number of ancient
handwritten copies. While the earliest
manuscripts have a different text type from the bulk of later ones that have
been preserved, their witness still powerfully testified for the New
Testament's accurate preservation since these variations compose only a
relatively small part of its text.
For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea
Scroll discoveries have shrunk the gap for the Pentateuch (the first five books
of the Bible) at a stroke by a thousand years, though a gap of 1300 years or
more remains. These discoveries still
demonstrate faith in its accurate transmission is rational, since few mistakes
crept in between about 100 b.c. and c. 900 A.D. for the book of Isaiah. For example, as Geisler and Nix explain, for
the 166 words found in Isaiah 53, only 17 letters are in question when
comparing the Masoretic (standard Hebrew) text of 916 A.D. and the Dead Sea Scrolls'
main copy of Isaiah, copied about 125 b.c.
Ten of these letters concern different spellings, so they don't affect
meaning. Four more concern small
stylistic changes like conjunctions.
The last three letters add the word "light" to verse 11, which
doesn't affect the verse's meaning much.
The Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) also
has this word. Thus, only one word in a
chapter of 166 words can be questioned after a thousand years of transmission,
of generations of scribes copying the work of previous scribes. Gleason Archer said the Dead Sea Scrolls'
copies of Isaiah agree with the standard printed Masoretic Hebrew text "in
more than 95 percent of the text. The 5
percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and
variations in spelling." Their
discovery further justifies William Green's conclusion written nearly 50 years
earlier: "It may safely be said
that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted." If it was so well preserved for this period
of time (c. 100 b.c. to 900 A.D.) that previously wasn't checkable, it's hardly
foolhardy to have faith that it was for an earlier period that still can't be
checked.
What
books should be in the New Testament?
This subject raises the issue of the canon, which concerns which books
should and shouldn't be in it. After
all, up to 200 various "Gospels" floated around in the ancient Roman
Empire. These apocryphal (so-called
"missing") books boasted such titles as "The Shepherd of
Hermas," "The Gospel of Peter," "The Gospel of Thomas,"
“The Gospel of Barnabas,” etc. For
example, it appears that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, evidently got many of
his stories second and third hand orally, but ultimately often from apocryphal
sources such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Barnabas, not from the
Bible itself. It results in some clear
historical errors in the Koran of Islam.
Now, why should Christians believe only four Gospels were inspired by
God? Since apocryphal books' quality is
much lower and/or their teachings so greatly vary from the canonical books,
they can be easily dismissed from serious consideration. The Christian community followed implicitly
(at least) the procedure of Deuteronomy 13:1-5. This Old Testament text says that later revelations‑‑here
specifically ones about following false gods‑‑which contradict
previous ones are automatically invalid, even when the false prophet made some
accurate predictions. Some of the
apocryphal gospels supported the Gnostic cause. Claiming the Old Testament's God was evil and totally different
from the New Testment's God, the Gnostics also denied Jesus had a body of flesh
and blood before His crucifixion. Since
their teachings totally contradict the Gospels and Letters (epistles) of the
New Testament, not to mention the Old Testament, their writings could
automatically be stamped heretical and rejected as fraudulent. As F.F. Bruce explains: “The gnostic schools lost because they
deserved to lose. A comparison of the
New Testament writings with the contents of The Nag Hammadi Library [a
collection of ancient Gnostic books discovered in 1945 in Egypt] should be
instructive, once the novelty of the latter is not allowed to weigh in its
favour against the familiarity of the former.”
Similarly,
James comments: "There is no
question of any one's having excluded them from the New Testament: They have done that for
themselves." Scholar Milligan
remarks: "We have only to compare
our New Testament books as a whole with other literature of the kind to realise
how wide is the gulf which separates them from it. The uncanonical gospels, it is often said, are in reality the
best evidence for the canonical."
And Aland maintains: "It
cannot be said of a single writing preserved to us from the early period of the
church outside the New Testament that it could properly be added today to the
Canon." For these reasons it's
absurd to claim that the Gospel of Peter's account of Jesus being resurrected
on the Last Day of Unleavened Bread (which is a historical inaccuracy) proves
the other four Gospels are wrong.
Instead, the Gospel of Peter is simply false: It is just one document written later than the earlier
four canonical Gospels. It also
contains the false Gnostic/docetic teaching that Jesus did not come in the
flesh. Even judging by secular
criteria, the four Gospels are far more likely to be historically
reliable. Furthermore, archeological
discoveries have repeatedly sustained Luke's reliability as a historian. Their collective witness against this
historical mistake found in "The Gospel of Peter" should be seen as
decisive.
In
evident reaction against the heretic (and Gnostic) Marcion's (c. 140 A.D.)
attempt to edit the canon, lists of the canonical books were made from the late
second century onwards. These lists,
even from the beginning, contain most of the books found in the New Testament
today. The author of the Muratorian
fragment (c. 170 A.D.), Irenaeus (c. 180 A.D.), Clement (c. 190 A.D.),
Tertullian (c. 200 A.D.), Origen (c. 230 A.D.), Eusebius (c. 310 A.D.), and
Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 348 A.D.) all compiled lists of canonical books. Furthermore, a fundamentally false skeptical
assumption must be avoided: The Gospels
are not canonical because the church decreed them to be authoritative, but
because they are inspired, the church accepted them as having authority. A leading criterion for the church to accept
a book as scripture was whether the church believed an apostle (Paul, John,
Matthew, James) or someone associated with an apostle (traditionally, Mark was
seen as associated with Peter, and Luke with Paul) wrote it. Nothing written after c. 100 A.D. made it
into the canon. Only the books written
within a generation or two of Jesus' death were deemed proper to include in the
canon. What mattered was apostolic
authority, not just authorship. Thus,
N.B. Stonehouse says: "In the
Epistles [Letters, such as by Paul] there is consistent recognition that in the
church there is only one absolute authority, the authority of the Lord
himself. Wherever the apostles speak
with authority, they do so as exercising the Lord's authority." High levels of skepticism about the New
Testament's canon simply aren't justified.
Did
the Roman Catholic Church chose the canon?
It claims this, but this wasn't true.
First of all, it is quite problematic to label "Roman
Catholic" the persecuted Sunday-keeping church that survived before the
time the Roman Emperor Constantine granted toleration through the Edict of
Milan (A.D. 313). The increasing union
of church and state in the fourth century and afterwards inevitably caused Rome
to corrupt doctrinally and spiritually the church. Second, the Roman Catholic Church's leadership (which is
the crucial issue) did not choose the canon, and then impose it from the top
down. Instead, the Greek-speaking
eastern churches showed their independence of the Bishop of Rome. Many of them, at least in Asia Minor (now
Turkey), held onto seventh-day Sabbatarianism (Saturday observance) and a
Passover (not Easter) communion for many years after 100 A.D., showing they
were corrupted at a later date.
Furthermore, this claim ignores how God can move men who are not true
believers to make the right decisions.
Would God be so careless to let those with false doctrines ultimately
pervert His holy word? Similarly, the
Old Testament was preserved and had the right books placed in it despite Israel
often fell into idolatry and later rejected the Messiah as a nation. For secular historians of ancient history to
even be able to do their jobs, they have to assume the texts they analyze have
a certain amount of reliability themselves, so both Christians and unbelievers
share this kind of faith some. Finally,
the Sunday-observing Church before the time of Emperor Constantine and the
Edict of Milan was hardly a tightly controlled, highly organized, monolithic
group. It had suffered terrible
persecution during the rule of Diocletian (284-305 A.D.) and earlier
emperors.
Consider
this statement by Jerome (c. 374-419 A.D.) who translated the Latin Vulgate
Bible (at least for the Gospels and Old Testament). Even in the year 414 A.D., as he wrote to Dardanus, the prefect
of Gaul (modern France), it shows the lack of top-down uniformity in the
Catholic Church on the canon, long after the pro-Trinitarian Council of Nicea
(325 A.D.):
This
must be said to our people, that the epistle which is entitled 'To the Hebrews'
is accepted as the apostle Paul's not only by the churches of the east but by
all church writers in the Greek language of earlier times [note that he doesn't
consider papal authority or synods of bishops as determining the canon's
contents!‑‑EVS], although many judge it to be by Barnabas. It is of no great moment who the author is,
since it is the work of a churchman and received recognition day by day in the
churches' public reading [again, this clearly denies a top-down approach‑‑EVS]. If the custom of the Latins does not receive
it among the canonical scriptures, neither, by the same liberty, do the
churches of the Greeks accept John's Apocalypse [the Book of Revelation]. Yet we accept them both, not following the
custom of the present time [which denies as binding the authority of recent
council decisions, such as that of Hippo Regius in 393 and Carthage in 397, or
the papal decree of 405--EVS] but the precedent of early writers [notice!], who
generally make free use of testimonies from both works.
This
statement shows the canon came from the traditional practices of laymembers,
elders, and writers--from the bottom up.
As scholar Kurt Aland remarks:
"It goes without saying that the Church, understood as the entire
body of believers, created the canon . . . it was not the reverse; it
was not imposed from the top, be it by bishops or synods."
Persecution
was a major factor in forming the canon, especially the campaign lasting 10
years (cf. Rev. 2:10) unleashed by the Roman emperor Diocletian starting in 303
A.D. During those years the Roman
government for the first time specifically targeted for destruction all copies
of the New Testament. Believers in the
scattered congregations throughout the empire had to know which religious
documents they had they could hand over and which ones they should resist
surrendering, even if that cost them their lives. As Bruce notes, handing over "a copy of the Shepherd
of Hermas or a manual of church order" might be permissible if that would
satisfy the Roman police for a time, but sacred Scripture never would be O.K.
to give up voluntarily. "But for
Christians who were ordered to hand over books it must have become important to
know which books must on no account be surrendered and those which might
reasonably be regarded as 'not worth dying for.'" Decentralized
decision-making for each congregation, or a group of congregations under one
bishop, was the order of the day after local Roman officials launched their
attacks. They show papal decrees or
synods of bishops did not create the canon when they proclaimed its
contents in the mid to late fourth century and early fifth centuries. Instead, the bishops or the Pope merely ratified
pre-existing practice over the centuries and decades by multitudes of
laymembers, elders, and church writers scattered within the confines of a vast
empire.
Therefore,
among most serious conservative Christians, there are few disputes about the
canon of Scripture except for the old debate about certain books of the Old
Testament (“the apocrypha”) that the Catholic Church includes but which
Protestants and Jews exclude. There
aren’t that many disputes about who wrote which book of the Bible, especially
in the New Testament, among conservative Christians. True, the Letter to the Hebrews isn’t clearly a letter written by
Paul, so its authorship has been commonly argued about. But many ancient traditional Christian
writings bear witness to who wrote which New Testament book
It’s
clearly reasonable to have faith in the Bible.
For more evidence on this subject, it’s recommended to read some basic
books by C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, Henry Morris, and others who
defend belief in God and/or the Bible from a rational viewpoint.
Eric
Snow
Click here to access
essays that defend Christianity: /apologetics.html
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Why does God Allow Evil?
Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
May Christians work on
Saturdays? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Protestant
Rhetoric vs Sabbath Refuted.htm
Should Christians obey
the Old Testament law? /doctrinalhtml/Does
the New Covenant Abolish the OT Law.htm
Do you have an immortal
soul? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Here
and Hereafter.htm
Does the ministry have
authority? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Is
There an Ordained Ministry vs Edwards.html
Is the United States the
Beast? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Are
We the Beast vs Collins.htm
Should you give 10% of
your income to your church? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Does
the Argument from Silence Abolish the Old Testament Law of Tithing 0205 Mokarow
rebuttal.htm
Is Jesus God? Click
here: /doctrinalhtml/Is
Jesus God.htm
Will there be a third
resurrection? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Will
There Be a Third Resurrection.htm
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