Jesus told His disciples that they would be His “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). And this wasn’t just a matter of geography. Pentecost, in Jerusalem alone, required a host of languages. And that was just the start, for linguistic missionaries have now …
It’s interesting to follow the Twitter traffic during episodes of The Bible on the History Channel. Though reaction to the series has been pretty positive, there are detractors. One tweeted a summary “Yawn” to the second installment, adding, “David seems like more of a smart aleck than a man after God’s own heart.” Another ventured …
Like the fellow who thought he’d be crossing visible longitude lines on his ocean voyage to Europe, some may think that the chapter and verse divisions were on the sheet when apostles such as John (or psalmists such as David) wrote down Scripture. But no, they wrote letters and poetry and Gospels and other history …
When we think of biblical locations associated with gospel outreach to the Gentiles, we may well think first to Jerusalem, where Peter’s preaching at Pentecost was heard by people of many nations in their own languages (Acts 2), and where the Jerusalem Council determined that non-Jewish converts would not need to be circumcised to be …
Most people know that “Jesus” means “Yah Saves” and that “Peter” means “Rock,” but what about those name clusters we find at the end of the epistles? What do their names signify? For instance, Paul greeted 27 different people in the last chapter of Romans. Let’s sample a dozen or so to show how we …
It’s fun to study surnames, or last names, as distinguished from Christian names, or first names. Back in history, when things got crowded, they had to add second names to sort out all the people named John or James or Mary or Ruth. So they turned to four contextual features—location (as in Lois Hill); parentage …