The Christadelphian Ejournal is an online magazine published quarterly and intended to be a forum for articles written in an analytical style. It is a vehicle for exegetical and expositional articles, it engages in academic biblical studies that originate in other Christian confessions, it defends the Biblical principles summarised in the common Christadelphian statement of faith and subject published articles to peer review and amendment.
Denis Alexander discusses this text in the context of Galileo’s dispute with the Catholic Church over whether the sun went round the earth.[1] According to Alexander, Galileo’s view was that if this text asserts the fixed position of …
The third reviewee, in our series on Tarshish, Prof. Timothy Champion, is the Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. Champion writes about Tarshish only once in his paper, “The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology”, …
Acts 13.6-12 follows Acts’ second protagonist, Paul outside of the relative familiarity of Jerusalem and Samaria and into Gentile Salamis. As with the two previous pericopes (see our column in the Jan and April issues), the first part of the …
In the first article of this series (Jan 2015), we considered ad hominem arguments (against the person); in the second article (Apr 2015), we looked at confirmation bias which can be used as an ad hominem argument. Our goal was …
“Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other[s] judge.” (1 Corinthians 14:29)
The purpose of this study is to consider how the members of the church should judge those things that are said.
Peter gives …
This article is an examination of Genesis 1-5 in relation to the Neolithic Revolution. Our question is whether the details of the account of Adam and Eve are consistent with what we know of the Neolithic Revolution in the …
The book of Ecclesiastes takes its name from the Greek Septuagint (LXX) word Ekklesia or assembly which became Ecclesiastes in the Latin Vulgate and in English. Ekklesia is related to the Hebrew verb qahal, ―to assemble. It is both …
A lack of knowledge is not necessarily ignorance and we all lack knowledge and sometimes we show ignorance. This is true in all walks of life and no different for claims to bible knowledge. We probably more readily see it …
From the title Christadelphians might get the mistaken idea that Bart Ehrman’s new book, How Jesus Became God, would be sympathetic to the biblical unitarian position, exposing the doctrine of the deity of Christ as a later deviation from the …
How should we appraise the morality of the Law of Moses? This is a question of method. We might bring to bear moral philosophy or the cultural norms of our own society or social group. We might evaluate the …
One of the most startling scriptures to our ears in this day and age is the law we find in Deuteronomy 25:11-2
“When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver …
In the age of information overload, instant gratification and distraction, the art of reading comprehension is rapidly disappearing. Nothing engages the modern reader for more than five minutes anyway and (particularly with the Internet) authors resort to shock value and …
The OT scholar, J. H. Walton comments,
God called the light [ ’ôr] ‘day’ [yôm] , and the darkness he called ‘night.’ If God called the light yôm, why does the text continue throughout the OT to call the light …
In this column, we will continue our review of works on the identity of Tarshish and we will review Sir Christopher Hawkins [1758 – 1829]’s Observations On the Tin Trade of the Ancients in Cornwall, and On the ‘ictis’ of …
The narrative of the encounter with Simon the Magus is set in Samaria. The first part sets up the story for the subsequent action, as well as introducing some of the key themes that will reoccur in the rest of …
Wikipedia defines ‘confirmation bias’ as a tendency to favour that which confirms your existing belief. (“Confirmation bias, also called myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses” …
Robert Alter has called the book of Proverbs an “anthology of anthologies” (or a collection of collections)[1], indeed, a brief glance at Proverbs demonstrates that the book is subdivided into sections with even conservative scholars recognizing multiple …
It is a commonly repeated claim that belief in the virgin birth was not part of the original Christian preaching and was a later invention. The claim is based upon the idea that the virgin birth is absent from …
“Of making many books there is no end …” the Preacher says, as he brings to close his book (Ecc 12:12). Having completed the full draft of Who Through Jesus Sleep (soon to published book about the mortality of …
In an earlier paper,[1] we argued that the Cyrus oracles are partly an ironic criticism of Hezekiah. In this paper, we oppose that argument and present another line of interpretation.
In his paper, “Cyrus the Great”, in …
In an earlier paper,[1] it was suggested that “Cyrus” was a re-vocalisation of the Hebrew for “craftsman” or “workman” (), as an allusion to the craftsman (Bezaleel, Exod 31:2), who was endowed with the spirit of wisdom …
An isolationist approach to the acquisition and development of biblical knowledge in the community is not possible now that the Internet Age is upon us. That is, you can certainly bury your head in the sand, if you want to, …
The columns this year (2015) are developed from research I undertook, over an 18 month period. They will be four reviews of books that in part deal with the topic of the identification of Tharshish.[1]
My approach in …
This column continues our discussion from October 2014 of Luke’s language of judgement.
Like many Lukan narratives, the first part of the pericope introduces some key themes of what’s to follow.
With great power the apostles gave their testimony to …
This passage is often referred to as the Pericope de Adultera and has caused controversy amongst textual critics because it is omitted from some of the earliest manuscripts. Some argue that it was a later addition (not by John) and …
A lot of religious doubt is about scale. The sceptic will ask: How can God hear everyone who is praying at the same time? How can God be everywhere? How can a single person be all-powerful? How can someone live …
This article[1] is concerned with the genealogy of Genesis 5. The sceptic baulks at the high ages and the total number of years that s/he calculates for the creation of Adam and Eve. Both young earth and …
This issue of the EJournal sees the start of a series of short articles on logical topics. Logic is roughly defined as the study of reasoning. We will not be concerned with formal logics such as the propositional calculus or …
Today if someone says that Person X is the son of Person Y, they would usually mean that Person Y is blood parent to Person X. There are some other less common uses of the phrase “son of” that …