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.
Speaking with someone and praying to someone are two different types of speech act. Actually speaking with Jesus, who is in heaven, puts communication on a different level. Where it is two-way audible communication, this does not happen in prayer.
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This passage offers a paradigm for a prayer of request. Psalms of petition are another source for prayer form(s). This prayer shows an awareness of how scripture can be used to ‘read’ a circumstance, and thereby facilitate the relevant construction …
Textual Criticism is a necessary, if sometimes maligned, activity. The substance of textual criticism is the comparison of manuscripts to determine which reading is most likely to be the original. John 1:18 is a case in point.
No one has …
This text rendered above as in the RSV correctly captures the Perfect aspect/tense of the Hebrew verb which places the “drinking” of the sword in the past. The KJV has “shall be bathed in heaven” which incorrectly directs the English …
In an earlier article, “Babylon in Isaiah 13-14”,[1] it was suggested that Isa 13:17 referred to Median harassment of Israelite places of settlement in Media after the captivity of 722 (2 Kgs 17:6). The purpose of this note …
In earlier articles, links were established between the Fourth Gospel (4G) and the epistles to the Ephesians and Hebrews. It was suggested that they were all addressed to different elements within the Ephesian community at different stages of its …
Previous articles on the Fourth Gospel (4G) suggested that the Gospel was written to the Diaspora at Ephesus and discovered links between the 4G and Luke-Acts.[1] Luke is regarded as Paul’s companion and biographer; therefore his employment …
The “darkening” of the sun, moon and stars is a convenient shorthand for describing Joel 2:10,
The earth has quaked before him; the heavens have trembled: the sun and the moon have been darkened, and the stars have gathered …
The KJV margin offers “teacher of righteousness” as an alternative for the Hebrew of Joel 2:23, but this proposal is rarely followed by commentators and a rare choice in other versions. Is this marginal alternative correct and does it …
Specialization in Biblical Studies is the norm. Scholars will be “Old Testament” or “New Testament”; perhaps “Intertestamental Judaism” or “Second Temple Judaism”, and possibly some topic in the area of “The Bible and the Modern World”. A quick glance …
The Biblical drama of Job has proven a long-standing enigma. A faithful disciple is seemingly tortured at the hands of his God, apparently so that the Deity might win a barter. It sounds like the most deplorable of Greek …
What might be wrong in Old Testament scholarship? The question is deliberately vague and all-encompassing. We might ask, similarly, what might be wrong in Church Doctrine? What would we answer in this case? Suggested answers might include: the doctrine of …
While Obadiah has no dateable information in its superscription, the consensus of scholars is that the work is just exilic, or on the cusp of the exile, and partly a reflection upon Edom’s involvement in the sack of Jerusalem …
The book of Obadiah carries no dateline (e.g. ‘in xth year of…’), nor does it bear the name of any king (cf. Hos 1:1; Amos 1:1; etc.). There is no biographical information about the prophet, save the name ‘Obadiah’, …
It has long been recognised by scholars that “the Way” is a term of reference for the early Christian community:
…and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the …
The epilogue of John appears to be an appendix, written by a disciple of John, in order to clarify the destiny of Peter and John, and lending supporting testimony to the veracity of the Gospel. This addition was probably necessitated …
Time and again in OT scholarship one comes across an appeal to a consensus view as a way of persuading the reader that an interpretation is correct. More often than not, such a consensus was laid down in older German …
A common theme in many Christadelphian writings, particularly in continuous-historic interpretations of Revelation, is a concept of the ‘faithful remnant’, i.e. the idea that throughout history there has been individuals and groups who have remained faithful to “the Truth”. …
In this article we counter the assumption operative in two recent English translations (NIV, NET) summed up in the footnote text “For ‘Hebrew’ we should read ‘Aramaic’”. There is a family of words to discuss and we first set …
In the previous article on the destination and purpose of the 4G, it was proposed that the Gospel was written to the Ephesian Diaspora community by John the son of Zebedee before the definitive split with Christianity. It was suggested …
Ashton describes the problem of John’s audience as follows,
There are, broadly speaking, three questions that may be asked concerning John’s audience or readership: was it (a) universal or particular; (b) Jewish or Gentile (or possibly Samaritan -somewhere in between …
This is an introductory study about praise to God. In this first instance, I am looking at praise to His name in the Biblical form: ‘Hallelu-Yah’ (or, ‘Halleluia’ in the Greek of Revelation 19).
We can ask: How does …
The term for “the Northerner” () presents a problem of interpretation that has been noted in commentaries, and this problem is whether it would have been used for locusts or a nation to the north and/or east of the …
A previous article investigated the use of Psalm 89 in the Fourth Gospel and briefly noted that both Psalm 89 and Psalm 82 make use of the “divine council” motif. It concluded that the relevance of Psalm 89 to …
Psalm 89 is generally not recognised as contributing to the theology of the Fourth Gospel. The following article will act as a corrective by demonstrating the multiple allusions and echoes of the Psalm throughout the Fourth Gospel and particularly …
There is a generally accepted notion in biblical scholarship that the Bible as we know it today is the product of editing from its earliest stages of composition through to its final, definitive and ‘canonical’ textual form. So persistent has …
One of the key themes of the OT prophets is the brotherhood between Edom and Israel. This concept of brotherhood stems from earlier tradition that traces these two nations back to the two sons of Isaac: Esau and Jacob. The …
The standard conservative introduction to the topic of dating the Hebrew kings is E. R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings.[1] Modifications of Thiele’s chronology have been made by other conservative scholars, for example by …
