Was There an Old Testament Before the New Testament? A Guest Post from Jason Parry

There is an ongoing debate about when the books of the Old Testament were recognized as Scripture and when, or whether, there was a closed circle of books that were recognized to be inspired by the Holy Spirit prior to the time of Jesus. Related questions include where the additional material found in the Greek …

Beckwith on the Relationship between the Testaments

In his magnificent book, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church, Roger Beckwith writes (408): The church was, of course, given its own authoritative interpretation of the Old Testament by Jesus and the apostles, but since Christianity was a thorough-going prophetic movement, claiming a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit, withdrawn when prophecy …

How Should the Books of the OT Be Ordered?

English translations need to revisit the way that the books of the Old Testament are ordered. Let me put it another way: The only basis for the way that English translations order the books of the Old Testament is modern convention. The order we use today seems to have arisen with the printing press. There …

A New Fragment of Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter

David Brakke has published a signifcant essay with a fresh translation of Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter: “A New Fragment of Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter: Heresy, Apocrypha, and the Canon.”  Harvard Theological Review 103 (2010): 47-66. He points to some of the implications of a “new fragment of the Coptic text” of Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter: …

Still Sola Scriptura, My Essay from The Sacred Text

Thanks to Gorgias Press and to the editors of The Sacred Text, the Michaels Bird and Pahl, for permission to post my essay from the volume here: “Still Sola Scriptura: An Evangelical View of Scripture,” pages 215–40 in The Sacred Text: Excavating the Texts, Exploring the Interpretations, and Engaging the Theologies of the Christian Scriptures, …

Now Available: The Sacred Text

Newly released from Gorgias Press: Michael F. Bird and Michael W. Pahl, eds. The Sacred Text: Excavating the Texts, Exploring the Interpretations, and Engaging the Theologies of the Christian Scriptures. Gorgias Précis Portfolios 7. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias, 2010. Contents Introduction: From Manuscript to MP3 – Michael F. Bird The History of the Texts The Septuagint …