LifeWay Research is reporting that recent data they have acquired reveals that most pastors are against political endorsements in the pulpit.
I find the data encouraging as I am strongly against pastors making political endorsements from the pulpit. Though, I am not against the freedom to do so.
From LifeWay Research:
Dr. Jason Hiles, Christian Studies professor at Louisiana College and the Associate Dean for Biblical and Theological Studies at the Louisiana College Caskey School of Divinity, recently wrote an article for the Louisiana Baptist Convention’s Baptist Message titled, Reflections on Summertime Missions and Salvation.
In the article, Hiles gives a biblical foundation for why we as Christians do missions and how God’s active work in salvation is achieved through the means of those sent to proclaim the glorious gospel of Christ.
Hiles corrects a common misunderstanding of many Christians regarding the “noble savage” and those who would charge God as being unfair if he did not give every rebel a “chance” or opportunity to hear the gospel and repent. Continue Reading…
The writings of the Apostle Paul exists as a collection known as the Pauline corpus, making up a significant portion of the New Testament writings. Regarding this collection of Paul’s writings, F.F. Bruce writes in his book The Canon of Scripture:
We do not know by whom or in what place the first edition of Paul’s collected letters was produced. C. F. D. Moule has suggested that it was Luke’s doing: “it is entirely in keeping with his historian’s temperament to collect them.” As for the place, Ephesus, Corinth and Alexandria have been suggested. The suggestion of Alexandria has been supported by the Continue Reading…
Today in class, my Hebrew/OT professor mentioned a recent study on the authorship of the Hebrew Bible using a computer algorithm. The software divided the Hebrew text into two categories: priestly and non-priestly. Regardless of one’s view of this type of study, the results are very interesting.
Israeli software aims to shed light on the Bible
Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible.
The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.
When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the “priestly” and “non-priestly.” It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent – effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.
“We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method,” the Israeli team announced in a paper presented last week in Portland, Oregon, at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The team includes a computer science doctoral student, Navot Akiva, and a father-son duo: Nachum Dershowitz, a Tel Aviv University computer scientist, and his son, Idan Dershowitz, a Bible scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is usually thought to have been written by the “priestly” author, but the software indicated it was not.
View the article in its entirety here.
Welcome! My name is Joshua Breland. I am a disciple of Christ, husband to Libby, and full time student.
