After weeks of studying how the Bible came to be and how to study it, my followers still had a few more questions! In this episode of Verity I answered ten or so final questions that came up during the series, including topics like the church fathers, Amplified Bible, Book of Enoch, how chapters and verses were developed, and more.
Summary
Any books or websites for further reading?
- How we got the Bible by Timothy Paul Jones
- Evidence for Christianity by Josh McDowell
- The Journey from Texts to Translations by Paul Wagner
- Words of Delight by Leland Ryken
- Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus by Lois Tverberg
- JSTOR academic journals
I’d love to hear more about our black church fathers and their role in the canon.
- Clement, Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril were all of North African descent but wrote in Greek
- Cyprian, Tertullian, and Augustine wrote in Latin
- They were not black in the modern sense, but were definitely indigineous people of that continent. Medieval painters and artists painted them (like Jesus) as white European men, when they would in fact have been significantly darker in appearance.
- https://urbanfaith.com/2014/02/the-faith-of-our-fathers-reclaiming-the-north-african-church-fathers.html/
Are there any books that are debated as canon or not still today?
– all of the apocrypha would be in debate between Catholics and protestants, and since the Nag Hammadi discovery of Gnostic gospels, there are people who think those have authority too.
Can you address the amplified bible a little deeper?
Pub 1965, revised 1987 and 2015
The Amplified acts like a functional equivalence bible with dynamic equivalence in parentheses in the text itself. In some cases it acts as a study bible, with commentary inserted into the text in brackets/parantheses. Because of this, it can be helpful, but the parentheses content should be looked at like commentary as opposed to… well, Bible.
Listen Now
Listen to these answers and other questions in the episode below!