Biblical Interpretation
Reading Scripture in its literary, historical, and linguistic contexts.
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There’s a sentence of Jesus that has been quietly misused for centuries. “The kingdom of God is within you.” That’s how many of us learned it. And from that single line, an entire spirituality grew—one focused inward, contemplative, and often detached from the concrete reign of God in the world. The problem is simple: That…
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Here’s the apostolic core Paul never bothers to re-teach, because by the time he wrote, it was already drilled into them in person. 1. The Story Was Already Non-Negotiable Paul never stops to explain: • who Israel is • why Messiah mattered • why the cross wasn’t failure • why resurrection changes history Why? Because…
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It’s a question that refuses to go away—especially lately. Did God lie? The question usually surfaces around one particularly uncomfortable Old Testament passage: the scene in which God commissions a “lying spirit” to deceive King Ahab through his prophets, leading him to his death (1 Kings 22; 2 Chronicles 18). Some readers respond instinctively: “Of…
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Why the New Testament Gives Us Stories and Letters—Not Treatises When we open the New Testament, one feature should immediately unsettle our expectations: almost none of it is systematic theology. There is no apostolic summa. No catechism outlining the complete doctrine of God, Christ, salvation, and the Church from first principles to final conclusions. Instead,…
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Modern Christianity has a habit of sanding Scripture until it feels safe to touch. Comfort is emphasized over conviction. Belief is celebrated apart from formation. But the Bible was not written for comfort-first audiences. It was forged in exile, persecution, famine, political collapse, and occupied land. This is not a defense of fire-and-brimstone preaching or…
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Why the New Testament Often Teaches Recognition Before Definition One of the quiet habits modern readers bring to Scripture is the expectation that clarity must arrive immediately—preferably in the form of precise definitions. What is this? What category does it belong to? How do we explain it cleanly? These are not illegitimate questions. But they…
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Ancient Greek—and Hebrew—manuscripts were not written the way modern readers expect. From classical antiquity through the early centuries AD, most literary and sacred texts were written in scriptio continua: a continuous stream of letters with no spaces between words, no punctuation, no capitalization, and no paragraph breaks. All letters were written in uppercase (majuscule) form.…
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The claim that Luke—whether the infancy narratives in chapters 1–2 or the Gospel as a whole—is ahistorical is not new. Nor is it fringe. But it does sit at the far edge of an already skeptical interpretive spectrum, and that placement matters. Much of the confusion surrounding Luke is not primarily evidential but definitional. Before surveying…
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One of the quiet but decisive shifts in early Christian identity is linguistic. The New Testament does notprimarily refer to believers as the faithful, the righteous, or the devout. Instead, it overwhelmingly calls them hagioi—“holy ones,” commonly translated “saints.” That choice wasn’t accidental. It was theological, polemical, and worldview-shaping. Hagioi, Not Hosioi: A Deliberate Break In the Greek of the…
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Let’s be honest for a moment. Sometimes reading the Bible feels like trying to assemble IKEA furniture with half the instructions missing, three metaphors instead of measurements, and a note at the bottom that says, “You should already know how this works.” And the worst part is—it’s not actually unclear to the people it was…
Restoring Apostolic Faith 