Associate Professor of New Testament, Tyndale Seminary
The First Written Gospel If we had been part of Mark’s first audience, we would not have picked a bound book up from the shelf of a library or bookstore. In fact, we would not likely have been reading it at all. For years we would have been used to hearing the stories of Jesus…
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What Is a Canon? The word “canon” comes from the Greek term kanon meaning ‘reed.’ The ancients often cut off long reeds to use for measuring things, like a primitive ruler. So kanon came to be used as a metaphor for any standard. A kanon is what you compare things to, checking to see whether…
Read MoreMany of my blog posts begin life as answers to my students’ questions. This one is no different. A student asked a good question about how we know Mark wasn’t written much earlier than AD 65 or so. Here is my (lightly edited) reply. The starting point for dating Mark is that our earliest church…
Read MoreThis was a sermon delivered at St. Paul’s-on-the-Hill Anglican church in Pickering, Ontario, Sunday March 13th.
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It’s often difficult to tell which encyclopedias and reference works you should rely on for academic biblical studies. There are a lot of “Bible Dictionaries” that are too shallow to be very useful, or that don’t reflect modern scholarship. One helpful tool is A Guide to Biblical Commentaries and Reference Works by John F. Evans (10th…
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