Dante used many common tropes of his time when describing hell. We can look at one quickly. Why is hell underground? The idea during medieval times was that things that were dirty, that were sinful, impure, were drawn downwards. So all of the Earthly problems would be drawn downward, with the worst being in the…
Zoroastrianism is a bit difficult. We just don’t know much about the earliest formations of the religion. It most likely began with a people called the Aryans, which is where Hinduism also develops from. There are a lot of connections between Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, including a lot of similarity in the languages that composed their…
There were many books that didn’t make the cut when it came to the Bible. And even more that never were in the running; that weren’t ever considered. In fact, even some of the books that are currently in the Bible hardly made the cut, such as Hebrews and Revelation. So why were some books…
When the abolitionist movement really began building up in the States, various ministers went to the Bible in order to show that slavery was not just unChristian, but was unBiblical. In response, those supporting slavery also went to the Bible, and what they came up with as a defense revolves around the Curse of Ham,…
There are two really friendly works that deal with this a bit, and one not so friendly work. The first is From Jesus to Christianity by Michael White. It gets you about four generations out from Jesus. So really the formation of the early church. Of probably most importance though is the split from Judaism,…
Short answer, it’s because we learn more about the languages that compose the Bible, as well as find new manuscripts, that allow for a better translation. Long answer: One of the best books on this subject is Bruce Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament. It does get dense though. One of Metzger’s students, Bart…
To begin, I just want to mention that I’m more familiar with Koine Greek than classical Greek. While I minored in Greek in college, my focus has been New Testament studies, so koine Greek reigns there. It won’t make much of a difference, but I wanted to be upfront with that. The word we are…
This is a bit complicated. The main theory on the creation of the Torah or Pentateuch is the Documentary Hypothesis. Basically, it is thought that these first five books are a combination of 4 sources and possibly a 5th editor. The sources are J, E, P, and D, with some adding an R source. J…
The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, or the Tanach. It contains a few books now regarded as Apocryphal, which are often included in various Bible translations today. It’s important because it gives us one more early manuscript tradition to go off of. It is in Greek, so it is a bit…
First, who is Pharaoh Akhenaten? He was an Egyptian ruler in the 18th Dynasty. One thing he is most known for was that he abandoned the traditional polytheistic religion of Egypt, and instead introduced Atenism, which center around the god Aten. This move wasn’t widely accepted, and after Akhenaten died, there was a major move…
