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CHALLENGE: Matthew and Luke contradict each other. Matthew says Judas hung himself (Matt. 27:5), but Luke says that “falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18).DEFENSE: The accounts preserve different aspects of the event but do not contradict each other.Both agree Judas died shortly after the Crucifixion. Matthew says Judas hanged himself after returning the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, while Luke has Peter speaking of the event duri …

There are many books on the subject of salvation, and many of them share certain characteristics:1. They focus exclusively on the subject of eternal salvation.2. They focus in particular on the doctrine of justification.3. They often ignore, in the interests of systematic theology, the way in which the Bible uses language.4. They are often written in a polemical, hostile style.5. Due to the authors’ unfamiliarity with the way other groups of Christians express themselves, they mistakenly critici …

“When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem” (Matt. 2:1).“Wise men” is a common translation in English Bibles, but it doesn’t give us a good idea who they were.The Greek word used here is magoi—the plural of magos. These terms may be more familiar from their Latin equivalents: In St. Jerome’s Vulgate, we read that magi came from the east, and an individual member of the group would thus be a magus.Who Were the Magi?Or …

One of the most mysterious figures haunting the Christian imagination is the Antichrist. Innumerable works, both fiction and non-fiction, have been devoted to him. The concept is so compelling that even non-Christians use it. Muslims believe that at the Second Coming of Christ he will do battle with the Antichrist (Arabic, al-Dajjal). But amid all the speculation about the Antichrist—much of it wild and fanciful—what do we really know about the figure? Very little.Four Mentions in Scripture …

Many in the Protestant community discount books not found in their version of the Old Testament on the ground that there were “400 silent years” between Malachi and the ministry of Jesus.This claim is bolstered by the assertion that there were no prophets in this period. The implication is that, without the divine inspiration given to prophets, books of Scripture couldn’t be written.There are several problems with this assertion. One is that it isn’t clear that all the books in the Protestant Ol …