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Did the Early Christians Get Things Wrong?
You can find countless variations of the claim that early Christians believed Protestant things:
Mormons who claim that the early Christians believed Mormon things Muslims who claim they believed Muslim thingsNon-religious people claiming that they didn’t originally consider Jesus divineAnd various other religious groups making similar claims about how their teachings were what the earliest Christians really believed.Almost all of these arguments follow a similar form: the first followers of J
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Jul 1st 2024
What Books of the Bible Did Early Christians Use for Liturgy?
So how do we know which books the early Christians used in the liturgy?As Valeriy Alikin of St. Petersburg Christian University explains,“Christians began to read apostolic epistles in their gatherings at the latest from the middle of the first century onwards.” At the end of his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul instructs,“I adjure you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the brethren”(5:27). And after the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, the leaders of the Church send Paul and St
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Dec 27th 2023
The Necessity of Tradition
The first Christians didn’t learn their faith from the Bible
because none of the books of the New Testament had been written yet. This is
evident in Paul thanking the Corinthians for “maintain[ing] the traditions even as I have
delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2),
and instructing his disciple Timothy,“what you have heard from me before
many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also”
(2 Tim. 2:2).Paul thanked the Thessalonians for accepting his preaching,
not
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Oct 16th 2023
The Jesus Question
When I was deciding whether or not I
should be a Christian, I made sure to read about as many other religions as I
could. At first it was overwhelming to compare the teachings of faiths like
Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism to Christianity, but then I noticed they all had
one thing I could compare: a teaching about Jesus Christ.Almost every major world religion
has a teaching about the identity of Jesus. Jews say Jesus was a human teacher,
Muslims say he was a prophet, and Hindus and Buddhist
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Sep 26th 2023
A Five-Part Test for Your Eucharistic Beliefs
How can you tell if you have the right understanding—the biblical interpretation, Jesus’ interpretation—of the Eucharist?I’d suggest five things to look for: your beliefs should be strange,sacrificial,serious,sacramental, and shocking. First, as we’ve already seen, the proper Christian understanding of the Eucharist must be strange, and hard to accept. That’s how it was initially received, and Jesus did nothing to dispel this impression. Why, he was trying to present an easy teaching and was jus
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Jul 27th 2023