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Search by subject, then refine by approach. A prophecy study may also be apologetic or discerning because subject tells you what it examines, while approach tells you how it examines it.
17 results for “Early Christianity”
Clear searchBrian E. Daley · Historical theology · 1991
I recommend The Hope of the Early Church because it showed me how varied early Christian thinking about death and the world to come really was. Daley traces the development of the intermediate state, apokatastasis, res…
View recommendation →Hippolytus · Exposition, prophecy, and polemic · early third century
…Christ and Antichrist draws repeatedly from the biblical text and preserves a compelling early discussion of Daniel, the Antichrist, Christ's return, and the future kingdom. His Refutation of All Heresies also records and challenges many competing teachings. Together the writing…
View recommendation →R. V. Sellers · Theological biography and history of doctrine · 1928
A reconstruction of the life, conflicts, surviving writings, and Christology of Eustathius of Antioch, a prominent opponent of Arianism whose career illuminates both the Council of Nicaea and the unsettled theological and political struggles which followed it.
View recommendation →Irenaeus of Lyons · Early Christian theology and polemic · c. 180–190
…oodness of creation, and the unity of the Old and New Testaments. He is also an important early witness to a future earthly kingdom: his premillennial passages show that this expectation cannot simply be dismissed as a recent invention. Read Irenaeus as an early witness, not as a…
View recommendation →Tertullian · Apologetic, doctrinal, and practical treatises · c. 197–220
…ourage under persecution, and an uncompromising emphasis on holy living. Tertullian is an early witness, not a final authority. His later association with the New Prophecy, his growing severity, and some extreme practical conclusions require discernment; even his strongest argume…
View recommendation →Marvin W. Meyer · Historical sourcebook · 1987
A wide-ranging collection of ancient texts which opens a window onto the mystery religions of the Mediterranean world—their gods, initiations, sacrifices, prayers, festivals, secret rites, and hopes for blessing or life beyond death.
View recommendation →Which Gospel does the Qur'an affirm?
…no one can now locate in their history? This is the Injeel problem. It is not merely that Christianity and Islam disagree. It is that Islam appeals to a Gospel which it cannot historically produce, while rejecting the Gospel which history actually supplies. The strongest Islamic…
Read article →Augustine of Hippo · Spiritual autobiography and prayer · c. 397–400
Augustine's searching account of restless desire, intellectual wandering, entrenched sin, conversion, memory, prayer, and the grace of God, written not merely as autobiography but as an extended confession addressed to God.
View recommendation →A history of interpretation, polemic, and forgotten tension
How Supersessionism Took Root in the Early Church A history of interpretation, polemic, and forgotten tension Supersessionism did not appear in one moment through one theologian. It developed as the Church became increasingly G…
Read article →Christianity, Islam and the verdict of the evidence
The Sum of These Things Christianity, Islam and the verdict of the evidence “Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Ma…
Read article →The Venerable Bede · Ecclesiastical and national history · 731
I recommend Bede because he brings the early English Church out of abstraction and fills it with people, places, journeys, decisions, failures, and acts of courage. His history shows how the gospel crossed cultures and kingdoms,…
View recommendation →The crucifixion in history, Scripture and the Qur'an
Did Jesus Really Die? The crucifixion in history, Scripture and the Qur'an Christianity and Islam cannot both be correct about the death of Jesus. The Gospel declares that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, was buried and rose bodily from the dead. His…
Read article →Matthew, the Hebrew word almah, and a sign whose meaning reaches beyond Ahaz
…k word parthenos for Isaiah 7:14. The Jewish Greek translation of Isaiah, produced before Christianity, already rendered almah with parthenos, the ordinary Greek term for a virgin or maiden. This point is sometimes overstated by saying that seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars…
Read article →Testing Islam's evidence for divine revelation
…eism? Those questions deserve answers, and the preceding articles have supplied them. But Christianity is not the only faith carrying a burden of proof. Islam does not merely criticise Christian revelation. It presents another book, another prophet and another account of Jesus, t…
Read article →The covenant son and the sacrifice that points to Christ
…nferred from the sequence and supplied by interpretation. This difference is fundamental. Christianity does not begin with an unnamed son and reason backwards from later religious geography. It begins with a text which repeatedly gives the name. The strongest Islamic case The Mus…
Read article →Why the Trinity is not polytheism—and why Christians confess one God
…ristians believed the Father, Son, and Spirit were three separate divine beings. Historic Christianity denies precisely that. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to hold together everything Scripture reveals: there is one God; the Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spi…
Read article →The Messiah cut off before the Temple fell
…s not possess. But they do not remove the problem. Daniel 9 existed within Judaism before Christianity. Its prophecy places the cutting off of an anointed figure before the destruction of the city and sanctuary. Jesus appeared during the Second Temple period, was recognised as th…
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