What did the first Christians believe, and how do we know? Explore Paul’s letters, the traditions he inherited, and the evidence that brings the earliest Christian communities into view.
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The Common Ground: Why Christians and Skeptics Should Begin with Paul’s Seven Letters →
Articles in this topic
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The God the Ancient World Saw in Pieces: Philippians 2 and Ancient Stories of Divine Descent
When I began comparing Philippians 2 with the stories told about Dionysus, Apollo, Demeter, Heracles, Prometheus, and other ancient figures, I expected to find a few interesting verbal similarities. I did not expect to find…
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Did Their Minds Create the Risen Jesus?
Read Paul’s seven undisputed letters slowly, and the first Christian generation loses its stained-glass stillness. It becomes noisy. Teachers arrive after Paul and challenge his work. Peter withdraws from a table shared with Gentiles, and…
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If These Seven Letters Were All We Had: The Christian Faith Would Still Stand
Imagine that every Gospel manuscript disappeared. Acts was lost. The disputed letters of Paul vanished. Hebrews, James, Peter, John, Jude, and Revelation were gone. No creed, council, catechism, or theological work survived. Imagine even that…
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John Chrysostom and the Question Paul Already Fought: Must Christians Keep the Law?
John Chrysostom’s sermons against Judaizing Christians are often quoted in fragments. When they are reduced to a few shocking lines, they can sound like simple hatred. When they are read in context, the picture is…
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The Apocalypse of Peter: A Window into Early Christian Judgment and the Formation of Scripture
The Apocalypse of Peter is one of the most revealing documents from the second century of Christianity. It is not part of the New Testament, yet for a time it stood very close to being…
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The Gospel of Peter: A Late Text, A Local Church, and an Early Test of the Christian Message
The Gospel of Peter is often presented as one of the most intriguing “lost gospels,” a text that some claim could have stood alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John if history had taken a different…
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Multiplying by Mission: Session 3 at Mission Lake
40% Growth Then, 5% Growth Now — What We Must Learn Anew In our last session, we looked closely at the seven undisputed letters of Paul and asked whether we can trust the words we…
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Multiplying by Mission: Session 2 at Mission Lake
40% Growth Then, 5% Growth Now — What We Must Learn Anew 1. Review from Session 1 Last week we saw that even atheist and skeptical scholars agree on seven undisputed letters of Paul. These…
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When Philosophy Clashed with the Cross: Gentile Rejections of the Christ Hymn
In Philippians 2:6–11, one of the earliest Christian hymns declares a staggering paradox: that Jesus Christ, “being in very nature God,” humbled himself to become human and die on a cross—only to be exalted and…
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