Posts

King Hezekiah and King Josiah

From OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com Prompt – What was the relationship between King Hezekiah’s and King Josiah? King Hezekiah and King Josiah were both kings of Judah, but they were not contemporaries. Hezekiah was Josiah’s great-grandfather. Hezekiah had a son named Manasseh, who succeeded him as king of Judah. Manasseh’s son, Amon, […]

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King Hezekiah, Isaiah, Micah, Babylon and the Shadow Miracle

For an interesting article at BAR see Hezekiah’s Religious Reform—In the Bible and Archaeology, What was King Hezekiah’s reform like on the ground? by David Rafael Moulis; December 12, 2024. From OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com Scroll down to see Follow-up prompts: Initial Prompt – How do the actions of King Hezekiah in the Hebrew […]

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Steles, Inscriptions, & Archeological Evidence

The Mesha Stele The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, is a stele dated around 840 BCE containing a significant Canaanite inscription in the name of King Mesha of Moab (a kingdom located in modern Jordan). Mesha tells how Chemosh, the god of Moab, had been angry with his people and had allowed them to be subjugated to the Kingdom of Israel, but at length, Chemosh […]

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Biblical Peoples

From BAR/BAS – Biblical Peoples, The World of Ancient Israel. The pdf is in the BAR directory in DropBox. This is a collection of articles published in their magazine with photos and maps. A great resource. CONTENTS AMMON The Hebrew Bible’s usual designation of the Ammonites as “the children of Ammon” (bĕnê ‘Ammôn, e.g., 1 […]

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Scholars’ Views of Decrepancies

Below are excerpts from my transcript of Bart Ehrman’s interview with Megan titled Gospel Discrepancies: Why Matthew and Luke Tell Different Christmas Stories. He explains why discrepancies are not bad and should be viewed independently to gain the different insights of the different authors. Well, the one thing I’ll say is that knowing these discrepancies […]

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Markan Priority

Extracts below are from Bart Ehrman’s post: Mark: The First Gospel in 19th Century Research dated February 8, 2019. Over the years, three arguments have proved widely convincing for establishing Mark’s priority to Matthew and Luke: Patterns of Agreement – The reason then that Matthew and Luke rarely agree against Mark in the wording of […]

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KJV: Translation Issues

Problems with the King James Version: What Were the Translators Translating? by Bart Ehrman The primary subject of his post is; As a result, translations into English of the Greek New Testament, based on Erasmus’s editions and those that replicated, more or less, his text, include translations of passages that were almost certainly not originally […]

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Preterist Calculations

From OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com. 12/6/2024. Prompt: How do the Preterists calculate the end time and when do they think it happened? Preterism is a Christian eschatological view that interprets many or all biblical prophecies about the “end times” as events that have already occurred, particularly in the first century. Here’s how […]

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