You hear some kinds of stories multiple times. Then they become tropes. Then you get fed up of hearing them.
Take the whole ‘chosen one’ plot. Something bad needs sorting, but fate or prophecy has decided who will do this. And more often than not, it’s a child. Or a baby. Or a yet-to-be-born baby. Whoever it is, they were born for this.
And then every now and then, you see the story told well, or in a surprising way.
Continue reading Christmas 2020: Week 2, Day 5: Chosen
“God lets his children tell his story.”
Peter Enns, biblical scholar
Today, people believe things are true when the history, facts and science stack up.
(Well… I mean… most of us do…)
Being people of faith, Christians want to show that things about God are true. And sometimes they do this by showing how the facts stack up.
Now, I have time for this – up to a point. There is reliable historical information, outside of the Bible, to show that Jesus lived and died. There is science behind the study of ancient texts and earliest the New Testament manuscripts date from very close to Jesus’s time.
But, trying to prove God or the Bible by using science has its limits. For one thing, history cannot be reproduced in a lab experiment. For another, the stories of the Bible aren’t scientific in that way.
Continue reading Christmas 2020: Week 2, Day 4: Translation