Cannot take a staff
Matthew 10:9-10, “Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, 10 or a bag for your journey, or even two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worthy of his support.”
Luke 9:3, “And He said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece.”
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Two blind men (Matthew 20:29-30) – “And as they were going out from Jericho, a great multitude followed Him. 30And behold, two blind men sitting by the road, hearing that Jesus was passing by, cried out, saying, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!”
One blind man (Mark 10:46-47) – “And they *came to Jericho. And as He was going out from Jericho with His disciples and a great multitude, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the road. 47And when he heard that it was Jesus the Nazarene, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
One blind man (Luke 18:35,38) – “And it came about that as He was approaching Jericho, a certain blind man was sitting by the road, begging…38And he called out, saying, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
“And Asa begat Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias; (Matt 1:8)”
Problem: Matthew says “Joram begot Uzziah.” However, 1 Chronicles 3:11 lists “Joram [and then] his son, Ahaziah.” Which one is correct?
CLAIM: Critics argue that Daniel made a gross historical error here. On their view, Daniel believed that Darius was the one to conquer Babylon, rather than the Persian king Cyrus. Of course, Darius I ruled the Medo-Persian Empire from 522-486 BC, so he could not be the man mentioned here in 539 BC.
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There is a theory taught just as faithfully in today’s bible colleges as evolution is taught in secular universities, and it has just about as much proof. This theory is held to be fact by such Bible scholars as James White, Bob Ross, and Kenneth Barker. (Barker was the head of the NIV translation committee.) It is known as the “Conflate Theory,” It was developed by Brooke Foss Westcott and John Fenton Anthony Hort. These two Anglican bible scholars devoted much of their lives to a critical study of the Greek New Testament. They studied the various “text types” or groups of manuscripts, and they claimed that the manuscripts from Alexandria, Egypt (primarily Sinaticus and Vaticanus) were the best because they were apparently the oldest and thus, in their opinion, closer to the originals. But they had one major problem: 95% of all the NT manuscripts (known as the Majority Text) disagreed with the their Alexandrian manuscripts while agreeing with each other.
Imagine for a moment that we are in a different time period. We have gone back thousands of years. There are no cars. There are no airplanes. There are no modern conveniences. We are in primitive times.
We take a look around us. There is no Bible. We know nothing about the universe around us. We have no knowledge of God. We don’t know how mankind got here. Then we look again. We see a seed fall from a tree and from the top of the soil, plant itself, tend to its self, raise itself up into a seedling and mature into a tree, only to repeat the cycle all over again. And we wonder. Then we go to the ocean. We study the tides and discover that they are used to clean the waters, making it impossible to support life without them. We look and ask ourselves, “Was this planned?” We look beneath the surface of the water, to the depths below. We find life. Strange creatures! Some which breathe water and some which breathe air like us. Some that spawn eggs.
Archaeology Supports the Old Testament.
Creation. The recent discoveries of creation accounts at Ebla add evidence of this. This library of sixteen thousand clay tablets predates the Babylonian account by about 600 years. The creation tablet is strikingly close to Genesis, speaking of one being who created the heavens, moon, stars, and earth. The people at Ebla believed in creation from nothing. The Bible contains the ancient, less embellished version of the story and transmits the facts without the corruption of the mythological renderings.
A few of the more radical skeptics deny that Jesus was an historical person. This is called “the Jesus myth.” In 2012, for example, Timothy Freke published The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?
Following is a refutation of the myth of the Jesus myth:
Had there been any question whatsoever about the actual existence of Jesus, the opponents of Christianity in the early centuries would have used this to refute Christianity’s legitimacy, but this was never done.
The New King James Version was conceived by Arthur Farstad, a conservative Baptist and a former editor at Thomas Nelson Publishers. The project was inaugurated in 1975 with two meetings (Nashville and Chicago) of 68 interested persons, most of them prominent Baptists but also with some conservative Presbyterians.
The Statement of Purpose issued by Thomas Nelson, publishers of the New King James Bible New Testament (1979), makes the following claim: “Not to add to, take from, nor alter the communication intended by the original translators, but to convey that communication in 20th century vocabulary and usage.”
2 Peter 3:16 As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction. 17 Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness. 18 But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.
The following are excerpts from the Committee on Bible Translation’s August 2010 statement about the upcoming (at that time) 2011 revision of the NIV. (niv-cbt.org)
When the original Bible documents first emerged, they captured exactly what God wanted to say in the language and idiom of ordinary people. There was no friction between hearing God’s Word the way it was written and understanding it the way it was meant. The original audience experienced a unique fusion of these two ingredients.