© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. PART 1 OF 3 Introduction And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Years ago I saw an interesting episode of the television game show “Jeopardy.” In this game, answers to questions in different categories are posted according to dollar value, and three contestants vie to be first to “ring in” and give the correct answer (i.e. the correct corresponding question). If he answers correctly, the assigned dollar values are added to the contestant’s …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction … Male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27b) In the beginning, God could have created one generic type of human being, but instead He chose to make males and females. Males and females are different in form, in appearance, and in psychology. They are not carbon copies of each other, but were designed to complement each other, and that means …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Is it unjust of God to send people to hell simply because they don’t follow Him? This charge is frequently made by atheists and other skeptics, but it is unsustainable. The first thing that people need to understand is that God made us and so we belong to Him (Psalm 100:3). Not only that, our ongoing existence is because of Him; He …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: This article is a companion to our article “THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER AND THE EVANGELICAL BETRAYAL OF THE BIBLE: Exposing the Major Weapons Levied against the Trustworthiness of the Bible,” in which we look at, inter alia, Dr. Norman Geisler’s argument that seeing the resurrection of the OT saints in Matthew 27:52-53 as non-historical is incompatible with Biblical inerrancy. Introduction According to …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction The four Gospel books in the New Testament are our primary sources for information about the life, ministry, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They are all based on early eyewitness testimony. The Gospel According to Matthew was written by the former tax-collector Matthew aka Levi, one of Jesus’ twelve apostles, in AD 40-41. The Gospel According to Mark was written …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: This is a companion article to our article “A CALL FOR SERIOUS EVANGELICAL APOLOGETICS: The Authenticity of John 7:53-8:11 as a Case Study” Introduction One of the best known stories about Jesus is His encounter with an adulteress whom He refused to condemn. The story, known in academic circles as the Pericope Adulterae, or Pericope de Adultera (“the extract about the …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. The Problem There is a troubling dearth of serious and competent apologetics being done by evangelicals in the matter of the origins and transmission history of the New Testament. The “received wisdom” about such issues as when, how, and in what order the Gospel books were written and about the original form of the NT text has come to be dominated by …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. There are a number of events in the ministry of Jesus that are documented by more than one Gospel author. Events that are documented by two authors (Matthew and Mark, Matthew and Luke, or Mark and Luke) are called the “double tradition.” Events that are described by three Gospel writers (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are called the “triple tradition.”[1] One of the …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction The New Testament books were seen as Scripture from the very beginning.[1] They were passed around from church to church[2] and copies must have been made of the originals (i.e. the “autographs”) from the very beginning. Manuscripts of the NT proliferated through the centuries as copies were made of earlier copies, and copies made of those. The large number of such …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. An article in the 24 January 2015 issue of New Scientist trumpets, “Ancient echoes speak to us from the big bang.”[1] According to that headline, there are “ancient echoes” and they are “speak[ing] to us from the big bang.” Surely this must be further evidence for the Big Bang Theory. And yet, as one reads through the article, he cannot be faulted …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Understand each bite before moving on to the next one! The First Bite A) The New Testament (NT) was written in Koine Greek in the 1st-century AD, but the printing press was not invented (in the West) until the mid-15th century AD. This means that for about 1,400 years, books – including the NT – could only be reproduced through copying by …
© 2015, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. An advertisement from the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada appeared in today’s Globe and Mail (January 1, 2015, p. A9), entitled “Cousin, we need to talk.” It featured the face of a chimpanzee and the text began, We share almost 99% of our DNA. We still have so much to learn from each other. Here we again see an evolutionist trope that …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. According to an article in today’s National Post entitled “Answering the Great Questions” by Lawrence Krauss (p. A14), atheist Krauss tells us about “Hawking Radiation,” particles that are supposedly emitted by black holes. (He does not tell us that Hawking radiation is a theoretical construct predicted by physicist Stephen Hawking, but not something that has ever been observed or experimentally verified.) Krauss …
© 2014, by Diane Hong. All Rights Reserved. Yoga has certainly gone mainstream. It has been a craze for decades. We see yoga studios pop up everywhere; fitness centres offer “hot yoga” as part of their classes; doctors recommend that you do yoga to relax; and I even heard of “Christian yoga classes” offer in churches, which is shocking! Over the years I have had this discussion with Christian friends, …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Tuesday, November 11, 2014, saw the release of a new book called The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary Magdalene,[1] by Simcha Jacobovici (co-author of the risible The Jesus Family Tomb)[2] and Barrie Wilson (author of the less sensationalistic but equally risible How Jesus Became Christian).[3] The Globe and Mail featured an article on The Lost …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. When I was a young boy living in Montreal, my dad took me to a local theatre to see a re-release of Disney’s Fantasia. Fantasia, made in 1940, features eight animated sequences set to classical music. The sequences didn’t all have the same impact on me; I didn’t care much for the Dancing Hippo sequence or the Greek Mythology sequence. The three …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Heaven is for Real,[1] Pastor Todd Burpo’s story of his son Colton’s alleged “trip to heaven and back” has certainly caught the public imagination. As of this writing, the book sits in top spot on The New York Times’ Print/Paperback Nonfiction Best Sellers list, a list on which it has appeared for an astounding 186 consecutive weeks.[2] It has sold more than …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction If one asks an Evangelical Christian whether Jesus is “the Word of God,” the answer is usually an unqualified “yes.” If one then asks whether the Bible is “the Word of God,” the answer is also an unqualified “yes.” While many are satisfied with these answers, there are others who see them as contradictory. Muslims, for example, will ask how two …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Part 1: David K. Clark’s Super New Argument Attempts to disprove the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ date back all the way to the very day of the resurrection itself, when the tomb guards who reported this event to the chief priests were told to “‘Tell them, “His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept”’” (Matthew 28:13). This …
© 2014, by Derek Casey. All Rights Reserved. Verification of Contemporary Facts and Proof for the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus “… because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:31) The Gospel is good news because it is verifiable and …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction In an article entitled “Jesus’ Resurrection and Marian Apparitions: Medjugorje as a Living Laboratory,”[1] Dr. Hector Avalos (below, left) seeks to cast doubt on the New Testament records of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances by arguing that the so-called “Marian apparitions”[2] which began in 1981 at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia (below, right),[3] “amply illustrates how people can use the most objective and physical language to …
© 2014, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction The liberal Biblical scholarship Emperor has new clothes. This particular new suit is the “Bible’s Phantom camels,”[1] a claim by two Israeli archaeologists[2] that domesticated camels first came to Israel in “the last third of the 10th century B.C.,”[3] which means that the Bible’s account in Genesis of camels during the time of the patriarchs centuries earlier is anachronistic and shows …
© 2013, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. Introduction It’s that time of year again. Christmas is approaching, and with it a bevy of annual traditions: Christmas carols, decorations, coloured lights on houses, shopping for gifts – and, of course, the farrago of assaults by atheists and liberal scholars on the historical truth of the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus. The latest such is “Joseph Ratzinger and the …
© 2013, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. One sometimes has to wonder if the raison d’être of Bible scholars is to “spen[d] their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). How else can we account for the bizarre idea championed by some of them that Jesus did not speak the words recorded in John 3:16-17 in His conversation with Nicodemus? …
© 2013, by John Tors. All Rights Reserved. The Background A sensational book has taken the evangelical community by storm. First published in January, 2012, it reached The New York Times bestseller list in its second week of release[1], and has remained there ever since. Within the first year it had sold a million copies, and as of this writing, it is currently #12 on the “Trade Fiction” Best Seller …
