Inerrancy of Scripture

Jesus authoritatively declared, “Thy Word is Truth (John 17:17)!” It is up to you to believe His claim that God’s Word is trustworthy or to reject as contradictory. Those who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and those who reject the truthfulness of Scripture have the same evidence and yet come to opposite conclusions. The same is true with Christ as the Son of God. Those who receive Him and those who reject Him as Savior both have the same facts. One repudiates and one accepts. I will give one example of each: Bart Ehrman and Lee Strobel.

Read more

Messianic Secret in the Gospel of Mark

The accusers and critics of Jesus did not all die in the first century. We want to answer a modern opponent of who Jesus was. In his discussion of the theology of Mark, Craig Evans notes that Mark’s theology is revealed in the Messianic Secret (see footnote 1). The Messianic Secret according to its originator, William Wrede, was first manifested in Jesus forbidding others to proclaim he was the Messiah (demons in 1:34; healed leper in 1:44), and second, the disciples’ failure to understand who Jesus claimed to be (in the three passion predictions in Mark 8, 9, 10)), and third, Jesus’ teaching, such as the parables (4:11-12), which meant to conceal. Wrede, contended that Jesus did not know he was the Messiah and no one recognized Jesus as the Messiah, until after his resurrection and that Mark had to create the Messianic Secret to show how no one recognized Jesus as the Messiah before the resurrection (see footnote 2). “These were all editoral and unhistorical…By inventing the ‘messianic secret’ Mark removed a source of embarrassment for the theology of the church by explaining why Jesus was not more generally recognized as Messiah during His lifetime” (see footnote 3).

Read more