Let me share a few thoughts on Peter’s vision of a great sheet descend­ing with all kinds of ani­mals in it. Did the vision meant the abro­ga­tion of the food laws as tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian the­olo­gians claim? Or per­haps the pas­sage was meant to com­mu­ni­cate a dif­fer­ent idea. (more…)

Through­out the his­tory of the Chris­t­ian church we have seen many doc­trines devel­oped. One only needs to go to a Chris­t­ian book­store or a bible col­lege library to find the diver­sity of inter­pre­ta­tions on bib­li­cal pas­sages. What is the rea­son for such a diver­sity of inter­pre­ta­tions? (more…)

Let me share a few thoughts about the usage of pro­nouns when trans­lat­ing the Greek text to Eng­lish. If you only ever learned Eng­lish you are prob­a­bly not aware of trans­la­tional issues. Con­cern­ing nat­ural and gram­mat­i­cal gen­ders, please refer to the fol­low­ing article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender (more…)

Let me share my thoughts con­cern­ing expres­sions of divine favour, a con­cept so often ignored by the expos­i­tors of the NT. As an exam­ple let us con­sider the fol­low­ing passage:

Col 1:16 for in him all things were cre­ated, in heaven and on earth, vis­i­ble and invis­i­ble, whether thrones or domin­ions or prin­ci­pal­i­ties or author­i­ties — all things were cre­ated through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (more…)

The PaRDeS sys­tem was first pub­lished in the Zohar in the sec­ond cen­tury, but it is evi­dently much older than that. The NT authors use all four lev­els, and thus, their under­stand­ing is cru­cial to under­stand­ing the NT. (more…)