Over the past couple of decades, neuroscientists inadvertently discovered something fascinating — our brains naturally default to thinking about the future. They happened upon this little gem through the use of control groups who were instructed in various MRI studies to “think about nothing.” As researchers learned, our minds quickly drift from nothing to something, and the something we drift toward is thoughts of the future.
The Gospel Saves Posts
One of the more interesting books I read this last year was Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others. The author, Shane Lopez, was one of the lead researchers in the area of hope before his untimely death in 2016. Though Dr. Lopez takes a secular approach to the topic, I found a great deal of overlap between his conclusions and how the Bible presents hope. The empirical evidence along with revealed knowledge suggests we are “hard-wired” to be hopeful.
“How long will you waver between two opinions?” the prophet Elijah asked Israel. Are we fully committed to God or do we give Him only a piece of our lives?
Was the New Testament assembled by a fourth century council? Did that council deliberately exclude other books about Jesus?
Defenders of the Christian faith settled on a definition of evil many centuries ago. Evil is a lack, a privation, or a corruption of what is good. It is not the absence of good because evil does not exist in and of itself.
The case in favor of John grows stronger when we add another internal element: the author of this account was familiar with Palestine.
For the sake of argument, I will disregard the previous few blogs concerning the fourth gospel account to consider the additional internal evidence that points to John as the author.
As a general unrest in Palestine fomented outright rebellion in the mid to late 60’s A.D., Eusebius tells us that the disciples and apostles abandoned Jerusalem and Judea.
From the writings of Clement of Rome and Irenaeus, we know that the core elements of the Christian faith were established by the end of the first century, some 60-70 years following the death and reported resurrection of Jesus. I indicated in my previous post that though this is early testimony in terms of ancient history, there are more ancient documents that communicate these truths.