Monday 05 June

Aims

Bible and Church aims to present world-class scholarship directly to the church, providing Christians with evidence in support of the historical basis of the faith, and renewing confidence in the Bible.

Evidence of Eyewitnesses.

Whose testimony can we trust? A widely held idea is that Christian beliefs arose over a long period of time through a mixture of gullibility and conspiracy. Early Christian records are held to be legend, myth or fabrication.

Evidence of History.

Who has the true message of Jesus? Probably the most popular idea in relation to the Bible is that books have been missed out or put in due to political pressure and various media have been full of talk about ‘other gospels’.

Evidence of Manuscripts.

The four gospels and the other gospels compared. A popular idea is that the Bible has been corrupted, either by deliberate falsification or simply lost through passage of time. Such ideas are promoted in the British media.

Confidence in the Bible

We are being bombarded with false information about the Bible. It’s alleged that it has been corrupted by power-hungry Christians. They are charged with having omitted books they did not like, and changing the original message of Jesus

EVENTS

Next Conference

Northern Ireland

DATE TO BE CONFIRMED

Belfast Bible College

Manuscript Expert

Dr Dirk Jongkind is a Dutch biblical scholar who finished his PhD at Cambridge University on Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete copy of the New Testament.

After his PhD he was employed by the British Library to carry out research on Codex Sinaiticus and he has published a book entitled Scribal Habits in Codex Sinaiticus (2007). He has also recently re-edited the edition of the Greek New Testament of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, and carried out significant work on the legal language used in and outside the New Testament.

Currently he is the Research Fellow in New Testament Text and Language at Tyndale House, Cambridge and the John W. Laing Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He is married to Marion, with six children.