Biblical Heritage Center Blog

Combators against the Spirit Christians ( Pneumatomachians ) were fourth-century Christians who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit . Fifth-century writers, such as Sozomen, Socrates, Jerome, and Rufinus, identify them as Macedonians, claiming that Macedonius, a Semiarian bishop of Constantinople (ca. 342-360), was the founder of the sect. In the 360s, the sect held its own councils. In the next decade, they became fragmented. One group not only rejected the Holy Spirit’s divinity, it also rejected the divinity of the Son. Read complete blog at -- http://fromonejesus.blogspot.com/2016/11/combators-against-spirit-christians.html

There is a great deal of debate about what Judaism looked like in that post-Temple period of the first centuries of the Common Era, and I vacillate on whether I should even call it Judaism or, perhaps better: Judaisms . It took quite a few more centuries for Judaism to find a singular expression as “ rabbinic Judaism .” Read the complete article at -- http://fromonejesus.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-origin-of-rabbinic-judaism.html  

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most important blocks of the teachings of Yeshua (the real name of Jesus) to have survived the 2000 year journey of being passed down from one generation to the next by non-Jews from a variety of non-Jewish cultures. The problem is that people who did not understand the Jewish culture or the Hebrew Scriptures of Yeshua have copied the manuscripts that have been used to make English translations of his teachings and created the Belief Systems through which over 2 billion Christian view and understand Yeshua's life and teachings. This toxic mix has produced crusades, inquisitions, indulgences, the holocaust, an immunity to the suffering of others, and an estimated 40,000 Christian denominations and paradenominations in America today! Are the above things   Yeshua had in mind for his followers to be actively involved in as he taught his disciples on the mountain that day? This is the   Christians today must answer. The bottom line i...

A jug from the Middle Bronze Age, featuring a human sculpture, was recently unearthed during an excavation in the city of Yehud, near Tel Aviv, with the assistance of area students. In addition to the unique pottery vessel, other vessels and metal items were found, including several daggers, arrowheads, an ax head, sheep bones, and what are likely the bones of a donkey. See pictures and read article at -- http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Rare-3800-year-old-pottery-vessel-with-human-sculpture-discovered-in-Yehuda-473441

In 1517 Martin Luther (1483-1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation. His attack on the church’s sale of indulgences resonated with discontented townsfolk, who were sick of clerics extorting money from gullible people on dubious pretexts. The ecclesiastical establishment treated Luther’s protest with lofty disdain, but young clerics took his ideas to the people in the towns, who initiated local reforms that effectively liberated their congregations from the control of Rome. The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements. Like other heretics in the past, Luther had created an antichurch. Luther and the other great reformers — Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and John Calvin (1509-64) — were addres...

The new Evangelicals were New Light or Separate Baptists from New England, whose leaders began to sift into North Carolina and Virginia in the 1750s, and who soon began to establish their own churches and create new ones. Baptists had appeared in the South earlier in the century – Charleston had had a Baptist congregation since 1695 – but they were quiet, well-mannered folk who were not active proselytizers . The New Lights, however, were neither quiet nor well-behaved even by Evangelical Presbyterian standards, for they openly attacked the Anglican clergy, ordained semiliterate men as ministers, stubbornly refused to apply for licenses to preach, and valued emotional outbursts in their meetings as a sign of God’s presence and favor. Through these actions, the Baptists managed to attack most of the underpinnings of colonial order. They denied the authority of the Crown to direct the moral life of the community through the Church of England, as well as the right of the Crown to...

Controversial claim argues that ancient Israelites turned Egyptian hieroglyphics into letters. The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes. Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt, says archaeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Hebrew speakers seeking a way to communicate in writing with other Egyptian Jews simplified the pharaohs’ complex hieroglyphic writing system into 22 alphabetic letters, Petrovich proposed. See pictures and read article at -- https://www.sciencenews.org/article/oldest-alphabet-identified-hebrew?tgt=nr