For an overview of which evidence for Jesus' resurrection to focus on most, see my post here. Steve Hays wrote a lengthier post on how to make a case for the resurrection. Here are some of the Easter issues we've addressed over the years, with many more in the archives: Evidence For Acts' Material On The Resurrection Appearance To Paul Evidence That The Risen Jesus Was Heard And Touched, Not Just Seen, Including In 1 Corinthians 15 The Gospels And Acts' Polymodal Resurrection Accounts Corroborated In The New Testament Letters The Witnesses' Willingness To Suffer For Belief In Jesus' Resurre ..read more

I've written about my overall view of the Zeitoun case elsewhere, such as here and here. What I want to do in this post is expand upon an aspect of the case I've previously addressed more briefly. The apparitions exhibited some weaknesses that make more sense coming from a source of a lower nature than God or Mary. I'll use abbreviations to refer to some sources I'll be citing a lot. Travis Dumsday's The Marian Apparitions At Zeitoun (Yonkers, New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2024) will be referred to with the abbreviation MAZ. The numbers that follow will refer to approximate Kindle l ..read more

"The love of God and the love of the world are like the scales of a balance: as one falls the other rises. When our natural inclinations prosper, religion is faint and languishes. But when earthly objects wither away and lose their beauty, then the soul begins to cool and flag in its pursuit of them, the seeds of grace take root, and the divine life begins to flourish and prevail. It is therefore of great importance that we should convince ourselves of the emptiness and vanity of creature enjoyments, and persuade our hearts to relinquish our love for them. Let us seriously consider all that ou ..read more

It's popular to apply the passage to something like a situation in which a man refuses to look for a job and wants to live off of government assistance instead. But the principle in 2 Thessalonians also has a broader application that tells us a lot about why the world is in the state it's in. Working a job isn't the most important work in life. In the contexts that are the most important, religious ones, the large majority of people are negligent. If you aren't willing to do the work needed to persuade people about theological issues, moral issues, and so on, why do you expect to reap the ben ..read more

Tertullian acknowledged that people were justified apart from baptism during Jesus' public ministry. But in response to critics of baptismal regeneration, he wrote, "in days gone by, there was salvation by means of bare faith, before the passion and resurrection of the Lord", whereas now "the law of baptizing has been imposed" (On Baptism 13). I've noted before that John's gospel emphasizes Jesus' statements about salvation during his public ministry (John 3:16, 5:24, 11:25-26, etc.), and John tells us that he wrote his gospel to lead people to salvation (John 20:31), using language similar t ..read more

Josephus is an important source on some baptismal issues, but he often gets overlooked or underestimated. He refers to how John the Baptist's baptism wasn't meant to be a means of obtaining justification. Dismissing Josephus as a non-Christian isn't an adequate objection, since the significance of his earliness and his knowledge of recent Jewish history don't depend on his being a Christian. You can be a non-Christian, but still be right about something. And if the advocate of baptismal regeneration wants to acknowledge that John's baptism wasn't justificatory, then he needs to address some im ..read more

When 2 Thessalonians 2:15 comes up in discussions related to the Christian rule of faith, we can begin by going several verses earlier and asking whether the oral teaching Paul refers to in 2 Thessalonians 2:6 has been preserved. It's a disputed passage that different people have interpreted in different ways. Beyond the specifics of 2:6, 2 Thessalonians in general is in large part about eschatology. When we look at the early oral eschatological traditions, such as the ones found in Papias and Irenaeus, they're largely premillennial, even though the most prominent modern critics of sola scrip ..read more

I disagreed with him on a lot of issues, but, as with anybody who does the sort of work he did, there's a lot to agree with him about and appreciate as well. Since there's so much that's false and fraudulent in religion and the paranormal, anybody who gives so much of his life to opposing that sort of thing is going to do some good in the process. One of my memories of him is an appearance he made on "The Sally Jessy Raphael Show" in the 1980s. He was part of a panel with Ed and Lorraine Warren, Ed sitting next to Joe. You can watch it on YouTube. Go here for a segment in which Joe commented ..read more

I'm not just referring to formal debates, though they're part of the problem. The bigger problem is how Protestants in general handle certain debates in general, whether formal or informal ones. There are a lot of issues that Protestants don't handle well, but two of the ones they handle the worst are baptismal regeneration and eternal security. It's about as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning that Roman Catholics and other critics of Protestantism will raise those issues over and over again, whether in formal debates, on their YouTube channels, or elsewhere. Protestants who reje ..read more

I've written before about how opposition to the perpetual virginity of Mary persisted beyond the earliest centuries, into the late patristic and early medieval eras. Bede, writing in the eighth century, uses the present tense to refer to opponents of the perpetual virginity of Mary: "That Mary is described as having given birth to her firstborn son [Luke 2:7] is not to be taken to mean that she also brought forth other sons, as the Helvidian heretics claim, as if Christ could not be called 'firstborn' unless he had brothers, in the same way that one is not customarily called 'only-begotten ..read more