In recent years a new focus has emerged in biblical interpretation: The role played by the natural world in shaping the religion and culture of the ancient Israelites, and their attitudes toward nature. Earlier biblical interpretation precluded this focus. As outlined in the Introduction, scholars interpreted the Bible from an exclusively history-oriented perspective. They focused on the events...

This thesis is a Biblical Exegesis of Colossians 3:1-3 investigating its significance for Christians today. It explored: the historical, cultural and literary context of Colossians and the church in Colossae; in depth exegetical analysis to determine authorship and its original meaning, including preliminary analysis, contextual analysis, verbal analysis, literary analysis, an exegetical synthe...

Within a broader context of visual and musical symmetry patterns, we explore biblical parallelism, the poetic symmetry patterns of the Bible. We present six frequently occurring parallel forms – simple, chiastic, elliptical, sequential, unequal length, and repeated words. These six forms are broad enough to include many known examples of biblical parallelism. Our major contribution is a system ...

Schism The noun schism (schisma) which occurs eight times in the New Testament, is derived from the verb schizo to split, to separate, to tear apart, to cleave, to rend. Schisma can sometimes simply mean an actual tear, as in Matthew 9: 16 where Jesus says 'No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made' (cf. Lk. 5: 3...

Note: Contribution to ‘Augustine and Manichaean Christianity’, the First South African Symposium on Augustine of Hippo, University of Pretoria, 24−26 April 2012. Dr Jacob van den Berg is participating as research fellow of Prof. Dr Hans van Oort, Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Church History and Polity of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Afr...

Biblical texts attribute the same activities and features to biblical gods Yahweh Jesus, as other – mostly older of Ancient Near East gods. Almost all non-biblical have been transfered It means that religious thinkers shared common worldview. Our analysis undermines opinion uniqueness Judaism Christianity. Such view is false, it creation Jewish Christian theologians. One cannot find supprot in ...