Studies
Hard biblical questions and original-language insights — 27 Anakalypsis study chapters covering hermeneutics, canon formation, textual transmission, biblical Hebrew and Greek, and more.
I. "The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail"
The standard pulpit reading goes: "no matter how hard Satan attacks, the Church will hold out." Comforting. Defensive. Survival theology. It is also the exact opposite of what the sentence is doing — and the exact opposite of where Jesus was standing when He said it.
II. Why Does God Allow Evil?
Theodicy is the oldest hard question, and people deserve more than "free will, mystery, the end."
III. We Should Love God Whether He Blesses Us or Not
The transactional gospel — "obey and be blessed" — is the loudest false teaching in American Christianity, and the Bible has been answering it for 3,000 years.
IV. "Pray Without Ceasing"
Three words. Two of them are doing heavy lifting that English translations bury.
V. Greek and Hebrew Words That Change Everything
Read these once and you can never read English Bibles the same way.
VI. Structure as Theology
Hebrew authors didn't write linearly the way we do. They built chiasms (X-shape, ABCBA — meaning is at the center, not the end), bookends (matching beginning and ending), and parallel panels. When you see the structure, you see the point.
VII. Hebrew Poetry Parallelism
The single biggest thing English readers miss about the Psalms (and Proverbs, and most of the prophets, and large stretches of Job): Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme. It parallels. The "rhyme" is in the thought, not the sound. Lines come in pairs (couplets) or threes (tricolons) where
VIII. The Hittite Treaty Form Behind Deuteronomy
When you read Deuteronomy with archaeological eyes, you discover it follows a specific ancient Near Eastern document type: the Hittite suzerain-vassal treaty of the late 2nd millennium BC. This is significant because:
IX. Hebrew Has No Tenses
English speakers misread the prophets because we expect grammar like ours: past, present, future. Hebrew doesn't have tenses. It has aspect — completed (perfective, qatal) vs. incomplete (imperfective, yiqtol) — and time is inferred from context.
X. The Synoptic Problem
About 90% of Mark's material appears in Matthew. About 50% of Mark appears in Luke. Matthew and Luke share another large body of material not in Mark, mostly sayings of Jesus. They are called the Synoptic Gospels ("seen together"). John, by contrast, is sui generis.
XI. The Second-Temple World the New Testament Breathes
The Bible has a roughly 400-year gap between the close of Malachi (~430 BC) and Matthew 1. The KJV places the Apocrypha in this gap; most Protestant Bibles skip it. That gap is the formative period for everything the NT assumes.
XII. The Seventy Sevens of Daniel
Seventy "sevens" = 490 (years, as most readers conclude). Gabriel breaks them as 7 + 62 + 1 = 70 sevens, with key events at the boundaries.
XIII. Melchizedek
A man appears in Genesis 14 for three verses, blesses Abraham, accepts a tenth of the spoils, and disappears. He has no recorded genealogy. He's not from the line of Aaron (which won't exist for 400+ years). He is king of Salem (probably Jerusalem) and priest of God Most High (El
XIV. "The Day of the Lord"
A motif chain you can trace from Joel to Revelation, and one of the keys to reading prophecy without getting whiplash. Sometimes "the Day of the Lord" means imminent local judgment. Sometimes it means a near-future national catastrophe. Sometimes it means the eschatological end.
XV. The Trinity in the Old Testament
The Trinity is not a Christian invention overlaid on the Hebrew Bible. It is recognized in the New Testament because it was already there — in the grammar, in the visitations, in the named figures who are both identified with YHWH and distinct from Him. The doctrine is fully arti
XVI. Matthew's Five Discourses
Matthew structures his Gospel around five major discourses — long blocks of Jesus' teaching, each ending with a closing formula ("when Jesus had finished these sayings..."):
XVII. The Seven "I AM" Sayings of John
John's Gospel is organized around seven ἐγώ εἰμι (egō eimi) sayings — "I AM" with a predicate complement. Each one stakes a divine claim to be something the OT promised God would give. The number seven is intentional: completeness, totality. The seven sayings together compose a s
XVIII. The Four Faces, The Four Gospels
Six centuries apart, two prophets describe the same vision. Ezekiel 1, by the river Chebar in exile around 593 BC, sees four living creatures around the throne of God, each with four faces — a man, a lion, an ox, an eagle. Revelation 4, written by John on Patmos around AD 95, des
XIX. The Criterion of Embarrassment
If you wanted to invent a religion, you would not invent it like this. You would not have the lead apostle deny his master three times before the rooster crowed. You would not have the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection be women — whose testimony was inadmissible in first-cen
XX. Why the Gospels Disagree on Details
Three angels at the tomb? Two? One? Did Jairus' daughter die before the messengers arrived, or after? Did the cock crow once or twice in Peter's denial? Did Judas hang himself or fall headlong in the field? Were Jesus' last words "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" or "I
XXI. Other Hard Questions Still to Develop
A running list. These deserve their own sections eventually; collecting them here so they're not lost.
XXII. Learning Koine Greek
Most Christians never learn Greek because the resources are pitched at seminary students who already know what a participle is. This is the on-ramp before that on-ramp: a single sitting that gets you reading John 1:1–5 in the original, understanding why the grammar matters, and k
XXIII. Learning Biblical Hebrew
If Greek opens the New Testament, Hebrew opens the other three-quarters of the Bible. And Hebrew is not harder than Greek — it is different. Twenty-two consonants, vowels written as little marks under the letters, no tenses (only aspect — see chapter IX), and verbs built from thr
XXIV. Hermeneutics
You can know Greek and Hebrew (chapters XXII–XXIII) and still mishandle Scripture. The opposite is also true — millions of readers without a word of Greek read the Bible faithfully and well. The difference is hermeneutics: the discipline of how to read. Get the rules right and th
XXV. How We Got the Bible
You can know Greek (XXII), Hebrew (XXIII), and hermeneutics (XXIV) and still hit a wall the first time someone asks: "How do you know you've got the right books?" or "Aren't the manuscripts full of errors?" or "Why is my NIV different from your ESV?" This chapter is the answer to
XXVI. The Shape of the Story
Most readers of the Bible — including most lifelong Christians — have read it as a collection of stories, laws, poems, and letters rather than as one coherent narrative. That's understandable: the Bible is 66 books, written by 40+ authors across 1,500 years, in three languages, o
XXVII. How to Actually Study a Passage
You can know hermeneutics (XXIV), the canon (XXV), the redemptive arc (XXVI), and even Greek and Hebrew (XXII–XXIII) — and still freeze when you sit down with a blank page and a passage at 6 AM Monday. The gap between understanding the theory and doing the work is its own discipl