Apologetics is often of greater benefit to believers than unbelievers, and this is both proper and biblical (Acts 18:27-28).

The apostles evangelized an empire without once telling people that God loved them.

Politics is the most respectable form of thievery.

It is impossible for a private citizen or organization to violate your First Amendment rights.

Anything that’s not worse than alcohol or cigarettes should be decriminalized immediately; let’s show some c0nsistency. Then we should start debating the rest.

There’s text in your Bible that’s not Scripture. No, I’m not talking about the chapter and verse divisions, nor the introductions and appendices. I’m referring to the story of the woman caught in adultery, John 7:53-8:11, and the long ending of Mark, Mark 16:9-20.

As you may notice from a small footnote in your Bible, these passages are missing in some of the best and earliest manuscripts. In the case of Mark, it’s easy to understand why someone would add a longer ending: without it, the Resurrection story simply ends with the women being afraid and telling no one, and neglects to tell of anything Jesus did after he was risen. And indeed, people came up with not just the ending you see in your Bible, which is only the most common, but also several others. And some manuscripts that do have the ending also put markings to indicate it was not believed to be original. (See this footnote in the NET Bible for much greater detail.)

In the case of the story of the woman caught in adultery, often referred to as the pericope adulterae, there’s even greater evidence for it’s illegitimate provenance, beyond it’s being missing in almost all early manuscripts and being marked as suspect in others. And among the manuscripts that include it, amazingly, it’s not always even placed in the book of John! A couple manuscripts place it in different parts of Luke, and others put it in different spots in John. Suffice it to say that original passages in John don’t occasionally vacation in Luke. (See the NET Bible’s detailed footnote.)

As to why it made its way into John, my guess would be for the same reason people keep talking about it today: it’s a memorable and powerful story, possibly an early tradition about Jesus that was not written down in Scripture. I’d guess that if you asked people to name their top 5 favorite stories about Jesus, it would pop up quite often. Eventually, somebody added it to its current place in John, and it stuck. Might it be true? Perhaps, but we can’t know, nor can we put our trust in it as Scripture. Certainly any doctrine must be proved elsewhere.

So what then should we do? Well, until such time as Bible publishers have the courage to remove the passages from the Bible, or at least relegate them to footnotes, we need to make clear that these are not Scripture. That way we won’t be surprised when the Bart Erhman’s of the world make the “shocking” revelation that they’re not original. (And by the way, these two passages are the only large insertions into the Bible. There are no others like them.) We shouldn’t read them in Bible study or preach them in sermons.

We certainly shouldn’t use them to make doctrinal points, even if they’d be convenient for proving that point. Doctrine must be proved from Scripture, not from stories we wish were Scripture. If you can only prove your point by saying, “Let him without sin cast the first stone,” then you don’t have a biblical point. If there’s a point to be made about Jesus, it must be made from somewhere else. God has given us more than enough to learn about Christ in the Bible; we needn’t look elsewhere.

If you’re trying to make a point from a Bible verse and you can’t make that point unless you only quote part of the verse (or passage)–then that verse doesn’t make that point.

It won’t take a lot of money for the Kingdom to advance, but it will take a lot of generosity.

Why the Free Market Beats Government Control

In a free market, a company increases profits by either producing a good/service that pleases a larger number of people or finding more efficient ways to operate. In a government-controlled market, a company increases profits by gaining the favor of a small number of government officials.

“And as this verse says in The Message translation…”

It’s quite common to hear Christians call The Message a translation or to see it quoted in a book in the same way as translations like the NIV, ESV, etc. Yet this is a misunderstanding of what The Message actually is; it’s a paraphrase, not a translation. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad or that Christians shouldn’t use it, but it should change how we use it.

The Message is the work of Eugene Peterson, a pastor and scholar who created it as a paraphrase from the original languages of the Bible (in this respect it differs from The Living Bible, which was a paraphrase of an English translation). Since it’s a paraphrase, it’s not attempting to translate the words of the Bible; it’s trying to restate what Eugene Peterson thinks those words mean in a way that will be compelling to contemporary English speakers. As Peterson himself has stated, it is not the Word of God, nor should it be used in church for Scripture reading.

All this does not mean that it’s bad for a person to read The Message or quote it, any more than it’s wrong to read any pastor’s interpretation or rephrasing of Scripture, but it does mean it should not be read as having the divine authority of a real Bible. So read it as one pastor’s vividly written commentary on Scripture, but don’t read it as the Bible.