A Pilgrim's Search
A Fresh Look at the Bible and Its History
Latest Articles
The Bible’s Crucial Lesson
Our purpose here is to expose what the Bible teaches is God’s desire and intentions of, and for us, and as a result, how the rest of one’s traditional religious beliefs and practices are supplanted. Having understood God’s heart for us, we will see which aspects of the Bible reveal it, and which don’t. Those that don’t, we need to recognize are there for different, and by definition, secondary, reasons. The Bible’s story of God’s plan and message isn’t “new”.…
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Why Was Jesus Murdered?
Theories about how Jesus’ death dealt with our separation from God have come and gone throughout church history. The favored, traditional Christian doctrine is that Jesus was sacrificed on the cross to “forgive our sins”. This is believed to be crucial since those sins were holding us apart from God’s “justification” and, it is believed, our resultant ticket to God’s heaven when we die.
More cynical observers say that this is simply the “Get out of Hell free” version of…
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Jesus’s Nature
Christian tradition has long affirmed that Jesus is divine—one “person” of a triune Godhead. This framework interprets His authority, miracles, and exaltation as evidence of inherent deity. Yet the New Testament also presents Jesus as a fully human figure who lived, acted, and suffered within the constraints of human biology.
A second model has garnered some support and that is the idea that God manifested Himself as the human Jesus, so-called Modalism[i]. In this model, God presents an image that…
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Always Learning, Never Knowing
Most people who embark on a journey expect to arrive at their destination. Airports contain huge boards showing the status, gate number, and destination of all of its departing airplanes. All of the people boarding a flight for a particular destination fully expect to arrive at that destination.
But this situation isn’t true of every pursuit. Our premise here is that there are those embarked on the abstract journey of “knowing” that don’t always want to succeed. They don’t want…
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Moses in Egypt?
The Bible’s Exodus narrative is quite specific about Moses’s history in Egypt: his adoption by the Queen; His rise to responsibility and power under Pharaoh; his crime, and his flight to Midian to escape justice.
And from Moses’s introduction in this narrative, the Exodus author goes out of his way to inform us that Moses is from the tribe of Levi. We’ll look for Moses in the historical record, we’ll also try to understand the significance of his Levite identity. …
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Israel In Egypt?
Where is the evidence for Israel in Egypt and their Exodus from it? When we look for its memory in Egypt we don’t find it. When we look for it at Jericho we don’t find it. When we look for it in Egyptian or Mesopotamian records we don’t find it. You would think something as momentous as an entire nation emigrating from one land to another would get some mention in the historical (not just the biblical) record. But we…
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