A Pilgrim's Search

A Fresh Look at the Bible and Its History

Latest Articles

When Was The Book of Deuteronomy Written?

An old Jewish joke says that for every two Jews, you have three opinions, but that could also apply to biblical scholars. Because no two biblical scholars can agree on anything, and they oftentimes disagree with themselves, eagerly hedging their own theories, proposing counter-options. It is true that academics quarrel over theories for a living, but biblical scholarship takes it to a whole other level and is notorious for the complete lack of agreement on even the most basic views…

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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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