While there are many ancient texts focusing on Jesus as a baby and as a man, much less is known about him as a child. Here’s what some of them tell us.
- Associate Professor, New Testament, & Inaugural Director of The Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy, University of Divinity
In Greg Sheridan’s latest book, “pagan” Rome is a straw man, against which he posits early Christianity as the loving and brave hero.
Ces trois textes religieux justifient tous les guerres défensives. Mais ils y fixent des limites strictes, et soulignent également l’importance de la paix.
These three key religious texts all offer justifications for defensive wars. But they also stress the importance of peace.
The Christmas story famously begins with an angel visiting the virgin Mary. Yet their history is of beings capable of both wonder and terror.
Both major parties leaned in to the Bible and Christianity at their recent conventions, but in very different ways.
Like a lot of things that happen at this time of year, the Stations of the Cross is a ritual – and an important one to many.
Dalam Alkitab, surga adalah tempat di mana Tuhan tinggal, bukan tempat kehidupan kekal. Namun seiring berjalannya waktu, hal ini telah menjadi tercampur aduk dengan gagasan tentang surga dan keselamatan abadi.
Some conservative Christians have taken to claiming ‘victim’ status in the modern world, but we should be wary of such claims.
The cross was not always the dominant symbol of Christianity, and would certainly not have been worn as a fashion accessory by early Christians.
It is not unusual that Morrison talks about prayer in his responses. But we might expect more than just prayer from a devout Christian who also happens to be prime minister.
Two Christmas traditions – those around the birth of Jesus and Santa who brings gifts to all – contain strong elements of magic.
Communion – including drinking the symbolic blood of Christ – is a spiritual act, not a medical cure. To argue otherwise is a dangerous corruption of Christian belief.
Australians have always preferred to keep their faith private, and politics “out” of religion. But the two are intrinsically entwined, and always have been.
The things we find hard to balance during COVID-19 – individual freedoms versus the group, accountability versus blame, science versus personal beliefs – are centuries old and deeply human.
Had Trump read the text he held, he would have found a story of liberation for slaves, a divine preference for the poor, and a damning critique of any empire that oppressed its people.
For people of faith, for whom communal prayer and service are central to their beliefs, the need to stay away from each other is particularly challenging.
The idealisation of Mary as a virgin has created a misguided and deeply damaging relationship between sex and sin within the Christian church.
In the societies the Bible was written in, masculinity was the ideal. So it’s astonishing there are moments of gender subversion and gender diversity found in the Bible’s pages.
While some conservative Christians view Halloween as “devil worship”, finding a way to honour the dead is an important tradition in our generally death-denying society.
In the Bible, heaven is where God resides, rather than a place of eternal life. But over time it has become conflated with ideas of paradise and eternal salvation.
“Hell” in the Bible is a highly symbolic idea designed to persuade people to stay faithful to their God, not to set out a precise agenda for the afterlife.
¿Qué ocurriría si la sociedad occidental y los cristianos se enfrentaran a la realidad de que el cuerpo clavado de la cruz era negro?
The biblical story of Jesus’s birth is an inherently political story – something that makes many Christians uncomfortable.
The prime minister’s pentecostal faith champions a simplistic reading of the Bible - but that can lead its followers to a narrow view of the world.
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