Church and Biblical History

“…in Alaska, a church’s pastor preached from the parking lot during a drive-in Easter service, while the interior of the church was being used as an alternate hospital site to manage the overflow of COVID-19 patients. The last time churches in the U.S. were turned into temporary hospitals was during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

“…construction workers have toiled tirelessly to save the 13th-century relic by President Emmanuel Macron’s promised five-year timeline…. But as the coronavirus began to ravage the city, repair work on Notre Dame was stopped after already being delayed for months by contamination due to lead that melted from the roof.” - Fox

“Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby and chairman of the Museum of the Bible, is returning 11,500 antiquities to the Iraqi and Egyptian governments. The ancient clay seals and fragments of papyrus do not have complete documentation and may have been looted or stolen.” - CToday

“Church history is intertwined with plagues. Read about what healthcare looked like during the Roman Empire, how Christian communities responded to outbreaks like the Black Death by persecuting Jews, and how the modern church approached the AIDS crisis.” - CT

“As believers, we easily mistake these kinds of events and developments as ‘signs of the end,’ becoming anxious or sensational in our outlook. Jesus jettisons this perspective, though, saying the opposite – that when these things happen, ‘the end is not yet’ (Matt 24:6).” - P&D

“Not only have Christians cared for their neighbors during plague times–Stone also cites the example and words of Luther that we have been blogging about–they also pioneered principles of hygiene to prevent further infections” - Gene Veith

“A team of independent investigators has found that the 16 alleged Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. are forgeries. On March 13, Art Fraud Insights released a report over 200 pages long that it completed at the request of the Bible museum.” - CLeaders

“This temple was likely built around 900 B.C. and operated for a few hundred years, until its demise in the early sixth century B.C., according to Kisilevitz and her co-researcher, who wrote about it in the January/February issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine.” - LiveScience

“Brief statements of key doctrines have been with us since the beginning of biblical history.. .. Creeds and confessions are useful only to the extent that they reproduce faithfully the teaching of Scripture itself—serving as a helpful teaching tool for churches” - Crossway

Judas Maccabeus “liberated the Temple in 165 B.C. They immediately repaired the damage the pagans did to its sacred furnishings, destroyed and rebuilt its desecrated altar, and rededicated the Temple to the worship of God (Yahweh). A tradition emerged that they found only one container of olive oil not contaminated by the pagans, enough to burn for one day.