St Jude's Mapperley Archive Blog

I don't know if you've been watching the TV series Bible Hunters . If not, I wouldn't bother. It's another badly done attempt to make Christianity look bad by fudging the evidence around the history of the Bible. But I thought it might be helpful to share something of how the New Testament came to exist. “prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” 2 Pet 1:21 Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead in either AD 30 or 33. By AD 50, the church had grown enough that some of the leaders of the church needed to write to other bits of it (Galatians written in 48, 1 Thessalonians in 51, James maybe even earlier). The churches found these letters so valuable that they made copies of them, and circulated them to other churches as well, and reading them alongside the Old Testament. Even by the time 2 Peter was written (mid-late 60s?), people were evidently reading Paul's letters as Scripture (2 Pet 3:16). Al...

Greetings! Yesterday we continued in our series on the 10 Commandments, and we looked in particular at the second commandment “You shall not make for yourself an idol...” The main point I drew out from the passage was that the essence of idolatry is us deciding for ourselves what God is like. We do that all the time in 21st century Nottingham, don't we? We come up with our ideas about what God should be like, and act like they are true. We pick and choose which bits of God we like, we love DIY religion, and God tells us not to. We saw that DIY religion is stupid. There's no reason at all why our ideas about God should be true, unless they come from the Bible which is how God has told us about himself. Sometimes we need to read the Bible carefully to see what it says – like when we read Exodus 20:5 which talks about God punishing children for the sins of their parents. When we read that, we need to bear in mind Ezekiel 18, where God is very clear that he only ...

Loving God | Loving Each Other | Loving our Community Greetings! Yesterday in the liturgical calendar was the festival of the Presentation of Christ at the Temple, which we remembered at the 9:15am service. I love the story of Simeon and Anna in Luke 2 . On one level, both Simeon and Anna had immensely dramatic lives. In terms of name recognition, they're better known today than almost anyone else – certainly better known than any politicians or generals except Augustus Caesar. Simeon's words are still remembered across the world. And yet on another level, both of them lived lives that were almost inconsequential. Both of them are remembered for something that happened near the end of their lives, after decades of waiting. Simeon, we are told, was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and Anna was looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. Both of them were longing for God to come and set his people free, for God to bring his ...