Archive for July 2006

Relevant Radio… How To Defend Your Faith

July 31, 2006 by gmichuta.

I’ll be on Relevant Radio’s new show, Searching The Word, tomorrow August 1st at 1pm (Central). Chuck Neff and I will be exploring what it takes to explain and defend the Catholic Faith. If your local Catholic radio station carries the Relevant Radio Network, please tune in. It should be a lot of fun!

Posted in Being There | No Comments »

Great Weekend Meeting Great Ministries

July 31, 2006 by gmichuta.

I’m back from the Defending the Faith Conference at Steubenville, Ohio. If you haven’t attended this conference, I highly recommend it especially if you are just starting Catholic apologetics.

I would like to give a special thank you to Rob Corzine of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. The St. Paul Center is doing remarkable work in promoting good, sound, and exciting material on Scripture. I highly recommend their site which includes online classes on Scripture and many other goodies. The address is www.salvationhistory.com. Check it out.

Posted in Scripture Study | 1 Comment »

See You In Steuby…

July 28, 2006 by gmichuta.

Anyone going to the Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Defending the Faith Conference this weekend? I have a lot of friends from around the U.S. and Canada who attend this conference regularly so I try to attend every year to see them. If you are going, I will be on campus Saturday. Please come by me and say hello. It would be good to meet you.

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Question From Caller: Did Jesus Know Greek?

July 27, 2006 by gmichuta.

Yesterday, I received a question from a caller on a comment that I had made regarding the language spoken in Jerusalem and surrounding areas.It has once been taught that the Jews in Judea spoke only Hebrew (and maybe a little Latin to communicate with their Roman occupiers) while the Jews of the Diaspora spoke Greek or Latin. From this oversimplification came the two-canon theory of the Old Testament canon. The two-canon theory claimed that Hebrew speaking Jews accepted as Scripture only books written in Hebrew, while the more liberal Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora (especially Alexandria) accepted books written in either Hebrew or Greek. As the theory goes, the Jews in Judea rejected the Deuterocanon because they were written in Greek, while the Jews of the Diaspora accepted it.

The theory had become so widely accepted that by the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed to be an incontestable fact until A.C. Sundberg in his Harvard dissertation dismantled the theory (Albert Sundberg Jr., The Old Testament of the Early Church. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). By the time of Sundberg’s dissertation many of the assumptions of the two-canon theory have already been debunked. One of them was the distinction made between the Hebrew and Greek speaking Jews upon which the theory relied. Sundberg demonstrates, along with other recent works, that the first century Jerusalem was just as Hellenzed as any other major city in the ancient Middle East. From the discoveries of Greek inscriptions in ancient synagogues in Palestine and other evidence, scholars now believe that there was a very large portion of the population of Judea that knew Greek. Some have even suggested that a few of these synagogues may have used the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament that is often quoted in the New Testament) as their Bible for their Greek-speaking congregations. Therefore, contrary what one may find in the movie The Passion of the Christ, the Jews of Jesus’ day spoke Aramaic (Hebrew) and Greek. In regards to the canon, it now appears that the Jews of the Diaspora were not free-wheeling liberals when it came to the canon. A more likely scenario is that the Jews of the Diaspora followed the example set in Jerusalem for their canon, which contained books written in Hebrew and Greek.

The next time someone tells you that the Deuterocanon can’t be Scripture because the Jews in Jerusalem only knew Hebrew you can help them correct their antiquated understanding. You may also wish to peruse a couple of articles that I have in the Deuterocanon section of my website.

God Inspired Scripture Only In Hebrew

Were There Two Canons in Palestine and Alexandria?

Posted in Deuterocanon | 1 Comment »

Welcome To Our New Blog

July 26, 2006 by gmichuta.

Hello all. Welcome to our new blog that will focus on hands on Catholic apologetics and evangelism in the modern world. It will also contain some random thoughts on the Faith and updates on what is going on around the U.S. as far as talks, conferences and so on. Please keep checking because its going to be a lot of fun.

If you haven’t seen our new website go to www.handsonapologetics.com and check it out for yourself.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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