Big news! My wife Melissa and I have just launched a website to be the new online home for our ministry content. It’s called Word First, and we are thrilled. For years, we’ve been laboring in our respective ministry areas and have produced content on our blogs Canon Fodder and Wit’s End. And that will...

Pepuza. That’s not a name that probably means anything to modern ears. In the late the second century, a radical self-proclaimed prophet named Montanus declared that Pepuza—a remote village in Phrygia (modern date Turkey)—would be the location of the second coming.   His prophecies were accompanied by ecstatic experiences and strange utterances, thought by his...

Since the Gospels are Greco-Roman biographies, we should not be surprised that their authors would want to include eyewitness testimony. After all, the principle that historical accounts should be based on eyewitness reports (either directly indirectly) was an established value among all the ancient historians ranging from Herodotus to Thucydides to Polybius and even to...