The Book of Jubilees is an ancient Jewish text from the Second Temple period. As a text, it played a significant role in the religion of the first century AD. Josephus made heavy use of it in his Antiquities. In addition to being a textual composition, Jubilees is a repository for a vast swathe of Jewish religious and historical traditions providing a window into the understanding and practices of Jewish people during this period. Many of the ideas found in Jubilees appear in the New Testament, casually mixed as traditions with the text of the Hebrew scriptures themselves. In a handful of places, the New Testament authors seem to cite Jubilees directly. Many of the earliest Fathers reference this text…
In discussions of the Christian religion, perhaps no word is bandied about more frequently than the word ‘faith’. Despite its frequency of use, defining precisely what it means based on usage often proves elusive. This is likely due to the variety of historical and religious contexts in which the term has come to be used. The central principle of the Protestant Reformation was salvation by faith alone. This established an ongoing debate about the relationship between faith and works in salvation. The Christian faith refers sometimes to the whole of the Christian religion, sometimes to Christian beliefs or dogmas, sometimes to a restricted list of core beliefs or dogmas which are seen as unquestionable. When dealing with the struggles and…
