Book overviews
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John
So different from the other three in chronology, idiom and content that harmonising is not an option. Two endings, and a famous passage the earliest manuscripts do not have.
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Proverbs
Collections inside collections, a stretch running close to Egyptian instruction literature, and the error the form invites: reading an observation as a promise.
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Luke
A formal preface, a two-volume work with Acts, and a census in chapter 2 that remains a real and unresolved historical difficulty.
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Psalms
An anthology spanning centuries, five books with doxologies, and two numbering systems that make the same psalm a different number in different Bibles.
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Nahum
Three chapters against one city. Nahum is the shortest route into the central question of this site: Nineveh did fall, we know the year, and the whole argument is about when the poem was written.
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Mark
The shortest Gospel, earliest on the majority view, and the book with the most important textual fact in the New Testament attached to its final page.
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Exodus
The founding story of the Hebrew Bible and the one no Egyptian text names. The date debate, the silence of the record, and what “no evidence” does and does not mean.
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Matthew
Jewish framing, five discourses, fulfilment formulas — and a dating argument that turns on a single verse about a burnt city.
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Genesis
Origins, flood and patriarchs — the hardest book on this site to check, because it describes a period with almost nothing to check it against, and its closest documented relatives are not Israelite.