The Jerusalem Center for Bible Translators (JCBT) is a non-profit educational ministry which focuses on training mother tongue Bible translators, consultants-in-training and consultants. This training, under the auspices of the Rothberg International School for Overseas Students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, serves to allow increasing numbers of people to access to the Biblical message in their mother tongue created from a quality translation referencing the original Hebrew text.

The JCBT/Hebrew University program is designed specifically for Bible translators. JCBT has served translators and consultants from several Bible translation agencies, including Biblica, Bible League, IBT, NBTT, SIL, TSCO, UBS, Word for the World and Wycliffe, as well as sign language agencies like Deaf Missions and D.O.O.R. Students have come from 36 different countries.

That which is called the Chronological Gospel was initially penned by Trevor McIlwain of New Tribes Mission. There have been published at least three versions–a western version for adults, a western version for children, and a tribal version.

One will also find many other versions and many other names of essentially the same idea of teaching the Bible chronologically, starting with Genesis 1:1.

Keeping the original format, the first 68 lessons begin with the teaching of Genesis and Exodus (which is the first two-thirds of the lessons), after which one fast forwards to the life of Christ.

Lessons 69-80 are a summation of the first 68 lessons, primarily returning to the Old Testament lessons, and clearly placing Christ in the Old Testament.

After these 80 lessons, teaching has also been prepared in Acts, Romans, and Ephesians to be followed by lessons in other New Testament books.

Grr-Trude took her sermon today from Mark 9:19-24. //

I believe, help my unbelief

I will Logan you the faith you need for a miracle

The Bible assures us that at all times God is with us. He is our comforter; He is our healer. He is our physician; He is our provider. He knows better than we do.

When up against a bully, even when that bully is looking at me in the mirror, I focus on who I am in Christ. And knowing who I am in Christ gives me the strength and wisdom I need to face every bully. I gently (or more firmly if needed!) remind myself “I am who God says I am.”

The Family of Abraham

Abraham, the Friend of God
The Friend of God Falters
The Tragedy of Hagar
Ishmael: God Hears
Hostility toward the Brethren

You believe that there is one God; you do well."
James 2:19

The Stories and Message of God's Prophets
According to the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospel

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gabe44
10 hours ago
There is no way for us to know the financial means of Joseph and Mary. But inferences can be drawn if you look at Luke 2:24 and Leviticus 12:8. The former: 24 and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: “a pair of doves or two young pigeons.” The latter: 8 But if she cannot afford a lamb, she is to bring two doves or two young pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering.

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Laocoon gabe44
8 hours ago edited
I'm not sure that's any indication of anything.

By the 1st century Judiasm was dying. The people living in Judea and Galilee were mainly doing the min and calling it all good. The Pharisees created elaborate ways of avoiding as many of the religious obligations as possible. Jesus repeatedly criticized Jewish leaders for this nasty little habit. Not suggesting that either Joseph or Mary were as hypocritical as the Pharisees...but it's quite likely that they were doing the customary sacrifices that were found to be generally acceptable in their day. Luke actually says that when he refers to them "keeping what is said in the Law of the Lord". By the 1st century the whole doves/pigeons thing was pretty much the customary sacrifice and was in keeping with the conventional interpretation of the Leviticus passage.

As Streiff said...the term used for Joseph's profession is a Tekton. That term refers to a skilled craftsman..often in wood or stone. We get our word Architect from combining Archi (master, supervisor, leader, high skilled) and Tekton. During the youth of Jesus the Herodians were building Sepphoris only a short commute (6 kilometers) from Nazareth. They were snapping up all of the skilled workers they could lay their hands on and paying cash wages. Josephus records the scarcity of skilled craftsmen for the various projects the Herodians were working on. It was so bad that they were training Levite priests to be craftsmen to work on the more problamatic parts of Herod's Temple.

Can't prove it, but it's likely that a trained and skilled Tekton in Nazareth would be making a pretty good living from the work going on at Sepphoris. There weren't any US prevailing wage laws in 1st century Judea/Galilee...but from what we know about their building projects...the Herodians were quite willing to pay a premium to get quality work. We see that in Masada, in Caesarea, and in the remains of Sepphoris. And due to the craftsmen being absorbed in the near-by government bullding project at Sepphoris...prices for work on private sector projects would likely have risen as well. It was a good time to be a Tekton.

To some it may seem strange that we would quote Scripture, and then say it is a myth. But some have already caught on.

This very well known Scripture is often misquoted and mistunderstood. The way this Scripture should read is, "The wage of sin is death.

There is a GIGANTIC difference between what these two phrases communicate.

If we say, "the penalty for sin is death", then we infer that God is paying out the penalty. Nothing could be further from the truth. When attached to the rest of the verse, "but the free gift of God is eternal life", it makes it seem like God is sitting on a cloud with entrance tickets to heaven in one hand and a hangman's noose in the other. It infers that He is watching our lives and deciding which fate we will each earn by our behavior!

But actually, "sin" is being personified here. Jesus is telling us that if we make Sin our master, we will slave for him all of our lives and the wage he will pay us is death. In fact, we will have difficulty and darkness all through our lives if we choose to serve Sin.

Then there is a comparison. Jesus is telling us that God is already holding out a free gift in His hand, one which we do not have to work for -- life. Sin pays a wage - God gives a gift.

There are two ways to serve Sin. The first is to be to be drowning in self destructive habits, drugs, uncontrolled sex, drinking, lying, stealing, etc.

The second and less obvious way to be trapped by Sin is to attempt to please God through good behavior and religion. That will lead a person into an unwinnable battle with sin which can only end one of two ways; in false pride, or failure and sorrow. If we allow Sin to be our master and to control our lives, he will direct us into the same dead religious patterns that Jesus came to defeat. Sin will entrap, hurt, break down, and finally kill us.

But God has a gift - eternal, abundant, overflowing life. A gift, by definition, is something which is in no way earned.

The Arch Book series tells popular Bible stories through fun-to-read rhymes and bright illustrations. This well-loved series captures the attention of children, telling the Bible stories in an enjoyable and memorable way. This set contains one of each Arch Book currently in print.

View all books in the set here.

Arch® Books have brought Bible stories to life for millions of children worldwide since 1965. Perfect bedtime reading for children ages 5 to 9, Arch Books have long been trusted to teach important Bible stories with language and artwork that speak to preschoolers and beginner readers.

Price: $373.75 Arch Book Set (Set of 125)
by various authors
Item #: 591448
This well-loved series for children tells Bible stories in an enjoyable, memorable way.

Our custom Bible-based curriculum coordinates perfectly with our Torchlighter videos. Student guides contain puzzles, crafts, discussion questions and more for kids ages 8-12. Leader guides feature four Scripture-focused lesson plans, as well as additional teacher resources. Download them today!

Looking for other Torchlighter resources? Check out 10 ways you can use Torchlighters in your church.

Below are some books & resources that we recommend as tools for developing a habit of daily prayer and time in the Scriptures. We intentionally keep this list very short.

Very few Gentiles have a chance to see the Word of God without translation.

These Manuscripts have been carefully copied by our Jewish friends from around the world for the last 3,500 years.
Among the Jewish community there is no argument about the correct “translation”. They have the original Word of God without translation which has been so carefully copied, that if a Sefer Torah is written according to Halacha STaM (the law of the Sofer) it is .00004 (four one hundred thousands) in “world wide agreement correct”. A Sefer Torah contains 304,805 Hebrew letters and only six can not be agreed upon.

Basic formula for ink
(The following recipe is from the International Stam Forum stamforum.com/2012/03/dyo-making.html
This will produce about 2 quarts of fine, durable ink.

3 oz oak galls
1 oz logwood shavings
2.2 oz gum arabic
1.9 oz copperas

The trick to making really, really good iron gall ink is long, slow cooking of the galls and logwood. Some recipes I’ve seen call for just tossing all four ingredients together in a jar of water and allowing it to ‘macerate’ for a few weeks. This is great if you want to write with a disappointingly grey ink. However, if you’re like me and want an rich, deep black ink, straight from the bottle then we need to prepare the ingredients a bit more.

Stage One:
Assemble, weigh and prepare the ingredients for cooking.

In Michael Satlow’s book, How the Bible Became Holy (Yale, 2014), this same sort of argument appears. Satlow’s book argues that both the OT and NT canons were late bloomers, and that they bore no real authority until the third or fourth century CE. And part of the evidence for this claim comes from Satlow’s assessment of the NT manuscripts. He states:

The copies of early Christian manuscripts from around the second century CE were utilitarian. They were generally on papyrus rather than the more expensive and durable parchment. They lack the signs both of being written by a professional scribe and of being intended for public recitation (255).

There are a lot of claims in this brief couple of sentences. Unfortunately, virtually every one of them is mistaken. Let’s take them one at a time:

I’m a research professor who is learning to work well in biblical studies.

I want to help you do the same. Our programs often train us well in our content areas. But there’s a lot they have to leave out.

So, here you’ll find reflections on how to work well in biblical studies—particularly in ways typical curricula often miss out. Under this umbrella, we focus on helpful tools and resources, productivity, and working in academic biblical studies.

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, 29/03/19 09:43 | updated: 09:41

[טוויטר]
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis
Rabbi \Mirvis is the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. He was formerly Chief Rabbi of Ireland.

The fact that this week’s parasha is called Shemini, which means ‘the eighth’, issues an invitation to us to answer this question.

In Kabbalistic teachings, the number six represents the natural world. Hashem created our world in six days, and therefore we work on six days. The number seven represents the perfection of people. On the seventh day we celebrate Shabbat which is known as “M’ein Olam Haba” – the closest we can come in this world, to the perfect spirituality of the world to come. The number nine represents Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu, it is the divine number.

In maths, quite extraordinarily, a number can only be divided by nine if its digits add up to nine, or a multiple of nine. For example, in the number 459, 4+5+9 = 18 which is a multiple of 9, and therefore we know it is divisible by 9. It shows that 9 fits perfectly into the world around it, and that is a description of Hashem.

At the end of the Shema, we conclude the words “Hashem Eloheichem” – the Lord your God, but we always add the word ‘emet’ onto it which means truth. That is because the Talmud teaches us “chotamo shel HaKodesh Baruch Hu emet”, the seal of God is truth. The gematria of the word ‘emet’ adds up to 441, which is 4+4+1, which equals 9, indicating that the truth of Hashem is represented by the number 9.

So if seven represents the perfection of people, and nine represents Hashem, eight represents the bridge, connecting us with our creator.

That is why a baby boy has his ‘brit milah’ through which he establishes a covenant between himself and Hashem on the eighth day.

That is why the festival of Chanukah is eight days long when we recall the divine intervention which saved our people.

And that is why between Pesach and Shavuot for a period of 7×7 days we prepare ourselves for the re-enactment of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Once we reach that number 49, we are prepared for the festival of Shavuot, which takes places at the beginning of the eighth week, reminding us of that ultimate revelation when Hashem appeared to us, and of the first two of the ten commandments. He delivered them directly to us – the ultimate bridge between Heaven and earth.

Now we can understand our parasha, “vayehi b’yom hashemini” – and it came to pass on the eighth day – once the Mishkan (the sanctuary in the wilderness) had been completed, and the altar was there to be dedicated, for seven continuous days the people offered sacrifices with no response from God, but after those seven days, “va teitzei aish min ha Shamayim” – on the eighth day, fire came from Heaven and consumed the animal on the altar – there was that connection between Heaven and earth.

The number eight is a special number which issues a call to us. Let us embrace the natural world represented by the number six. Let us strive to reach our greatest potential for perfection, represented by the number seven. And in that way, may we merit to live up to the aspirations of the number eight, to feel the presence of Hashem in our lives and to enable Him to bless us always.

Shabbat Shalom.