Paul and Olena Miles with Grace Abroad Ministries
Say, “kai.” Now, say, “ho.” “Kai. Ho.” Kinda like that song from Slumdog Millionaire.
In Greek, “ho” means “the” and “kai” means “and.” In the New Testament, these two words are used 29,028 times (technically, ho will change forms in different situations, but it’s still basically the same word). Since there are only 138,162 words in the New Testament, you now know 21% of word occurrences in the NT. Congratulations!
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I enjoy nondogmatic speculation on issues where the Bible isn’t entirely clear. Did Jews build the Trojan horse? Did Elijah use Ba’al’s myths against him? We probably won’t know for sure on this side of eschatology, but they are fun things to think about. They can also be edifying topics for discussion because they force us to analyze what is written in the Word and give it precedence over what isn’t written in the Word.
I have developed a hypothesis that Joktan was the first creole speaker in recorded history. This hypothesis begs a few questions: 1) What is creole? 2) Who was Joktan? 3) Why did Joktan speak creole? and 4) Are you sure?
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Happy 4th of July! Today, we are going to talk about where the word, “America,” came from.
America is named after the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who went to Brazil about a decade after Christopher Columbus and discovered that it wasn’t Asia.
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I have recently come across the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia online (available here). It was an ongoing project over several decades in the Soviet Union, and gives insight to old Soviet mentality toward things. I looked up a few things and thought I’d translate some to give you a taste of Soviet propaganda. Here’s what the Ukrainian Soviets thought about the Bible:[Read More]
A brother in Christ has recently heard a preacher on the radio say that the last two verses of James prove that a Christian can lose his salvation. Let’s take a look at this passage and see how they fit in with the rest of the Bible’s teaching on God, man, and eternal life:
My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. (Jas 5:19-20 ESV)
The way we speak affects the way we think and the way we think affects the way we speak. And the way we speak is affected by centuries of geopolitical conflict and linguistic changes. Check out this map with translations of the word, “faith,” in various languages around Europe:
If you look at the map, you can see certain words that are similar and clumped together. The Slavic languages have something like “vera” (in the Cyrillic alphabet, “вера”). Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are all from the North Germanic branch, so they are all similar, whereas German and Dutch are from the West Germanic branch, so they look like each other.
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