Education, Advocacy and Activism

Before there was a Pentecostal movement there was a 230-year search for a second, definite experience of God after conversion. This lesson traces it from Spener's Pia Desideria (1675), Halle and the Moravians of Herrnhut, through John Wesley's Aldersgate experience (May 24, 1738) and his doctrine of Christian perfection, the rise of American Methodism, Phoebe Palmer's "altar" teaching, the national holiness camp mee…

How a Kansas Bible school in 1901 and a Los Angeles mission in 1906 started the Pentecostal movement, how it divided over sanctification, the Trinity and race, and how it organized into the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God, the Assemblies of God and the Foursquare Church. Then the healing revival, the Full Gospel Business Men, the Charismatic Renewal in Episcopal and Catholic churches, and C. Peter Wagner'…

What "evangelical" has meant from Luther's followers and the 18th-century revivals to the new evangelicals of the 1940s: the NAE (1942 to 1943), Carl Henry's Uneasy Conscience, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, Wheaton and Billy Graham from Los Angeles in 1949 to New York in 1957 and Lausanne in 1974. The lesson compares Bebbington's four marks, the 2015 NAE and Lifeway belief test, and Gallup and Pew survey coun…

Independent churches answer to no denomination, and the 2020 U.S. Religion Census counted 44,319 of them with about 21.1 million adherents, more than the Southern Baptist Convention. This lesson traces their roots (Congregational independence, the Restoration Movement, Bible churches, independent Baptists), weighs the census, the National Congregations Study, Pew and the Hartford megachurch studies, explains the see…

How hippies and runaways became evangelical Christians between 1967 and the late 1970s, from the Living Room and the House of Acts in San Francisco to Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. The lesson checks the dates of Chuck Smith's arrival (first sermon Dec. 5, 1965), Lonnie Frisbee's ministry, departures and death, the House of Miracles, the Pirate's Cove baptisms, the tent, Time's June 21, 1971 cover and Explo '72, keep…

What Calvary Chapel teaches and how it is run, in its own words first: Chuck Smith's verse-by-verse method and his "distinctives," the pastor-led "Moses model" with the named critics and defenders of it, and the statements of faith of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, the Calvary Chapel Association and the Calvary Global Network compared line by line. It then traces the radio ministry, Maranatha! Music and Calvary Chapel B…

How one Costa Mesa congregation became a network of well over a thousand churches, which pastors came out of it, and what happened after Chuck Smith died on Oct. 3, 2013. The lesson sets out the 2016 split between the Calvary Chapel Association and Brian Brodersen's Calvary Global Network in each side's own words, the controversies documented in court filings and named news reports, the debate over the Moses model, …

How a Calvary Chapel church plant in Los Angeles (1974) became the Vineyard, and how John Wimber, a former musician and Fuller church growth consultant, led it after his Yorba Linda church left Calvary Chapel in 1982. Covers the Mother's Day meeting with Lonnie Frisbee, Fuller Seminary's MC510 course and its 1986 cancellation, the 1987 report Ministry and the Miraculous , Wimber's books and kingdom theology, Vineyar…

From 1990 to 1997 the Vineyard took in, and then parted from, the Kansas City prophets and the Toronto Airport Vineyard, whose "Toronto Blessing" began on Jan. 20, 1994, and spread to Holy Trinity Brompton in London. After John Wimber's death on Nov. 17, 1997, Vineyard USA passed through four national directors, left women's ordination to local churches in 2006, kept a traditional position on marriage, and rebuilt i…

Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard share Jesus People roots, a casual style, contemporary worship and independence from the older denominations, and both say the gifts of the Spirit continue today. This capstone compares their current official statements on the gifts, church government, the end times, music, women in ministry, succession and scandal, draws the family tree from Pietism to both movements, and ends with a…

From the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate (AD 30 or 33) to about AD 100: the first Jewish community in Jerusalem, Peter, James and Stephen, Paul's conversion, letters and journeys, the Jerusalem council and the Gentile question, Nero's punishment of Christians in 64 and the fall of Jerusalem in 70. The lesson reads Acts and Paul beside Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius, shows how the first Christians baptized, met in …

The generation after the apostles left letters, a church manual and a martyr's story: 1 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, the Didache, Barnabas, Hermas, Papias and Diognetus. In the same decades the Gnostic teachers, Marcion and the Montanists offered rival accounts of God, Christ, Scripture and prophecy. This lesson reads each side in its own surviving words, then Irenaeus, Tertullian and the record, and ends with the r…

From Nero's punishment of Christians at Rome in 64 to Galerius's edict of toleration in 311, the church lived under the threat of death for refusing the gods. This lesson reads the Roman evidence (Tacitus, Pliny and Trajan, the Decian sacrifice certificates on papyrus, Galerius's own edict) beside the Christian martyr accounts and the apologists from Aristides and Justin to Tertullian and Origen. It weighs the estim…

How Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 and the letter of 313 changed the church's place in the Roman world, and what did not change. The lesson reads Arius, Alexander and Athanasius in their own words, gives the creed of 325 and its anathemas word for word with all 20 canons, sorts out how many bishops came to Nicaea, and follows the fight over one Greek word from 325 to the eve of Constantinople in …

How the churches settled who the Holy Spirit is and how Christ is both God and man, from the Cappadocian Fathers and Theodosius's edict of 380 through the councils of Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). Each side speaks in its own words, with the creed and the Chalcedonian definition word for word, the churches that rejected Chalcedon, and the modern agreements of 1973, 1990 and 1994.

The life of Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430) from his own Confessions and his biographer Possidius, from Thagaste and the Manichees to the garden in Milan, Hippo and the Vandal siege. Pelagius, Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum speak in their own surviving words, and the councils from Diospolis (415) and Carthage (418) to Ephesus (431) and Orange (529) are quoted from their canons. The lesson ends with how Catholics, …

How Christian monasticism grew from consecrated virgins and widows into the desert movement of Antony and Pachomius, the community rules of Basil and Benedict, and the reforms of Cluny and Citeaux. The lesson quotes Athanasius's Life of Antony, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Palladius, the Rule of Benedict, Gregory's Dialogues and the Cluny charter in named public domain translations, then weighs the scholarly d…

How the Latin West and the Greek East drifted apart over language, empire, papal authority and the filioque, what actually happened in Hagia Sophia on July 16, 1054, and why historians call 1054 a symptom more than a clean break. The sack of Constantinople in 1204, the failed unions of Lyon and Florence, the fall of 1453 and the 1965 lifting of the excommunications follow, then a plain description of the Orthodox Ch…

How the Latin church grew from Gregory the Great's Rome (590 to 604) into the central institution of medieval Europe: the missions to England and the Franks, Charlemagne's coronation in 800, parish life and the sacraments, the fight between popes and emperors at Canossa and Worms, Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council, the Crusades, the first inquisitions, the scholars and universities, Unam Sanctam, Avignon a…

From the Lyon merchant Valdes in the 1170s to Erasmus's Greek New Testament of 1516, movements inside and outside the medieval church called it back to the poverty and preaching of the Gospels. This lesson reads the Waldensians, Wycliffe and the Lollards, and Jan Hus and the Hussites in their own words, then sets out the record of their condemnation (Verona 1184, Blackfriars 1382, the statute of 1401, Constance 1415…

Martin Luther's protest against the preaching of indulgences in October 1517 grew within four years into a break with Rome over the authority of the pope, the councils and the Bible. This lesson follows Luther from the thunderstorm vow of 1505 through the 95 Theses, Leipzig, the treatises of 1520 and Worms to the Augsburg Confession and the Peace of Augsburg, quoting his own writings and the church documents. It rat…

Zwingli's Zurich, the first Anabaptists and the Schleitheim Confession, Calvin's Geneva and the Servetus case, the Reformed churches of France, Scotland, the Netherlands and the Palatinate, the English Reformation from Henry VIII to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Catholic response in the new orders, the Jesuits and the Council of Trent, each told first in its own documents and then from the record. The last lesso…

From the Formula of Concord (1577) and the Book of Concord (June 25, 1580) to the American synods: Muhlenberg's Ministerium (1748), the Saxon emigration and the founding of the Missouri Synod in Chicago (April 26, 1847), the Wisconsin Synod (1850), the Synodical Conference and its breakup, Seminex (1974), the 1988 ELCA merger, the 2009 decisions and the bodies that left. Each body's beliefs on fellowship, communion,…

Presbyterians are the Reformed churches governed by elders in sessions, presbyteries and assemblies, and most confess the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646 to 1647). This lesson follows them from the Scots Confession of 1560 and the Westminster Assembly through the Disruption of 1843 to the American divisions and reunions: Old Side and New Side, Old School and New School, North and South, the Auburn Affirmation …

The Calvinist and Arminian debate in the words of its own documents: Arminius's Declaration of Sentiments (1608), the five articles of the Remonstrance (1610), the Canons of Dort (1619) and chapter III of the Westminster Confession. The lesson traces where the TULIP acronym came from (first recorded 1913), explains Amyraut's middle way, the Lutheran rejection of both systems in the Formula of Concord and Wesley's ev…

How the Church of England took its lasting shape in the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, the Thirty-nine Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and how the Episcopal Church got its first bishops from Scotland and England after the Revolution. The lesson follows the Oxford Movement, the Lambeth Conference and the Quadrilateral, women's ordination and the 1979 prayer book, and the splits from 2003 to the ACNA, GA…

How English Puritans and Separatists built churches gathered by covenant, carried them to Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630), and wrote them into the Cambridge Platform (1648) and the Half-Way Covenant (1662). The lesson follows disestablishment in Connecticut (1818) and Massachusetts (1833), the Unitarian break, the mergers of 1931 and 1934, the United Church of Christ (June 25, 1957) and the continuing C…

From John Smyth's 1609 baptism in Amsterdam and Thomas Helwys's 1612 plea to King James to the Southern Baptist Convention's June 2026 vote on pastors: the General and Particular Baptist lines, the 1689 Confession, Roger Williams, Backus and Leland on religious liberty, the 1845 division over slavery, Landmarkism and the conservative resurgence. The lesson then describes the many kinds of Baptists (Southern, America…

How Wesley's American societies became the Methodist Episcopal Church at the 1784 Christmas Conference, and how that one body divided and reunited: the AME, AME Zion and CME churches, the Methodist Protestants, the 1844 split over slavery, the 1939 and 1968 unions, the Holiness churches (Wesleyan, Free Methodist, Nazarene, Salvation Army, Church of God), and the 2019 to 2024 United Methodist split that produced the …

The churches that grew from the Anabaptist movement after 1527: the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, the Amish division of 1693, the Mennonite settlers at Germantown, the Hutterites' community of goods and the Brethren of Schwarzenau. Each body is described in its own words, with its own counts and their years, through Wisconsin v. Yoder and the divisions of the 2020s.

The Religious Society of Friends from George Fox's preaching in the 1640s to the branches of 2026: the Light within, silent worship, the peace testimony of 1661, persecution in England and the hangings in Boston, Penn's Pennsylvania, Woolman and the end of Quaker slaveholding, and the Hicksite, Gurneyite and Wilburite separations that produced FGC, FUM, EFCI and the Conservative Friends. With the other radicals of t…

How Barton W. Stone's Kentucky "Christians" and Thomas and Alexander Campbell's "Disciples" set out to unite all Christians on the Bible alone, joined in 1832, and then divided over organs and missionary societies (recorded in the 1906 census) and again over the Disciples' 1968 restructure. Each of the three modern streams, the a cappella Churches of Christ, the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ,…

What "mainline" and "evangelical" mean as researchers and the councils use them, and what the bodies' own records show: the ELCA, UCC, PC(USA), Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church have each lost half or more of their members since their peaks, while the Southern Baptist Convention has declined for nineteen straight years and the Assemblies of God grew until about 2010. The lesson sets the denominational cou…

Three movements often lumped together as "dominionism": Christian Reconstruction and theonomy (Rushdoony, Bahnsen, North), the New Apostolic Reformation named by C. Peter Wagner, and the Seven Mountains framing traced to Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright in 1975. Each is described from its own writers' texts, then answered by the Reformed, evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic critics who rejected it, in their own…

A short orientation to three large Christian families that the Protestant lessons keep meeting: the Pentecostal bodies (Assemblies of God, Church of God in Christ, Church of God of Cleveland, Foursquare and the Oneness UPCI), the Orthodox jurisdictions in America and the OCA's 1970 autocephaly, and the Catholic Church in the United States with its Eastern Catholic eparchies. Each is described in its own words, then …

The whole of Part B on one page: a family tree of the Protestant families from the Reformation to 2026, with the Catholic and Orthodox churches for orientation, and a comparison table of what each body says about authority, baptism, communion, church government and ordination, with its founding date and latest US count (year and source given for every figure). A paragraph reviews each of lessons 01 to 13, and a list…

The Greek word martys meant a witness; by the time of the Martyrdom of Polycarp in the second century it meant a Christian who died for the faith. This lesson traces that shift, the line between martyr and confessor, and the feast days and lists that kept the dead remembered, then profiles the main sources of martyr history from Eusebius and the Depositio Martyrum to Foxe, the Martyrs Mirror, Challoner and the moder…

Briefs on the first Christian martyrs: John the Baptist, Stephen, James the son of Zebedee, James the brother of Jesus, Peter, Paul and Antipas of Pergamum, each with the earliest source, its date and a record-strength rating. The lesson separates what the Gospels, Acts, Revelation, Josephus and the earliest Christian letters say from what later tradition and legend added, and rates the deaths of the other apostles …

Nine briefs on the best-recorded martyrs of the Roman persecutions, from Ignatius of Antioch to Agnes and the Great Persecution of 303. Each brief sets the earliest record (letters, court transcripts, a church's eyewitness letter, Perpetua's own prison diary) apart from later tradition and legend, such as Lawrence's gridiron and the Colosseum. The lesson also weighs the estimates of how many died and links Module 79…

After 313 Rome stopped killing Christians, but Christians kept dying for their faith: in Persia under Shapur II, at Avarayr in Armenia in 451, on the Frisian mission field with Boniface in 754, and inside Christendom itself, where Wenceslas, Thomas Becket and the Waldensians died at Christian hands. Eight briefs set the earliest record of each death beside the traditions and legends that grew around it, ending with …

Between Wycliffe's death in 1384 and Tyndale's in 1536, church courts condemned reformers for heresy and secular rulers carried out the deaths. This lesson gives the charge, court, law and trial record for Wycliffe, the Lollards Sawtrey, Badby and Oldcastle, Jan Hus, Hieronymus of Prague (Jeroným Pražský), Savonarola and Tyndale, and separates the eyewitness record from later sayings and legends.

Eight briefs on Protestant and Anabaptist deaths from 1523 to 1569: the first Lutheran martyrs at Brussels, Felix Manz drowned by Reformed Zurich, Michael Sattler burned by Habsburg officials, Anne Askew under Henry VIII, the Marian burnings of John Rogers, Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer, and Dirk Willems. Each brief separates the court records and the martyrs' own words from what Foxe and the Martyrs Mirror added, and…

From 1535 to 1681 the English Crown executed about three hundred Catholics under treason laws, among them John Fisher, Thomas More, the London Carthusians, Edmund Campion, Margaret Clitherow and Oliver Plunkett. This lesson sets the government's stated grounds (treason) beside the martyrs' own words (faith), from the statutes and trial reports. It then follows the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki (1597), the Great Gen…

Briefs on Christians killed by other Christians from 1572 to 1692: the Huguenots of Paris and the provinces in 1572, Pierre and Marie Durand after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Scottish Covenanters Cameron, Cargill, Renwick and the Wigtown women, and the four Quakers hanged at Boston, Mary Dyer among them. Each brief separates what the record shows from later tradition and gives the disputes by name. Th…

From a Burmese death prison in 1824 to a sandbar on the Curaray River in 1956: the imprisonment of Adoniram Judson (who survived), the Boxer killings at Taiyuan and across north China in 1900, John and Betty Stam, Paul Schneider, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the five missionaries killed in Ecuador. Each brief separates the documented record from reported last words and later retelling, and …

Nine briefs on Christians imprisoned or killed since 1950: Richard Wurmbrand (who survived), Jerzy Popieluszko, Wang Zhiming, Watchman Nee, Janani Luwum, Oscar Romero, the Jesuits of the UCA with Elba and Celina Ramos, Shahbaz Bhatti and the 21 killed in Libya in 2015. Each separates the documented record from tradition and dispute. The lesson then sets the modern counts side by side: Open Doors' minimum of 4,849 Ch…

Before the Great Awakening, the colonies had already built their churches and their quarrels. This lesson reads the founding documents: Winthrop's "Modell of Christian Charity" and the dispute over where it was delivered, the Cambridge Platform (1648), the Half-Way Covenant (1662), Solomon Stoddard's open communion and five "harvests," the Reforming Synod (1679), the Saybrook Platform (1708), and the established chu…

How a revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734 and 1735 became the model for the colonial awakening through Jonathan Edwards's A Faithful Narrative, and how the wider revival of 1740 to 1742 produced Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Enfield, July 8, 1741), The Distinguishing Marks and Some Thoughts. The lesson reads the texts closely, weighs Edwards's convert numbers as the estimates they are, and separat…

George Whitefield (1714 to 1770) took the new birth into the fields at Kingswood in 1739 and then up and down the American colonies, making seven visits and linking local revivals into one public event. This lesson follows his 1739 to 1741 tour from his Journals, quotes Benjamin Franklin's account of the Philadelphia hall, the collection plate and the crowd calculation exactly, tests the crowd figures, and sets out …

How the revival of 1739 to 1742 divided the churches that experienced it. Gilbert Tennent's sermon The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (1740), the Presbyterian Old Side and New Side schism of 1741 and its reunion in 1758, the founding of the College of New Jersey, and in New England the Old Lights, New Lights, James Davenport's New London book burning and retractions, Charles Chauncy's critique, the Separates and …

After the revival of the 1740s Jonathan Edwards wrote the books that made him a lasting thinker: Religious Affections (1746) on telling true religion from false, Freedom of the Will (1754) with its distinction between natural and moral inability, Original Sin (1758) and the two dissertations on God's end in creation and on true virtue (1765). This lesson follows his dismissal from Northampton over the Lord's Supper …

Did the revivals of the 1740s help bring on the Revolution? This lesson sets out the case for a link (Heimert, Bonomi, McLoughlin), the case against (Butler, Lambert, Wood, Hatch, Noll) and Thomas Kidd's middle position, then follows the evangelical Baptists' fight against tax-supported churches in their own words: Isaac Backus's Appeal (1773) and the 1774 meeting with the Massachusetts delegates, John Leland and Ma…

After Jonathan Edwards died in 1758, his students Joseph Bellamy and Samuel Hopkins built the New Divinity: natural ability and moral inability, disinterested benevolence, the governmental atonement and some of the earliest antislavery writing by New England ministers, carried on by Jonathan Edwards Jr., Nathanael Emmons and Lemuel Haynes. Timothy Dwight, Edwards's grandson, led Yale through the revival of 1802 and …

From the Presbyterian sacramental meetings of Logan County, Kentucky (1800) to the great communion at Cane Ridge (August 1801), this lesson reads the eyewitness accounts of McGready, Stone and Cartwright, sets every crowd estimate beside its source, and follows the camp meeting into Methodist hands. It covers Asbury and the circuit riders, Methodist growth from the Minutes and Finke and Stark's estimates, the Cumber…

Charles G. Finney, a law student at Adams, New York, was converted on October 10, 1821, and by 1825 was leading revivals across central New York. This lesson follows him from his own account of that conversion through the Oneida County revivals, the protests of Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher and the New Lebanon Convention of 1827, to Rochester in 1830 to 1831 and his New York pulpits. It sets out the "new measur…

What Charles Finney taught, in his own words from the 1835 Lectures on Revivals and the 1846 to 1847 Oberlin Lectures on Systematic Theology: revival by means, natural ability, sin as choice, the governmental atonement and justification as pardon. Where those ideas came from (Edwards Jr., Taylor, Grotius), how Charles Hodge's 1847 review and B. B. Warfield's 1921 articles answered them, how Finney replied, and how t…

How Charles Finney came to Oberlin in 1835 after the Lane Seminary walkout, on conditions that put admissions in the faculty's hands and opened the school to Black students. The lesson follows Oberlin's first women graduates, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown, Finney's words and strategy on slavery, the Oberlin doctrine of entire sanctification, the Oberlin-Wellington rescue of 1858, Finney's last years, and how histo…

Western and central New York, opened by the Erie Canal, produced a cluster of new movements between 1825 and 1850: the Millerites and the Seventh-day Adventists who came from them, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, modern Spiritualism, the Shaker villages of Sodus Bay and Groveland, and John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida Community. This lesson traces the name from Finney's 'burnt district' to Whitney Cross,…

Princeton Seminary (1812) and Yale's Nathaniel Taylor gave rival answers to the questions the revivals raised: what sin is, what a sinner is able to do, and how Presbyterians and Congregationalists should work together. This lesson follows the argument through Taylor's Concio ad Clerum (1828), the Beecher and Barnes heresy trials, the abrogation of the Plan of Union and the Old School and New School division of 1837…

The review lesson of the module sets the whole story from 1630 to 1875 on one timeline, places every major figure in a who-is-who table and on a Calvinist to Arminian map built from their own words, and weighs whether "awakening" is a useful category at all. It then follows the line from Finney to Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, the altar call, the Holiness and Pentecostal churches, Bebbington's definition of …

A plainly argued case that the NIV and the versions that share its methods are weaker translations than the KJV and the close formal versions, with every point tied to a verse a reader can check: the Greek text and the readings it drops (some with no footnote), interpretive renderings the committee itself later reversed, the 2011 gender changes, and a handful of verses about Christ. Every NIV wording was checked aga…

No original manuscript of any Old Testament book survives, so the Hebrew text reaches modern readers through a chain of copies. This lesson follows that chain: the first scribes and the silver amulets of Ketef Hinnom, the Nash Papyrus, the Masoretes and their vowel points and margins, the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek Septuagint…

How the Greek New Testament survives: the papyri from Egypt (P52, P46, P66, P75), the great parchment codices Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus and Bezae, the thousands of later minuscules and lectionaries, the early translations and the church fathers' quotations. The lesson names each witness with its siglum, date and library, gives the INTF's 2023 count of 5,700 registered manuscripts with its limits, and check…

Which books belong in the Bible, and who decided? This lesson follows the Old Testament canon from the prologue to Sirach, Josephus's twenty-two books and the rabbis' debates to the Christian lists of Melito, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril and Augustine, and the Apocrypha question from the African councils, Florence and Trent to Luther's 1534 Bible, Article VI, the 1611 King James Version and the Westminster Confession. …

How western Christians read the Bible in Latin for a thousand years, from the Old Latin and the Latin Vulgate (translated about 382 to 405 at the request of Pope Damasus I) to the Codex Amiatinus, Trent, the Clementine Vulgate and the Nova Vulgata. Then the first English renderings: Caedmon, Bede's lost John, the Psalter and Lindisfarne glosses, Alfred, the West Saxon Gospels and Aelfric, and the Wycliffite Bible of…

How the Greek New Testament first reached print: the Complutensian Polyglot (printed 1514, issued about 1522), Erasmus's rushed Basel edition of 1516 and its four revisions, and the editions of Stephanus, Beza and the Elzevirs whose 1633 preface gave the Textus Receptus its name. The lesson names the manuscripts behind each edition, shows where Erasmus supplied Greek from the Latin, checks the story of his 'promise'…

From William Tyndale's Worms New Testament of 1526 to the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bishops' Bible of 1568 and the Catholic Rheims New Testament of 1582, this lesson follows the English Bible through the sixteenth century, translation by translation. It quotes each translator's own preface and title page, shows how Coverdale, John Rogers and the Geneva exiles built on Tyndale, compares one prayer and one verse acros…

How the King James Version was made: John Rainolds's request at Hampton Court in January 1604, the fifteen rules, the six companies of about fifty scholars, the review in London and Robert Barker's folio of 1611. The lesson quotes the translators' own preface and dedication, explains the He and She Bibles, the Wicked Bible and the question of authorization, and traces the changes from 1611 to Benjamin Blayney's Oxfo…

Every printed Greek New Testament is an edition, and three families of editions are argued over: the Textus Receptus behind the King James Version, the Majority Text built on the reading of most manuscripts, and the critical text behind most modern versions. This lesson sets out each position in its defenders' own words, explains how textual critics weigh evidence, and then takes eight disputed passages, from Mark 1…

In 1870 the Convocation of Canterbury began the first authorized revision of the King James Version. English and American scholars produced the Revised Version (New Testament 1881, Old Testament 1885), with a new Greek text and an appendix of American preferences; Dean Burgon and others attacked it. In 1901 the American committee issued its own edition, the American Standard Version, with 'Jehovah' for the divine na…

How a California foundation founded by Dewey and Minna Lockman revised the American Standard Version into the NASB (John 1960, New Testament 1963, whole Bible 1971), and how it was revised again in 1977, 1995 and 2020, with the Legacy Standard Bible following in 2021. The lesson sets out the NASB's Fourfold Aim and formal-equivalence method in its own words, explains its italics, small capitals and asterisks, traces…

Thomas Nelson commissioned the New King James Version in 1975 and published the New Testament in 1979 and the complete Bible in 1982, under executive editor Arthur L. Farstad. It updated the English of the King James (pronouns, verb endings, words whose meaning had shifted) while keeping its order of words and its Greek base, the Textus Receptus, and it reports the readings of the critical text (NU) and the Majority…

How the New International Version came to be, from Howard Long's request in 1955 and the Palos Heights conference of 1965 to the editions of 1973, 1978, 1984, the TNIV and the 2011 NIV, told from the Committee on Bible Translation's own charter, prefaces and notes. The lesson explains Eugene Nida's formal and dynamic equivalence in his own words, shows where the NIV places itself between them, and sets verses side b…

From J. B. Phillips's letters for a church youth club (1947) to Kenneth Taylor's Living Bible (1971), the Good News Bible, The Message, the New Living Translation and the disputed Passion Translation, this lesson lets each paraphrase and free rendering describe itself in its own words and then sets the record beside the claim. It traces the gender-inclusive editions from the NRSV of 1989 through the TNIV, the CEB an…

A five-step method for judging any English Bible: read its preface, compare a passage across versions, check the Hebrew and Greek with free tools, use a concordance and lexicons, and decode the footnotes. The method is worked through on John 1:18, where the KJV reads "the only begotten Son" and most modern versions read "God," with the manuscripts, editions and committee reasoning on each side, and on almah in Isaia…

The whole module in one place: a timeline from the oldest biblical inscriptions to the Bible versions of 2021, a second timeline of English Bibles from Wycliffe to 2021, a table of which Hebrew and Greek text stands behind which version, a who's who, a glossary of the module's terms, and review questions for every lesson. Each item links back to the lesson that gives the full evidence.