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Frequently asked questions

Short answers, each pointing at the page that works the question out properly. If what you came for is a word — lemma, MACULA, pericope — the Glossary is the faster stop.

About this site

Who writes this, and is it authoritative?

One person, as personal study notes — written to make sure I learn, and published in case they help someone else. They carry no authority beyond the Scripture they point at. Test them the way the Bereans tested Paul, "examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11). If a study and your Bible disagree, your Bible wins.

Is this written by AI?

The research is AI-assisted; the positions, the arguments and the errors are mine. AI does the fetching, collating and checking — pulling every occurrence of a word, catching a quotation I have misremembered, arguing back when a reading is weak. It has no spiritual authority, it does not pray, and it cannot be taught by God. If something here is wrong, I published it. → Why AI-assisted study, and where it stops in particular

How do I check a claim for myself?

Every study ends with its sources, naming the dataset or work each claim came out of rather than gesturing at "scholars". Most of that data is openly licensed and published alongside this site, so you can go and re-run the query rather than take the result on trust. → About our datasets

I think something here is wrong.

Then please say so — open an issue. Correction is the point of publishing rather than keeping notes in a drawer.

Is any of this finished?

Studies are revised as I learn more; Recently updated shows what has changed lately, and the Backlog is the public list of what is still to be written. Unfinished pages are held back rather than published half-done.

What I believe

What religion are you? What denomination?

Christian. That is the whole answer, and its not being a denomination is the point of it.

The question is harder to answer than it looks, because the categories the asker has in mind are often not the ones the responder lives by. Australia's 2026 Census is a clean example. Question 24 offers ten tick-boxes — no religion, Catholic, Anglican, Islam, Hinduism, Uniting Church, Buddhism, Presbyterian, Greek Orthodox, Baptist — and the word Christian is not among them. To give it as your answer you have to leave the list entirely and write it into the "other" box, where the Bureau records it as Christianity, not further defined.

Two things need saying plainly about that, because a false version of it went around in 2026. "Christian" was never removed from the Census. It was never a tick-box in the first place, and it is recorded when you write it in.1 The Bureau's stated reason is that a single Christianity box would lose the denominational detail. That is a fair thing for a statistician to want. The effect on the person filling in the form is still the same. The list they are handed is a list of the things that divide Christians, and the name they actually go by is not on it.

Paul met the same instinct in Corinth, and did not treat it as harmless:

✝️ 1 Corinthians 1:12-13 (ESV)

What I mean is that each one of you says, "I follow Paul," or "I follow Apollos," or "I follow Cephas," or "I follow Christ." Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Where I gather is a separate question, and a real one: I fellowship at a Calvary Chapel. Being planted in a local congregation matters, and this is not an argument for drifting between churches on principle. But it answers where I fellowship, not what I am, and collapsing the second question into the first is how the word Christian goes missing off a form.

What is your statement of faith?

Set out in full on its own page rather than summarised here, because a summary is where these things go wrong. → Statement of faith

Where do you land on end times?

Dispensational and pretribulational. The church is caught up to meet Christ before a literal seven- year tribulation. Then his visible return, a literal thousand-year reign, final judgement, and the new heaven and new earth. → End times and the Last Things studies

What does "dispensational" mean here, in practice?

The word itself is Paul's — οἰκονομία (oikonomia, G3622), the administration of a household, used at Ephesians 3:9 of the arrangement now in force; see dispensationalism for that. In practice, though, it rests on one commitment above all: that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God, over tradition and over human leaders. It is to be read first as written and in context — not as symbolic poetry, and not as verses cherry-picked to suit a belief already held.

The distinctive outcomes follow from that:

  • Less focus on me, and more on "your will be done" — reading the Psalms, for instance, by first asking what they show us about Jesus as Messiah, before asking what they show me about myself.
  • Creation is a literal six-day event. → Creation
  • End-times prophecy becomes simpler to read, because it is read the same way as everything else.
  • The promises God made to Israel are not quietly transferred to the Church. The two are kept distinct, which changes how a great deal of prophecy reads. → Israel and the Church

Is this a "Hebrew Roots" site?

No. Two different things share that phrase. Studying the Old Testament's types, its Torah, its feasts and its prophecy is what Jesus and the apostles did, and this site does a lot of it. The movement called Hebrew Roots teaches something else — that the Church simply is Israel, or that Gentile believers are a scattered tribe recovering their identity — and this site does not hold that. → Cautions

Do you think Christians have to keep the Torah or the feasts?

No, and Paul's warning against it is his sharpest language anywhere (Galatians 5:2-4). Studying what the Torah reveals about God's character, and what it foreshadows in Christ, is not the same as being bound to keep it. → Cautions

Do you treat 1 Enoch, the Apocrypha or the Dead Sea Scrolls as Scripture?

No. The canon here is the 66 books of the Old and New Testament, closed. (What is Scripture) Those other texts are used as historical witnesses — evidence for how a passage was read, what a word meant to its first hearers, and what the text said before the medieval manuscripts. The Dead Sea Scrolls in particular are a thousand years older than the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, and this site checks disputed readings against them. → Ancient texts and manuscripts

Bible text and translations

Which translations do you use, and why?

Two English Bibles do most of the work: the ESV in the studies' prose and the WEB everywhere else. The ESV is the text a study quotes, chosen because it is literal enough for close reading, and its quotations are checked against the ESV's own text. The World English Bible is public domain, so the site can carry all of it: it is the verse that opens in a pop-up when you tap any reference, and a study quotes it where a passage has to be reproduced at length.

Behind those two, a study compares more:

  • Other English translations, to see a disputed or ambiguous verse from several sides: the NASB and LSB (the most literal; the LSB prints the divine name as Yahweh), the NIV, NLT and CSB (more readable), and the ASV, YLT and ULT as literal cross-checks. The ULT records which Hebrew or Greek word stands behind each English word.
  • The original languages: the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Septuagint for the Old Testament, the Greek New Testament in its modern critical editions, and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Samaritan Pentateuch where they read differently.

→ Translation philosophy

Why not the KJV or the NKJV?

Not a matter of taste. The KJV rests on a late Greek text that had accumulated copying errors, and the NKJV modernised the language while keeping that same underlying text. For study, almost any modern translation is a better starting point. The KJV remains a landmark of English and is quoted here where its wording is the point. → English translations

Why does the New Testament sometimes quote the Old Testament differently from my Bible?

Usually because the New Testament author is quoting the Greek Old Testament, and it reads differently from the Hebrew. Hebrews 10:5 quotes "a body you have prepared for me" where Psalm 40:6 in Hebrew has "ears". Neither is a mistake, and the Scripture Links tool shows both verses in the original with the shared words highlighted, so you can see exactly what the quotation rests on. → Septuagint

How do we know the text hasn't been changed?

By comparing the manuscripts that carry it and saying openly where they disagree — which is what textual criticism is, and it is a strength of the case rather than an embarrassment to it. This site works the disputed cases rather than asserting that there are none. → Textual criticism

Dates and chronology

What year does the site count from?

Creation in 3959 BC, which the site calls AM 0 (Anno Mundi, "year of the world"). Every AM and Zadok year on the site counts from it: AD 1 is AM 3959, the cross in AD 33 is AM 3991, and the year 6000 falls in AD 2042. That last figure is where the arithmetic lands. Jesus kept the day and hour of His return hidden (Mark 13:32).

The date is counted back from a fixed point. Assyrian and Babylonian records fix the start of Solomon's temple at 966 BC. First Kings 6:1 dates it "in the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt" (ESV), which puts the Exodus in 1446 BC. The Hebrew (Masoretic) numbers of Genesis 5 and 11 then give 2,513 years from Adam to the Exodus, and 1446 + 2513 = 3959.

Each link carries its own confidence. The temple date is firm to within a few years. Reading the 480 years as elapsed time is contested, and so is the length of Israel's stay in Egypt, which would move creation 215 years earlier. The Greek Old Testament's longer numbers put creation 1,466 years earlier. Until October 2026 this site counted from Ussher's 4004 BC; the forty-five-year difference came from how he added up the kings. → Why Not 4004 BC?, Chronology Anchors, and the Prophetic Timeline, which draws the whole line

Do you hold a young earth?

Yes. I hold that about six thousand years have passed since Genesis 1:1, for the heavens as well as the earth. It is a conviction read from Scripture's own numbers, and it rests on four things.

  • The six days are a week. Exodus 20:11 grounds the Sabbath in creation: "in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day" (ESV). Heaven is in that sentence, so the count covers the universe, and Genesis 1 closes each day with "there was evening and there was morning".
  • Genesis 5 and 11 are a chronology as well as a genealogy. Each entry gives the father's age at his heir's birth: "When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son ... and named him Seth" (Genesis 5:3, ESV). Ruth's and Matthew's genealogies skip names, and this site says so. A skipped name in Genesis 5 would add no time, because every interval is stated in years.
  • Jesus puts humanity at the beginning. "But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female'" (Mark 10:6, ESV).
  • Death entered through Adam (Romans 5:12). I read that as ruling out ages of death before him. Christians who hold an old earth read it of human death alone, and that reading is defensible.

The exact year is less certain than the scale. The Masoretic, Samaritan and Greek texts put creation between 3959 and 5425 BC, and the site follows the Masoretic numbers for reasons it sets out. Many Christians who hold Scripture as firmly read Genesis 1's days as ages or as a literary framework, mainly because radiometric dating, starlight and counted tree rings and ice layers point to deep time. Where a study meets that evidence it is set out and left open: the population study shows a six-thousand-year history needs no special pleading, and stops short of calling that proof. → Statement of faith, Genealogy and Times, The Flood and the King Lists, and What World Population Declares

When was Jesus crucified?

Friday, 3 April AD 33. The day of the week is the firm part: Mark calls it "the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath" (15:42), and Luke and John say the same. Only two years in the plausible range put Passover on a Friday — AD 30 (7 April) and AD 33 (3 April).

The year rests mainly on Luke 3:1 read naturally, with Sejanus's fall behind the pressure on Pilate at John 19:12, Daniel 9 and Paul's chronology all leaning the same way. AD 30 stays defensible for anyone who dates Tiberius's fifteenth year from the co-regency. The lunar-eclipse argument that often accompanies this date is not used here — it needs both a contested observation and a strained reading of Peter's Joel quotation. → Chronology Anchors

Doesn't "three days and three nights" rule out a Friday?

It is the strongest objection to it. Friday afternoon to Sunday dawn gives two nights, not three. The short answer has three parts. The phrase occurs once (Matthew 12:40, quoting Jonah). The New Testament describes the same interval "on the third day" eight times. And Mark and Matthew report one prediction with "after three days" and "on the third day" respectively. So the Gospels treat the two as equivalent, which only works if part of a day counts as a day. The Friday reading is the stronger one and still spends that verse on credit. → Three Days and Three Nights

How the studies are made

Why do the studies keep going into Hebrew and Greek?

Because most study questions start from an English word, and therefore from a translator's decision. Going back to the word underneath shows what that decision was, and what it cost. → Reading the original-language data, and the Glossary for the vocabulary

Why don't you just quote commentaries?

Commentaries last, not first: they are used to test a reading already reached from the text, never to form one. Reaching for a commentary first is how you end up defending someone else's conclusion without having examined the passage. → What each tier is for

Your cross-references don't match my study Bible's. Why?

Because these are derived from the biblical texts themselves rather than inherited from an existing list. The site detects quotations and allusions by measuring the actual shared wording, and shows you that wording so you can judge each link. It finds connections the traditional lists miss, and it misses some they carry. → How we cross-reference, and its limits

Using the site

What questions do the studies answer?

Questions readers bring, each with the study that answers it from Scripture.

Where should I start?

Three doors, depending on what you came for. How to read the Bible is the method everything else here follows — the questions to ask of a passage, in order. Key takeaways explains what every study is trying to hand you, so the studies read faster. And if you would rather start with the thing itself, The Way is a word study that traces one Greek word, ὁδός (hodos, G3598), from Isaiah through John 14:6 into the book of Acts, and shows what this site does with a passage.

How is the site organised, and how do I find a passage?

Directories carry the subject and tags carry everything else — method, language, audience. Search (top of every page) covers the whole site, Tags slices it across subjects, and Scripture Links goes the other way, from a verse to what connects to it. → Our taxonomy

What is the timeline for?

To see the whole of God's work in history at once, in the shape He gave it. "With the Lord one day is as a thousand years" (2 Peter 3:8, ESV), and the Prophetic Timeline lays history out that way: seven thousand-year days from creation to the millennial reign. It puts a passage you are reading in its place, beside what came before it and what it looks forward to. It shows who was alive at the same time as whom, which surprises most readers: Methuselah dies in the year of the Flood, and Noah's son Shem is still alive when Abraham is 150. It sets the dated records of archaeology beside the biblical events they confirm.

It has a row for every person in the genealogy from Adam to Jesus, with lifespans, Hebrew name meanings and family. It zooms from the whole week down to AD 33 hour by hour, and a family-tree view shows the same people by descent. Every date is argued for in the Chronology studies.

Can I print the timeline?

Yes: the timeline's Chart view prints any stretch of it on A4 sheets, for a classroom wall, a small group or your own Bible. It draws the creation days over their thousand years, the ages from before the Flood to the new creation, the main events with a picture over each, the people, the manuscripts and inscriptions that bear witness to the history, and threads that follow a promise to its fulfilment. A separate sheet lays Daniel's kingdoms against Nebuchadnezzar's image. Choose a period and a number of sheets, print in colour or black and white, or download a sheet to take to a print shop.

Can I quote or reuse this?

Yes. The studies and other writing here are published under CC BY 4.0. Share them, translate them, put them in a handout or a course pack, quote them in something you sell. Just credit the source, and say if you changed anything.

That last condition is the one I care about. These are personal notes published so they can be checked, and "errors here are mine" only stays true if an altered version says it was altered.

Quoted Scripture and reference works are a different matter and are not mine to license — each carries its own terms. → Copyright and Scripture permissions

  1. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Religious affiliation (RELP), 2026 Census dictionary; AAP FactCheck, Falsehoods spread about census "Christian" category, August 2026. ↩