Technical

The gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are similar in many ways.  They share the "good news" of the kingdom of G-d and of the King, the Messiah Yeshua, who has come to reconcile His people to G-d.  There are some significant differences in the details and manner in which this news is delivered. 

The brief outline below contains the unique facets of each of the gospel writings.

Counting in Hebrew is similar to counting by Roman numerals: each letter symbolizes a number. The chart below provides the details. You may want to read about The Hebrew Alphabet if you haven't already read it. It will help you get started.

The Messianic movement (faith in Yeshua as the Messiah marked by the recognition of the Jewish origins of that faith and expressed in some degree of Torah observance) is filled with Gentiles from all stripes, creeds, and denominations.  One of the common questions I receive goes like this: "I used to be an [insert denomination here], and I want to know how that group connects back to the original first-century believers."  While each group is different, we have found strong connections with some key denominations of Christianity.

I've developed a graphical "family tree" of Christian denominations to provide context around where your prior denomination (or perhaps your current one!) connects back to the original roots of our faith in the Messiah.

Various figures of speech are found in most languages, including English, Hebrew, and Greek.  The words of Scripture convey a specific message by using these forms of language.  This short list of figures of speech (with examples from Scripture) was inspired by a sidebar in the January/February 2008 edition of Biblical Worldview Magazine.  The article was entitled "A Beginner's Guide to Biblical Prophecy".

We should recognize these figures of speech in G-d's Word to understand the meaning G-d intended to convey, whether we are studying Biblical prophecy or Biblical history.

A "harmony" attempts to take parallel passages from Scripture to show those passages' harmony and agreement.  Another important goal is to show how different accounts vary in their degree of information and detail.  The Gospel harmonization below focuses on the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  It is based on A.T. Robertson's gospel harmony from the early 1900s.

Harmony: a systematic arrangement of parallel literary passages (as of the Gospels) for the purpose of showing agreement or harmony [from Merriam-Webster Online].

Many Messianic resources seek to use a more accurate transliteration (transliteration = spell it as it sounds) of the names of individuals in the Bible.  I've compiled a list of names you may find here or on other sites for reference.

Be sure to check out the family tree of individuals from the Bible that I've created at BibleFamilyTree.info!

I've also started a complete inventory of every named individual in Scripture.  Check out my Person Label dataset at data.world.

As we study and meditate on Scripture, we find that many items or individuals are symbolic of something else or are given to foreshadow a future person or event.

The purpose of this page is to serve as a repository for thoughts and observations regarding items or individuals from Scripture and briefly note their symbolic meaning(s).

This article is not meant to be an exhaustive study of any of the items listed and is a work in progress.

Otherwise entitled: "Old Testament" Quotes in the "New Testament"

The Apostolic Writings quote the Tanakh at least 300 times. The list below documents all the references and notes whether the quote is consistent with the Septuagint [the Greek Translation of the Tanakh].

R. Grant Jones has published an even more detailed analysis entitled Notes on the Septuagint.  A later PDF version is available here.

The book known to Jews and Christians as "The Bible" or "Scripture" contains a number of individual books brought together by the unique characteristic of being written by men under the inspiration of the Spirit of G-d.  Although various groups may disagree on which individual books make up the Bible, there are a number of commonalities. On the following pages, I present information about these books and how they comprise the treasure we know as G-d's Word.

This article shows the Christian order of Scripture, and the Hebrew order of Scripture, and notes some additional, apocryphal books often associated with Scripture as well.

Let's start with the Protestant Christian order of Scripture.

The Hebrew alphabet (or "alef bet" as it is called) contains 22 letters. The Hebrew language is read from right to left as opposed to left to right for English, Spanish, and other Western languages. For example, the chart below begins with alef, bet, gimel, and so on.

The information below is provided only for reference. If you would like training in the Hebrew language may I recommend John Parsons' Hebrew for Christians website at https://www.hebrew4christians.com. He has a very extensive set of training materials available online and offline as well.