history

Saudi Arabia’s decision in 2019 to open its borders to tourists has led to a surprising number of evangelical Christians entering the country in search of biblical sites, according to a New York Times report.

New evidence reports Nathan Steinmeyer of the Biblical Archaeology Society is confirming the biblical description of the kingdom of Judah as it existed in King David’s time. This is significant, according to Steinmeyer, because “[d]espite King David’s prominence in the Hebrew Bible, little archaeological evidence has been directly linked to the early years of the Kingdom of Judah.” Because of this apparent discrepancy between the archeological record and the biblical description of the region during the 10th century B.C., “some scholars have argued that Judah only became a developed polity in the ninth or even eighth-century B.C.E.”

Four Black churches are among 40 recipients of a historic preservation grant that will help restore the facilities.

According to the Smithsonian Institution, “Juneteenth marks our country’s second independence day.” On this day in 1865, some two thousand Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, where they announced that the more than two hundred and fifty thousand enslaved black people in the state were free by executive decree. The day became known as “Juneteenth” by the newly freed people in Texas and eventually became a federal holiday.

On June 5, 1865, Anglican priest and polymath Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the processional hymn, "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The hymn was originally written for children walking to Horbury St. Peter’s Church near Wakefield in Yorkshire, England. Far from the cultural stereotype that the hymn earned Baring-Gould— that of a militant, narrow-minded clergyman fearful of and fighting against new knowledge— he actually led an impressive life, remaining keenly inquisitive about the world God has made.

On this day in A.D. 337, Emperor Constantine died. Many Christians think that Constantine was perhaps the worst thing to happen to the Church. They believe he made Christianity the imperial religion, thus leading the Church to compromise with pagan culture, marrying it to state power, and derailing the spread of the Gospel. The Church, they argue, was better off as a persecuted minority. After all, didn’t the Church father Tertullian tell us that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church?

An ancient Hebrew Bible dating back to the late ninth or early 10th century was sold for $38.1 million Wednesday afternoon.

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has found an ancient receipt from about 2,000 years ago on the City of David's Pilgrimage Road in Jerusalem.

The 2023 Wilberforce Award recipient is Shodankeh Johnson, a pastor and church planter in Sierra Leone. The award was named after William Wilberforce, whose work as an English politician led to the abolishment of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire. There is an incredible link between Wilberforce and the role Shodankeh’s Sierra Leone played in freeing slaves.

Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used ultraviolet photography to read text that had been written on parchment in the sixth century but erased and reused centuries later.