Author Archives: Jon Garvey

In March I wrote this piece, in which I questioned whether it was actually even possible now to obey all 613 Mosaic Commandments, as advocated by a Messianic Jew whose work I was reading. Deciding that it was too important a question merely to wing, I spent some weeks, after I finished reading his translation of a Hebrew manuscript of Matthew’s gospel, ploughing through the Pentateuch to answer that question.

…it ain’t biblical. In my research on the English Civil War founders of my own church, I came to the conclusion that a single aberrant doctrine – Fifth Monarchism – had caused our Baptists in particular, and other Puritans more generally, a lot of trouble with both Royalist and Commonwealth governments that might, perhaps, have been avoided by more critical biblical thinking. It taught me the importance for every church’s leaders to “watch your life and doctrine closely,” which in this context means watching what your church believes or practices that might diverge from biblical teaching, with bad consequences. That responsibility is not, of course, limited to leaders.