Monday with Mounce View online version

Can Cornelius and Luke tell Time? (Acts 10:30) Bill Mounce "Cornelius said, 'Four days ago at this hour, I was praying at the ninth hour in my house, and behold, a man stood before me in bright clothing.'" The challenge here is that it was only three days earlier that Cornelius had his vision. So is this an error? First of all, it seems highly unlikely that Luke, a trained physician, can't count, or that he made a silly math error that would have been caught when proofreading. There must be an explanation. And there is. The answer is the different way in which people count days. When I travel, my wife Robin wil talk about how many days I will be gone. If I leave on a Saturday and return on the next Friday, how many days will I be gone? I say 7 days. Robin says 5 days; she doesn't count the days she will see me, namely Saturday and Friday. What's happening in Acts 10:30 is that Cornelius is counting the day he saw the vision as one day. We tend not to do that.   Cornelius Us Vision Day 1 — Friends come to Caesarea Day 2 Day 1 Travel to Caesarea Day 3 Day 2 Meet with Cornelius Day 4 Day 3 So this is not an error but an alternate way of counting days. This blog is an extract from my upcoming book, Why I Trust the Bible, due out in August, 2021).

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BillMounce.com 523 NE Everett St., Camas, WA 98607                                                   Want to change how you receive these emails? You can *update your preferences or *unsubscribe from this list.   William D Mounce, PH.D. William D Mounce (PhD, Aberdeen University) lives as a writer in Washougal, Washington. He is the President of BiblicalTraining.org, a non-profit organization offering world-class educational resources for discipleship in the local church. See www.BillMounce.com for more information. Formerly he was a preaching pastor, and prior to that a professor of New Testament and director of the Greek Program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the author of the bestselling Greek textbook, Basics of Biblical Greek , and many other resources. He was the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and is serving on the NIV translation committee.  Want to buy William D Mounce books on Alibris?