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Pastoral Bible Institute News Our brethren in Australia have produced fun exercises keyed
to each of the ninety-three lessons in the PBI-distributed book Adam to Zion. These worksheets
plus the text of the book itself are in Adobe Acrobat pdf files and may be
printed on a computer. A CD ROM
containing the files will be sent without charge on request. World News Religious Church and culture analyst George Barna, founder of The Barna Group, says millions of Christians are leaving conventional churches to meet in homes. According to the researcher, about 50 million American adults meet in home churches at least once a month, and the numbers choosing this option are on the increase. Barna says home churches are a growing trend among Christians who want to “be” the church, not just attend church. —Agape Press, 6/16/2006 Passages from Saudi textbooks: First grade: “Every religion other than Islam is false.” Fourth grade: “True belief means … that you hate the polytheists and infidels but do not treat them unjustly.” Fifth grade: “It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and His prophet.” Eighth grade: “The apes are the Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.” —Freedom House report, May, 2006 Fifty women in Morocco have been officially certified as religious teachers, a first for the Muslim nation. —The Week, 6/2/2006 A talent war for financially literate Islamic scholars has erupted as western investment bankers rush to sell their services to devout Muslims. At present, devout Muslims will only buy financial products if a recognized Sharia scholar has issued approval. That is because many Muslims consider usury a sin, and will only invest in products structured to avoid interest payments. However, there are very few Islamic scholars who command enough religious respect to issue such approvals, called fatwas, and speak good enough English to read the necessary market documentation. That coupled with the fact that investment bankers are rushing to expand their business in the Middle East amid an oil price boom, has triggered heated competition for sharia advice. —Financial Times, 5/20/2006 The Christian population in Japan has remained at around one per cent of the country’s population since 1549, when Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier arrived, says a professor of the sociology of religion at Tokyo’s Roman Catholic Sophia University. “But the young generation no longer has a negative image of Christianity, which was once stigmatized as heretical or a religion of Japan’s enemy [during the Second World War], as many of them are seeking Christian-style weddings,” said Mark R. Mullins, author of the book “Christianity Made in Japan” that has sold thousands of copies in its Japanese version. —Ecumenical News International, 6/22/2006 Social Warren Buffett on Monday signed over much of his $44 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, uniting the world's two richest people in a bid to fight disease, reduce poverty and improve education. The roughly $30.7 billion donation doubles the Gates Foundation's size to $60 billion, five times larger than any other U.S. charitable group and bigger than the gross domestic product of Kuwait. —Reuters, 6/26/2006 A majority of baby boomers say they want to work in retirement. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Merrill Lynch found that 71 percent of adults hope to work in retirement. Earning money is just one reason, and it ranks third, the study found. The two leading reasons include remaining mentally and physically active and trying new professions. Many employers aren’t ready for the shift that could affect thousands of their workers. —Associated Press, 5/22/2006 Tens of thousands of Indonesians left homeless by an earthquake on Java had to wait days for food and medicine to arrive. The runway at the region’s airport was damaged, so planes couldn’t land there, and many of the roads from other airports were impassable. Hospital beds were in short supply for thousands of the injured. More than 5,000 people died in the 6.3 magnitude quake. —The Week, 6/9/2006 The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze was inaugurated in a public ceremony. The project took 13 years to complete. [It is] 2.3 km (7,575 ft) long and 185 meters (607 ft) high and is one of the vastest engineering works ever realized anywhere in the world. The government claimed the dam cost around 22.5 billion dollars, but many foreign experts in the sector say it is “unthinkable” that the project could have been completed with anything less than 40 billion. [It will produce] 84.7 billion kilowatt-hours per year. —Asia News/Agencies, 5/20/2006 Angola is in the midst of a gusher in oil revenue with tankers carrying away the 1.4 million barrels of crude pumped here each day. The economy grew by 18 percent last year. The government racked up a budget surplus of more than $2 billion. This year it is expected to take in $16.8 billion in revenue, well over twice the $7.5 billion it received in 2004. Economists say the government simply has more money than it can spend. Yet it seems powerless to address even the basic issues of clean water and sewers. Luanda’s slums are now the center of one of the worst cholera epidemics to strike Africa in nearly a decade, an outbreak that has sickened 43,000 Angolans and killed more than 1,600 since it began in February. “I have never seen anything like it,” said David Weatherill, a water and sanitation expert for Doctors Without Borders, which is leading the response to the epidemic. —New York Times, 6/16/2006 In the past three decades, the number of nations that have abolished the death penalty has risen from 16 to 86. Last year four countries accounted for nearly all executions worldwide: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States. —Newsweek, 6/26/2006 New Jersey became the first state to institute a statewide steroid-testing policy for high school athletes. Then-Gov. Richard Codey ordered the testing program last December in response to national statistics showing increased steroid use among high schoolers. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 6% of U.S. high school students, or about 300,000, took steroids in 2003 without a doctor’s prescription. —USA Today, 6/8/2006 In less than a decade, an estimated four million people have died, mostly of hunger and disease caused by the civil war in the Congo. It has been the deadliest conflict since World War II, with more than 1,000 people still dying each day. Aid agencies in Bunia, the regional capital, have struggled to work in the area. The militias and bandits remain in the countryside even if they have been pushed from their hilltop redoubts, and they prey upon aid convoys for food, medicine and money. —New York Times, 6/23/2006 Political Construction has begun on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world’s crop seeds. Prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were to attend the cornerstone ceremony near the town of Longyearbyen in Norway’s remote Svalbard Islands, roughly 620 miles from the North Pole. Norway’s Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a ‘’Noah’s Ark on Svalbard.’’ Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust. —Associated Press, 6/19/2006 Water supplies are declining from San Antonio to Austin, the Texas capital, as a mushrooming population and drought conditions strain underground reservoirs, threatening to stall the region’s growth. San Antonio is the third-fastest-growing large city in the U.S. according to Census Bureau estimates. Water systems aren’t keeping up with the new subdivisions, and wells used by some homeowners are drying up. Central Texas received only two-thirds of its usual rainfall last year and is running behind again this year. —Bloomberg News, 6/19/2006 An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq’s northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called “black oil,” the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire. The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the region, which is dotted with villages and crisscrossed by itinerant sheep herders, but also contains Iraq’s great northern refinery complex at Baiji. Exactly how far those pollutants will travel is unknown, but the Tigris passes through dozens of population centers from Baghdad to Basra. —New York Times, 6/18/2006 Financial A Massachusetts firm is bidding for the rights to beam radio commercials into school buses. Bus Radio, based in Needham, says it has already signed contracts with school districts representing 100,000 students and will start transmitting a blend of “age appropriate” pop music and kid-targeted radio ads. —The Week, 6/16/2006 As the insurance industry debates how to handle billions of dollars in potential claims from natural disasters, Allstate is dropping earthquake coverage for 352,000 policyholders in most states to cut its risk of losses from catastrophes. Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the insurance information institute trade group, said insurers face rising disaster claims, regulatory caps on raising premiums and higher prices for reinsurance, which is coverage for insurers. —USA Today, 6/7/2006 The gap between rich and poor is bigger in the United States than in any other advanced country. After you adjust for inflation, the wages of the typical American worker—the one at the very middle of the income distribution—have risen less than 1% since 2000. In the previous five years, they rose over 6%. The fruits of productivity gains have been skewed towards the highest earners, and towards companies whose profits have reached record levels as a share of GDP. The structural changes in America’s job market that began in the 1990s are now being reinforced by big changes in the global economy. The integration of China’s low-skilled millions and the increased off shoring of services to India and other countries have expanded the global supply of workers. —The Economist, 6/15/2006 China’s huge hunger for energy and other resources needed to feed its juggernaut economy is creating a profitable bond with commodity exporters, helping to refashion global markets and trading alliances. Sales of Australian coal, farm products, iron ore and other resources drove a 46 percent increase in exports to China last year, to US$11.8 billion. China is now Australia’s second biggest trading partner, after Japan. China is the world’s biggest consumer of steel, grain, aluminum, cement, copper, iron ore and zinc, among other commodities. Worldwide, investments in mining and energy exploration are rising … to keep up with Chinese demand. —Associated Press, 6/27/2006 Israel In a major diplomatic milestone, Indonesia’s government says it will allow its women’s Fed Cup tennis team to compete in Israel. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation and has been a vocal critic of Israel, which is scheduled to host the world group II playoff in July. The Indonesian tennis federation had originally asked for a change of venue, but Israel would not yield its right to host the event. —The Media Line, 5/24/2006 Hizbullah chief Sheikh Sayyad Hasan Na’srallah told a Beirut conference on “the culture of resistance” that armed warfare is the “only available alternative before us.” He said that Israel’s northern territories are “under the firing line” of more than 12,000 rockets Hizbullah is believed to possess. May 24 is the sixth anniversary of Israel’s unilateral pullout of its forces from Lebanon, a move for which Hizbullah credits its armed attacks on Israeli troops and territory. —The Media Line, 5/24/ 2006 Adult stem cells are being used by an Israeli research team to create a new orthopedic solution to a difficult and common problem: how to heal torn ligaments and tendons. The research team, led by Professor Dan Gazit, is working to change this by using stem cells taken from bone marrow and genetically engineering them to become different cells altogether. “With this in mind, we can genetically engineer new skeletal tissue–ligaments, cartilage, tendons,” explained Dr. Gadi Peled, a senior scientist at the lab. Peled said that in time, the new technology might be used to help people who suffer with lower back pain as well. Invertebrate discs consist largely of tendon tissue that deteriorates over time. The new approach for tendon regeneration was reported in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. —Arutz 7, 4/6/2006 Investment banker Lehman Brothers’ Tel Aviv office did six venture capital deals in less than two weeks in April. Activity in Israel has grown so much that Lehman had to add three more investment bankers to the ten it already has there. The tiny Middle Eastern country, with a population smaller than Manhattan’s, has become a global player in innovation, thanks to its thriving venture capital scene, and many home-grown startups. There are now 75 Israeli companies listed on the NASDAQ market—more listings than any foreign country with the exception of Canada. [Israel’s] growing strengths include medical technology, bio-technology, and nano-technology. —Red Herring magazine, 6/16/2006 Contradicting most of his colleagues, a former senior leader of the Waqf, the Islamic custodians of the Temple Mount, told WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview, he has come to believe the first and second Jewish Temples existed and stood at the current location of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The leader, who was dismissed from his Waqf position after he quietly made his beliefs known, said the Muslim world’s widespread denial of the existence of the Jewish temples is political in nature and is not rooted in facts. The former leader, who is well known to Al Aqsa scholars and Waqf officials, spoke on condition his name be withheld, claiming an on-the-record interview would endanger his life. — WorldNetDaily and YNet.com, 6/14/2006 China and Israel will work together to introduce Israeli water technology into the world’s most populous nation, under a cooperation agreement reached with China’s Ministry of Water Resources. Mekorot Water Company Chair, Booky Oren, headed the Israeli delegation, which also made a cooperation agreement with the head of Beijing’s water system on the local level. An additional agreement was made with the city of Shenzen which has 11 million residents. The city suffers from serious water problems, and its water budget under China’s current five-year plan is around US $9 billion. Israeli water technology will be introduced there by 2007. —Haaretz, 5/4/2006 An American couple was posthumously honored at Yad Vashem for saving nearly 2,000 Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. In a ceremony at the memorial, Martha and Waitstill Sharp became only the second and third Americans to be inducted into the memorial’s “Righteous Among the Nations” group for non-Jews who saved Jews. The Sharps left their home in Boston—and their two small children—to travel to Prague in 1939, where they helped hundreds of refugees escape the Nazi occupiers of Czechoslovakia. Later, they traveled to Lisbon, where they helped refugees flee Nazi-occupied France into Spain, then Portugal and then to the United States. About 20,000 non-Jews have received the “Righteous Among the Nations” honor. —Jerusalem Post, 6/12/2006 Book Review Misquoting Jesus. Bart D. Ehrman. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 2006. 242 pages. Since the publication of the fictional novel, The Da Vinci Code, and the release of the movie based on the book, the media have attempted to discount the authenticity of canon Scripture. In this best-selling book popular religious scholar Bart Ehrman attempts to prove that current biblical manuscripts are far removed in accuracy from the original texts. Manuscripts were hand copied for almost 1,500 years before the printing press changed everything. Many who copied texts were not professionals, and were heavily influenced by the theological and political disputes of their day. This makes it difficult to reconstruct the actual words and thoughts contained in the original texts. Why should this fatalistic view of Scripture be of interest to Bible Students? Textual scholars tell us that the Greek New Testament is the second-best-preserved work of antiquity. The best-preserved is the Hebrew Old Testament. Bible Students generally agree that copyists made changes in texts and at times added words of their own (producing what we refer to as spurious texts), as in Matthew 6:13, 24:36; Mark 16:9-20; John 1:18, 7:53 to 8:11; Acts 20:28, 1 Corinthians 15:51; 1 John 5:7-8; Revelation 20:5; and probably Luke 23:34. However, they also contend that the accuracy of Scripture was assured by God's overview producing an accurate record of Jesus’ words upon which we can rely as God’s word. One interesting point of Ehrman's book is his discussion of errors that likely crept into the texts because of the influence of beliefs such as the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. He shows the differences that occur as one compares later manuscripts with earlier ones. He also presents a thorough discussion of the history of today's manuscripts. —Len Griehs |
