One of the most misunderstood Catholic dogmas is that of the Immaculate Conception, the solemnity that the Holy Church of Jesus Christ observes on December 8th as a holy day of obligation. The Immaculate Conception is the dogma that Mary was saved by God in a singular and unique way. Unlike the rest of us […]

One of the seven Old Testament books rejected by Martin Luther and subsequent Protestants was the book of Ecclesiasticus, alternatively known by its “Old Latin” title Sirach. The other books rejected by Protestantism are Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, Baruch, and 1 & 2 Maccabees. Ecclesiasticus/Sirach is found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (three copies to be […]

Saint Augustine famously interpreted the “closed gate” through which passed the “prince” in Ezek 44 as a type of Mary’s perpetual virginity. Mary is the closed city and the prince miraculously passed through the closed gate. Here is the beautiful passage from Augustine describing from Scripture why Saint Joseph and Saint Mary did not consummate […]

I want to thank Tim Troutman and the rest of the Called to Communion fellows for allowing me to put up a quick post about my new book: The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism and the Origins of Catholic Christianity now available on amazon.com. The book begins with an event in which I encountered a Jewish Rabbi […]

Dr. Scott Hahn’s Kinship by Covenant is a revised and updated version of his 1995 doctoral dissertation Kinship by Covenant: A Biblical Theological Study of the Covenant Types and Texts in the Old and New Testaments published for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. The great biblical scholar, David Noel Freedman (d. 2008), recognized that […]