Ann Naffziger is a scripture instructor and spiritual director in the San Francisco Bay area. She has has written articles on spirituality and theology for various national magazines and edited several books on the Hebrew Scriptures.

	April 6th, 2012 Why is Jesus’ death and resurrection story called His “passion”? The sections of the gospels that tell of Jesus’ suffering and death are commonly referred to as the “Passion narratives” or his “Passion.” The term is derived from several instances in the original manuscripts that ...
	March 30th, 2012 Why does God test Job? You are in very good company indeed in asking this question for the ages. For thousands of years humans have struggled with the question of why bad things happen to good people or why God ...
	March 23rd, 2012 When using Direct Equivalence in the spoken word, should there be a disclaimer so people know what the terms actually mean? With all the talk in Catholic circles these days about the move toward a “direct equivalence” translation of the mass parts, some may not realize that the translation of scripture (the “spoken word”) we hear ...
	March 16th, 2012 With the new liturgical changes, what do scripture scholars think about Dynamic and Direct Equivalence translations? Although some words to the mass have changed, the stance of scripture scholars to translating the Bible hasn’t. Any serious scholars and translators of the Bible have to make choices in translation. They must either ...
	March 9th, 2012 Are there remnants of Noah’s Ark somewhere? Your question presupposes the literal historicity of the story of Noah’s ark found in Genesis 6-8. Although the story was assumed to be literal for hundreds of years, since about the 19th century mainline scripture ...
	March 2nd, 2012 Tell me what the book of Jonah is about. The Book of Jonah is a very short prophetic book. In it, Jonah ran away from his calling (God asked him to preach repentance to the wicked city of Ninevah) only to endanger the sailors ...
	February 24th, 2012 Did Jesus know how to read? Did Jesus know how to read? Someone told me he was illiterate. The vast majority of the population in Palestine in Jesus’ day would have been illiterate, with some historians suggesting that less than 10% ...
	February 17th, 2012 Who were the Sadducees? No literature from the Sadducees has survived, so we have little historical information about them. What we do know is that like the Pharisees, the Sadducees comprised a sect of Judaism around the time of ...
	February 10th, 2012 Who are the Pharisees? The Pharisees were lay leaders, a sect of Judaism that held great influence among Jewish people of Jesus’ day. They were characterized by observance of both the written laws (the Torah or Old Testament teachings) ...
	January 4th, 2012 What are “magi” anyway? Let me begin by stating who the “magi” were not, at least according to Scripture. There is no evidence in Matthew’s Gospel (2:1-18) -- the only one to mention the magi -- that they were ...
	December 30th, 2011 How old was Jesus when the magi got to Bethlehem to visit him? Christmas pageants often show the shepherds leaving the stage to make room for the magi who have come to worship the newborn Jesus. Yet according to Matthew’s Gospel (the only one mentioning the magi) Jesus ...
	December 27th, 2011 I’ve heard some priests say Jesus was born in a stable while others have said he was born in a cave. Which was it? It is Luke’s Gospel that gives us the famous picture of the newborn babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger (Lk 2:1-20). Luke never specifies that Jesus was born in a stable ...
	December 17th, 2011 What exactly are “swaddling clothes”? “Swaddling clothes” can also be translated as “cloth strips,” “bands of cloth” or even “rags.” It is likely Mary and Joseph used what little they had on hand at the end of an unanticipated 70 ...
	December 9th, 2011 What did Jesus have to say about homosexuality? If you were to read all four gospels thoroughly in search of Jesus’ teachings on homosexuality it would be a futile endeavor. Not only would you come to the end of the gospels without finding ...
	October 21st, 2011 Are the apostles the same as the disciples? These two terms are often used interchangeably, although in the synoptic gospels the apostles generally refer to the 12 men explicitly called by Jesus to follow him while the disciples are a more inclusive larger ...
	October 14th, 2011 Are the “Israelites” mentioned so often in the Old Testament the same as the “Jews”? Generally speaking “Israelites” refer to the ancestors of the Jews whose story is told in the Old Testament. In the book of Genesis, Abraham’s grandson Jacob was renamed “Israel”(Genesis 32:28) and following that renaming, Jacob’s ...
	October 7th, 2011 What is the “Pentateuch”? The Pentateuch is the technical term for the first five books of the Bible (“penta” = five, teuchos = book): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It is also sometimes called the Torah or referred ...
	September 30th, 2011 Why did Bathsheba commit adultery with King David? Bathsheba is sometimes misrepresented as the woman who committed adultery with King David, although from the story in 2 Samuel 11-12 it appears that David either seduced her or even raped her. In the original ...
	September 23rd, 2011 Why is the Jewish God of the Old Testament so judgmental and violent and the Christian God of the New Testament so kind and loving? Certainly there are Old Testament passages that portray a harsh God that many of us would find difficult to accept. For example, God smites the Egyptians and indiscriminately strikes down their firstborn in Exodus, or ...
	September 16th, 2011 Was the ending of the Gospel of Mark really added on later? Mark’s gospel is sometimes called “the gospel with no Christmas and a shaky Easter” because it tells us nothing about Jesus’ birth, and the oldest manuscripts we have of the gospel ended at 16:8a: The ...