What's the difference between discipline and punishment in the Christian life?

That's just one of the questions we'll be answering on today's edition of Core Christianity.

Well, hi, this is Bill Meyer, along with Pastor Adriel Sanchez, and this is the radio program where we answer your questions about

the Bible and the Christian life every day. You can call us right now with your question. Here's our phone number.

It's 833 The Core. You can call us for the next 25 minutes or so, 1-833-843-243-2673.

Now, you can also post your question on one of our social media sites, and you can

watch Adriel right now live on our YouTube channel and send him your question that way. Of course,

you can always email us your question at Questions at Core Christianity.com. First up today,

here's a voicemail from one of our listeners. This is Mary from

Kentucky. Hey, Bill and Adrile, thank you so much for your show. I enjoy listening and I learn so

much from it. The other days, I was reading through scripture, I had a couple questions

kind of about the history of it. Were stories in the Bible written as they happened or were they written

a time after? And then when did people learn about those stories? Thank you guys so much.

I appreciate any help that can give me on this answer. Hey, that's a great question, Mary.

So I don't imagine that the disciples are sort of like journalists, you know, as Jesus was doing things, they had a notebook with them and they were writing those things down. In fact, actually having paper or parchment in the ancient world, that was not, I mean, we think of, you know, going to the store and buying a notebook or something like that. And that's easy. It's cheap. At that time, it was actually very expensive to get your hands on those kinds of things. And so, no, I don't

think that they were sort of writing things down as they happened. This is something that they did after the fact. And then in terms of the spread of those stories, obviously you have, well, just preaching, you know, the oral tradition, if you will, but early on, and this is something that's really interesting, there's a guy,

scholar, he died not too long ago. His name was Larry Hurtado. He had a book that he wrote called

Destroyer of the God's Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman world. And one of the things that

he notes about the early Christian church is that it was unusually bookish for the ancient world.

In other words, they focused a lot on written texts, on books, on copying and writing down these scriptures.

Why?

Because there was this belief embedded in the early churches.

...