There are many occasions when what seem like throwaway remarks from Jesus say far more than we may realise. One in particular is heard in an exchange between a Canaanite woman where he tells her, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." So who are the lost sheep of the House of Israel? How did they become lost? Were they ever found? Strangely, these questions were never discussed or addressed, not to mention satisfactoraly answered during my decades as a church goer. This left me with no alternative to go and have a look in the Scriptures and find out for myself. This study documents what I found.

One of the interesting aspects of a number of ancient languages like Hebrew is that in their written form, where we have numbers and letters, they have only letters. In each language there are no numeric characters but the letters are also used as numbers. The context told the reader the word was a reference to a numeric value or not. The interesting outcome of this is that when a word is written, it also has a numeric equivalent. Applied in reverse, when a number is written, it has a word equivalent. One such word that many Christians today are familiar with is the word "tithe". Its numeric value is "one tenth", its word meaning is "gift to God".

That the Biblical character Joshua and the Egyptian Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, are both referred to as the Son of Nun, is the first of many pieces of theology-shaking evidence drawn from the pages of Egyptian and Jewish history, the Talmud and The Bible which collectively point towards Jesus and Tutankhamun being one and the same person. But they lived 1,600 years apart; how could that possibly be? This study examines the evidence in these ancient texts that link two of the most famous people in history.

The creation stories told in the Book of Genesis have their origins in the oral history of the people of Israel. They are influenced by this people’s cultural background as inhabitants of the ancient near east, but primarily and most importantly by their experience of God at work in their history. The Cultural Context of Israel gives a good explanation of religious and cultural influences on Israel, and also explains how Israel’s experience of God in its history influenced the accounts of creation.

The modern evangelical church teaches that Jesus Christ died for our sins in an act of atonement, a belief based primarily on the teachings of the Apostle Paul in his letters to the churches of his time. Yet Jesus himself in his teaching seemed to promote a different gospel which centred around the need for behavioral action, with little more than a single passing reference in the four gospels that He played any part in it (Matt. 26:28). So does Jesus offer us the path to Salvation because he taught us the path we should follow, or because he died for our sins in an Atonement?

Though the foundations on which the Christian faith stands are found in the New Testament, by its inclusion in the Bible, the Old Testament does form a prelude to it. One problem for many who read the Old Testament is that it is increasingly being found not to be historically accurate in a literal sense, and so it is often sidelined as being both irrelevant and inaccurate. The reality is that much of what it says happened did happen, but not necessarily in the places, times and to the people it states.