Why I Study Greek and First-Century Ephesus

"I would say that a clear understanding of the character of earliest Christianity—its beliefs, its practices, its struggles and challenges—are essential if we are to understand who we are as Christians and who we ought to be and to be about. The church today is suffering from a sort of amnesia; it has forgotten the rock from which it was hewn, and so it fails to understand its own identity. The past, as Lightfoot would say, is not mere prologue; it is the foundation of our faith and on it we must stand. Lightfoot reminds us again and again that history matters, that nothing can be theologically true that is historically false, that a gnostic sort of spirituality that divorces itself from the original Greek text and context of Acts is not a Christian approach to spiritual formation but a heresy against which the church fathers fought vigorously."

—Ben Witherington III, IVP Academic Alert 23, no. 3 (Winter 2015), p. 4.