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A manuscript or handwrit is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched (the original meaning of ''graffiti'') as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a waxed tablet (the way Romans made notes), or are in cuneiform writing, impressed with a pointed stylus in a flat tablet of unbaked clay. The word ''manuscript'' derives from the Medieval Latin ''manuscriptum'', a word first recorded in 1594 as a latinisation of earlier Germanic words used in the Middle Ages: compare Middle High German ''hantschrift'' (c. 1450), Old Norse ''handrit'' (bef. 1300), Old English ''handgewrit'' (bef. 1150), all meaning "manuscript", literally, "handwritten".

In publishing and academic contexts, a "manuscript" is the text submitted to the publisher or printer in preparation for publication, usually as a typescript prepared on a typewriter, or today, a printout from a PC, prepared in manuscript format.

Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations. Manuscripts may be in the form of scrolls or in book form, or codex format. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately engrossed initial letters or full-page illustrations.

Cultural background

The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts. The second ''s'' is not simply the plural; by an old convention, it doubles the last letter of the abbreviation to express the plural, just as ''pp.'' means "pages".

Before the invention of woodblock printing in China or by moveable type in a printing press in Europe, all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand. Historically, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls (''volumen'' in Latin) or books (''codex'', plural ''codices''). Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchments, on papyrus, and on paper. In Russia birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived. In India the Palm leaf manuscript, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, was used from ancient times until the 19th century. Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by the late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes.

When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud.

The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy-wrappings, discarded in the middens of Oxyrhynchus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried (Nag Hammadi library) or stored in dry caves (Dead Sea scrolls). Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.

Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of Antiquity are virtually all lost. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively moist Italian or Greek conditions; only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those.

Originally, all books were in manuscript form. In China, and later other parts of East Asia, Woodblock printing was used for books from about the seventh century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive. Private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century. Because of the likelihood of errors being introduced each time a manuscript was copied, the filiation of different version of the same text is a fundamental part of the study and criticism of all texts that have been transmitted in manuscript.

In Southeast Asia, in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as copperplate, softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with a metal stylus. In the Philippines, for example, as early as 900, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's dot-matrix printers. This type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the metal document in the hot, humid climate. In Burma, the kammavaca, buddhist manuscripts, were inscribed on brass, copper or ivory sheets, and even on discarded monk robes folded and lacquered. In Italy some important Etruscan texts were similarly inscribed on thin gold plates: similar sheets have been discovered in Bulgaria. Technically, these are all inscriptions rather than manuscripts.

The study of the writing, or "hand" in surviving manuscripts is termed palaeography. In the Western world, from the classical period through the early centuries of the Christian era, manuscripts were written without spaces between the words (scriptio continua), which makes them especially hard for the untrained to read. Extant copies of these early manuscripts written in Greek or Latin and usually dating from the 4th century to the 8th century, are classified according to their use of either all upper case or all lower case letters. Hebrew manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea scrolls make no such differentiation. Manuscripts using all upper case letters are called majuscule, those using all lower case are called minuscule. Usually, the majuscule scripts such as uncial are written with much more care. The scribe lifted his pen between each stroke, producing an unmistakable effect of regularity and formality. On the other hand, while minuscule scripts can be written with pen-lift, they may also be cursive, that is, use little or no pen-lift.

Modern variations

In modern times it can be classed as a sustainability strategy In the context of library science, a manuscript is defined as any hand-written item in the collections of a library or an archive; for example, a library's collection of the letters or a diary that some historical personage wrote. Such manuscript collections are described in finding aids, similar to an index or table of contents to the collection, in accordance with national and international content standards such as DACS and ISAD(G).

In other contexts, however, the use of the term "manuscript" no longer necessarily means something that is hand-written. By analogy a ''typescript'' has been produced on a typewriter.

In book, magazine, and music publishing, a manuscript is an original copy of a work written by an author or composer, which generally follows standardized typographic and formatting rules. (The staff paper commonly used for handwritten music is, for this reason, often called "manuscript paper.") In film and theatre, a manuscript, or ''script'' for short, is an author's or dramatist's text, used by a theater company or film crew during the production of the work's performance or filming. More specifically, a motion picture manuscript is called a screenplay; a television manuscript, a teleplay; a manuscript for the theater, a stage play; and a manuscript for audio-only performance is often called a radio play, even when the recorded performance is disseminated via non-radio means.

In insurance, a manuscript policy is one that is negotiated between the insurer and the policyholder, as opposed to an off-the-shelf form supplied by the insurer.

European manuscript history

Almost all surviving manuscripts use the codex format (as in a modern book), which had replaced the scroll by Late Antiquity. Parchment, or vellum as the best type of parchment is known had also replaced papyrus, which was not nearly so long lived and has survived to the present only in the extremely dry conditions of Egypt, although it was widely used across the Roman world. Parchment is made of animal skin, normally calf, sheep, and/or goat, but also other animals. With all skins, the quality of the finished product is based on how much preparation and skill was put into turning the skin into parchment. Parchment made from calf or sheep was the most common in Northern Europe, while in Southern Europe, those civilizations preferred goatskin. Often, if the parchment is white or cream in color and veins from the animal can still be seen, it is calfskin. If it is yellow, greasy or in some cases shiny, then it was made from sheepskin.

Vellum comes from the Latin word vitulinum which means “of calf”/ “made from calf”. For modern parchment makers and calligraphers, and apparently often in the past, the terms parchment and vellum are used based on the different degrees of quality, preparation and thickness, and not according to which animal the skin came from, and because of this, the more neutral term "membrane" is often used by modern academics, especially where the animal has not been established by testing.

Preparing a manuscript

The first stage in creating a manuscript is to prepare the skin so that the writer can write on it. The skin is washed with water and lime, but not together, and it has to soak in the lime for a couple of days. The hair is removed and the skin is dried by tension. The skin is put into a frame called a herse. The parchment maker attached the skin at points around the circumference. The skin is attached to herse by cords; to prevent tearing, the maker wrapped the area of the skin to which the cord is to be attached around a pebble called a pippin. After that is complete, the maker will use a crescent shaped knife, called lunarium or lunellum, to clean any surviving hairs. Once the skin is completely dry, it will be given a deep clean, and it will be processed into sheets. The number of sheets out of a piece of skin depends on the size of the skin and the given dimensions requested by the order. For example, the average calfskin can provide three and half medium sheets of writing material. This can be doubled when it is folded into two conjoint leaves, also known as a bifolium. Historians have found evidence of manuscripts where the scribe wrote down the medieval instructions now followed by modern membrane makers. Of course with any natural made product there will be some defects. Defects can be any sort of mistake in the membrane, whether it was human error during the preparation period or from when the animal was killed. Defects can also appear during the writing process. Unless it is kept in perfect condition, defects can appear later in the manuscript’s life as well.

Preparation of the pages for writing

Before anything a scribe can do, the membrane must be prepared. This will be listed in steps, as they occur today when making traditional animal skin manuscripts and as they did back in the Middle Ages. The first step is to setup the quires. The quires is a group of several sheets put together. Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham point out, in "Introduction to Manuscript Studies", that “the quire was the scribe’s basic writing unit throughout the Middle Ages”.

Pricking and ruling the leaves

In "Introduction to Manuscript Studies", Clemens and Graham define pricking and ruling perfectly

“Pricking is the process of making holes in a sheet of parchment (or membrane) in preparation of it ruling. The lines were then made by ruling between the prick marks.”

and on ruling “The process of entering ruled lines on the page to serve as a guide for entering text. Most manuscripts were ruled with horizontal lines that served as the baselines on which the text was entered and with vertical bounding lines that marked the boundaries of the columns.”

After this stage, the scribe would get to work copying from the original work to his collection of sheets of parchment.

Forming the quire

The scribe, usually a monk, would decide on what his quire would look like, by arranging the hair and flesh sides of the sheets. Throughout time from Carolingian period and all the way up to the Middles Ages, different styles of folding the quire came about. For example, though out mainland Europe throughout the Middle Ages, the quire would be put into a system which each side would fold on to the same style. The hair side would meet the hair side and the same goes with the flesh side. This was not the same style used in the British Isles, where the membrane would be folded so that it turned out a eight leaf quire, with single leaves in the third and sixth positions. Once the scribe has it the way that he wants, the next stage was tacking the quire. Tacking is when the scribe would hold together the leaves in quire with thread. Once threaded together, the scribe would then sew a line of parchment up the “spine” of the manuscript, as to protect the tacking.

A sample of common genres of manuscripts

From ancient texts to medieval maps, anything written down for study would have been done with manuscripts. Some of the most common genres were bibles, religious commentaries, philosophy, law and government texts.

Bibles

“The Bible was the most studied book of the Middle Ages.” The Bible was the center of medieval religious life. Along with the Bible, came scores of commentaries. Commentaries were written in volumes, with some focusing on just single pages of scripture. Across Europe, there were universities that prided themselves on their biblical knowledge. Along with Universities, certain cities also had their own celebrities of the medieval

Book of Hours

The book of hours was a devotional book popular in the Middle Ages. It is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. Like every manuscript, each manuscript book of hours is unique in one way or another, but most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and psalms, often with appropriate decorations, for Christian devotion. Illumination or decoration is minimal in many examples, often restricted to decorated capital letters at the start of psalms and other prayers, but books made for wealthy patrons may be extremely lavish, with full-page miniatures.

Liturgical Books and Calendars

Along with Bibles, large numbers of manuscripts made in the Middle Ages were used in Church. Due to the church’s complex system of rituals and worship, these books were finally written and most decorated of all medieval manuscripts. Liturgical books, usually, came in two varieties. Those used during Mass and those for Divine Office.

Most liturgical books came with a calendar in the front. This served as a quick reference point for important dates in Christ’s life and to tell Church officials which Saints were to be honored and on what day. The format of the Liturgical Calendar was as followed:

''an example of a medieval liturgical calendar''

! January, August, December	! March, May, July, October	! April, June, September, November	! February
Kal. (1)	Kal. (1)	Kal. (1)	Kal. (1)
IV Non. (2)	VI Non. (2)	IV Non. (2)	IV Non. (2)
III Non. (3)	V Non. (3)	III Non. (3)	III Non. (3)
II Non. (4)	IV Non. (4)	II Non. (4)	II Non. (4)
Non. (5)	III Non. (5)	Non. (5)	Non. (5)
VIII Id. (6)	II Non. (6)	VIII Id. (6)	VIII Id. (6)
VII Id. (7)	Non. (7)	VII Id. (7)	VII Id. (7)
VI Id. (8)	VIII Id. (8)	VI Id. (8)	VI Id. (8)
V Id. (9)	VII Id. (9)	V Id. (9)	V Id. (9)
IV Id. (10)	VII Id. (10)	IV Id. (10)	IV Id. (10)
III Id. (11)	V Id. (11)	III Id. (11)	III Id. (11)
II Id. (12)	IV Id. (12)	II Id. (12)	II Id. (12)
Id (13)	III Id. (13)	Id. (13)	Id. (13)
XIX Kal. (14)	II Id. (14)	XVIII Kal. (14)	XVI Kal. (14)
XVIII Kal. (15)	Id. (15)	XVII Kal. (15)	XV Kal. (15)
XVII Kal. (16)	XVII Kal. (16)	XVI Kal. (16)	XIV Kal. (16)
XVI Kal. (17)	XVI Kal. (17)	XV Kal. (17)	XIII Kal. (17)
XV Kal. (18)	XV Kal. (18)	XIV Kal. (18)	XII Kal. (18)
XIV Kal. (19)	XIV Kal. (19)	XIII Kal. (19)	XI Kal. (19)
XIII Kal. (20)	XIII Kal. (20	XII Kal. (20)	X Kal. (20)
XII Kal. (21)	XII Kal. (21)	XI Kal. (21)	IX Kal. (21)
XI Kal. (22)	XI Kal. (22)	X Kal. (22)	VIII Kal. (22)
X Kal. (23)	X Kal. (23)	IX Kal. (23)	VII Kal. (23)
IX Kal. (24)	IX Kal. (24)	VIII Kal. (24)	VI Kal (''the extra day in a leap year'')
VIII Kal. (25)	VIII Kal. (25)	VII Kal. (25)	VI Kal. (24/25)
VII Kal. (26)	VII Kal. (26)	VI Kal. (26)	V Kal. (25/26)
VI Kal. (27)	VI Kal. (27)	V Kal. (27)	V Kal. (26/27)
V Kal. (28)	V Kal. (28)	V Kal. (28)	V Kal. (27/28)
IV Kal. (29)	IV Kal. (29)	III Kal. (29)	III Kal. (28/29)
III Kal. (30)	III Kal. (30)	II Kal. (30)
II Kal. (31)	II Kal. (31)

Almost all medieval calendars give each day’s date according to the Roman method of reckoning time. In the Roman system, each month had three fixed points, known as Kalends (Kal), the Nons and the Ides. The nones fell on the fifth of the month in January, February, April, June, August, September, November and December, but on the seventh of the month in March, May, July and October. The ides ell on the thirteenth in those months in which the nones fell on the fifth, and the fifteenth in the other four months. All other days were dated by the number of days by which they preceded one of those fixed points.

Different Scripts

Merovingian script, or "Luxeuil minuscule", is named after an abbey in Western France, the Luxeuil Abbey, founded by the Irish missionary St Columba in ca.590. Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the small literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200. Codices, classical and Christian texts, and educational material were written in Carolingian minuscule throughout the Carolingian Renaissance. The script developed into blackletter and became obsolete, though its revival in the Italian renaissance forms the basis of more recent scripts. In ''Introduction to Manuscript Studies'', Clemens and Graham associate the beginning of this text coming from the Abby of Saint-Martin at Tours.

Caroline Minuscule arrived in England in the second half of the 10th century. Its adoption there, replacing Insular script, was encouraged by the importation of continental European manuscripts by Saints Dunstan, Aethelwold, and Oswald. This script spread quite rapidly, being employed in many English centres for copying Latin texts. English scribes adapted the Carolingian script, giving it proportion and legibility.[9] This new revision of the Caroline Minuscule was called English Protogothic Bookhand. Another script that is derived from the Caroline Minuscule was the German Protogothic Bookhand. It originated in southern Germany during the second half of the 12 century. All the indiviual letters are Caroline; but just as with English Protogothic Bookhand it evolved. This can be seen most notably in the arm of the letter h. It has a hairline that tapers out by curving to the left. When first read the German Protogothic h looks like the German Protogothic b. Many more scripts sprang out of the German Protogothic Bookhand. After those came Bastard Anglicana, which is best described as:

The coexistence in the Gothic period of formal hands employed for the copying of books and cursive scripts used for documentary purposes eventually resulted in cross-fertilization between these two fundamentally different writing styles. Notably, scribes began to upgrade some of the cursive scripts. A script that has been thus formalized is known as a ''bastard'' script (whereas a bookhand that has had cursive elementas fused onto it is known as a hybrid script). The advantage of such a script was that it could be written more quickly than a pure bookhand; it thus recommended itself to scribes in a period when demand for books was increasing and authors were tending to write longer texts. In England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many books were written in the script known as Bastard Anglicana.

Major US Repositories of Medieval Manuscripts

Pierpont Morgan = 1,300 (including papyri)

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale = 1,100

Houghton Library, Harvard = 850

Huntington Library = 400

Newberry Library = 260

Cornell University Library = 150

See also

Armenian Illuminated manuscript

Genkō yōshi

Gospel Book

List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts

Manuscript culture

Miniature (illuminated manuscript)

Music manuscript

Palm-leaf manuscript

Preservation of Illuminated Manuscripts

Printing press

Voynich manuscript

Woodblock printing

External links

British Library Glossary of manuscript terms, mostly relating to Western medieval manuscripts

Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh

Chinese Codicology

Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Sarasvati Mahal Library, has the richest collection of manuscripts in Sanskrit, Tamil, Marathi and Telugu

The Schøyen Collection – the world's largest private collection of manuscripts of all types, with many descriptions and images

Newberry Library Manuscript Search

Getty Exhibitions

Polish manuscripts in Sweden

Work cited

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Gordon Rugg was born in Perth, Scotland in 1955. He has a first degree in French and Linguistics and a PhD in Psychology, both from Reading University, UK. His background includes working as a timberyard worker, a field archaeologist and an English lecturer. He became the focus of media attention in 2004 for his work on the Voynich Manuscript.

He is co-author with Marian Petre of two books for students which focus on semi-tacit skills in research. He is head of the Knowledge Modelling Group at Keele University and a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Open University.

Research

His main research theme is elicitation methods – techniques for eliciting information from people, for purposes such as market research and requirements gathering for software development. His main work in this field includes the following. A series of co-authored papers on card sorts. A series of co-authored papers on laddering, including one which integrates laddering with graph theory. A paper co-authored with Neil Maiden, describing a framework for choosing the appropriate methods to elicit various types of semi-tacit and tacit knowledge.

This work formed one main strand in the Verifier method which he developed with Joanne Hyde. This is a method for critically re-assessing previous research into difficult problems. The initial stage uses a range of elicitation methods to gain an accurate picture of the assumptions and normal working practices used in the previous work. The next stage uses a knowledge of experts’ behaviour and a range of error taxonomies to identify the places where human error is most likely to have occurred. The final stage uses various formalisms to assess whether or not an error actually has occurred. There is no guarantee that this method will catch every error – it is not a method for proving the correctness of a piece of previous work – but it improves the chances of finding key errors.

Rugg’s other work is multidisciplinary, including theoretical archaeology and teaching methods.

Voynich manuscript

Rugg used an informal version of the Verifier method to re-assess previous work on the Voynich Manuscript, a manuscript widely believed to be a ciphertext based on a code which had resisted decipherment since the manuscript’s rediscovery by Voynich in 1912. Previous research had concluded that the manuscript contained linguistic features too complex to be readily explicable as a hoax, and too strange to be explicable as a transliteration of an unidentified language, leaving an uncracked cipher as the only realistic explanation.

Rugg identified that the assessments of complexity were not based on empirical evidence. He examined a range of techniques known in the late sixteenth century, and found that, by using a modified Cardan grille combined with a large table of meaningless syllables, it was possible to produce meaningless text that had qualititive and statistical properties similar to those of "Voynichese". Rugg replicated the drawings from a range of pages in the manuscript, accompanying each with the same quantity of text as found in the original page, and discovered that most pages could be reproduced in one to two hours, as fast as they could be transcribed. This suggested that a meaningless hoax manuscript as long and as apparently linguistically complex as the Voynich manuscript could be produced, complete with coloured illustrations, by a single person in between 250 and 500 hours.

However, there is debate about the features of the manuscript which Rugg's suggested method was not able to emulate. The two main features are lines showing different linguistic features from the bulk of the manuscript, such as the Neal keys, and the statistical properties of the text produced. Rugg argues that these linguistic features are trivially easy to hoax using the same approach with a different set of tables, and would add about five minutes to the time to produce each page; the counter-argument is that this makes the hoax too complex to be plausible. Regarding statistics, Rugg points out that text produced from the same set of initial nonsense syllables but using different table structures shows widely different statistical properties. Since there are tens of thousands of permutations of table design, he argues that it would simply be a question of time to find a design which produced the same statistical properties as “Voynichese”. Whether or not this would prove anything useful is another issue, since it could either be used to support Rugg’s argument, or dismissed as coincidence.

Further counterarguments are:

There is no historical evidence showing that Cardan grilles were used for this kind of purpose at any time in history

The radiocarbon dating, codicology and palaeography all indicate that the manuscript was constructed roughly a century before Cardan grilles were devised

The mathematical concept of randomness was not yet fully formed in the time period proposed

The debate continues.

External links

Knowledge Modelling Group at Keele University

BBC Staffordshire Feature on the Voynich Manuscript

Das Geheimnis des mysteriösen Voynich-Codes at Wissenschaft.de

What are Neal keys at www.voynich.net

Category:1955 births Category:Living people Category:People from Perth, Scotland Category:British scientists Category:Alumni of the University of Reading Category:Academics of Keele University

es:Gordon Rugg eo:Gordon Rugg fr:Gordon Rugg it:Gordon Rugg

Hendrik "Hank" Hanegraaff (born 1950) also known as the ''Bible Answer Man'' is an American author, radio talk-show host and advocate of evangelical Christianity. He was born in the Netherlands and raised in the United States since childhood. He is married with twelve children. He is an outspoken figure within the Christian countercult movement where he has established a reputation for his criticisms of non-Christian religions, new religious movements or cults and heresies within conservative Christianity. He is also an apologist on doctrinal and cultural issues.

Career

Prior to becoming a leading figure in the Christian countercult movement, Hanegraaff was closely affiliated with the ministry of D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian church in Florida. During his association with Kennedy in the 1980s, Hanegraaff applied memory-based techniques (such as acrostic mnemonics) to summarise strategies, methods and techniques in Christian evangelism. His work bears resemblances to memory dynamics techniques developed in speed-reading courses and in memory training programs used in some executive business courses.

During the late 1980s Hanegraaff became associated with Walter Martin (1928-1989) at the Christian Research Institute (CRI), the conservative Protestant countercult and apologetic ministry which Martin founded in 1960.

After Martin's death from heart failure in June 1989, Hanegraaff became president of CRI. As part of his role as ministry president, Hanegraaff assumed the role from Martin of anchorman on the radio program ''The Bible Answer Man''. Hanegraaff also became a conference speaker and itinerant preacher in churches, pursuing the general ministry charter of CRI. Shortly after the release of Dan Brown's novel, he co-authored ''The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction?'' with Lutheran apologist Paul Maier. His most recent publication to date is ''Christianity in Crisis 21st Century'', from Thomas Nelson in 2009.

The content of The Bible Answer Man show includes answering questions about Christian doctrine, biblical interpretation, and denominational particularities, as well as special focuses on particular issues when a notable figure is a guest, such as frequent shows focused on Mormonism when former Mormons appear in studio as guests to speak from their experiences.

Personal life

Christian Research Institute

During his tenure at Christian Research Institute, a rift between Hanegraaff and the family of the late Martin grew amid accusations of changing CRI's mission, and the improper use of its not-for-profit status. In 2003, an audit by Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability found financial irregularities at the CRI, resulting in a "significant reimbursement."

2007 Defamation Suit

Hanegraaff filed a defamation suit against a longtime critic William Alnor for statements made in a fundraising letter alleging mail fraud. The lawsuit was thrown out, the court finding that Hanegraaff did not prove "actual malice.”

Despite its warm reception by evangelicals, the book (as well as ''Christianity in Crisis'') was harshly criticized by many Pentecostal and charismatic leaders such as Don Williams, William DeArteaga and Michael L. Brown.

Worldwide Church of God

Throughout the 1990s, Hanegraaff engaged in dialogue with Joseph Tkach, Jr. and other leaders of the heterodox Worldwide Church of God (WCG), now known as Grace Communion International (GCI). The WCG was founded in the 1930s by Herbert W. Armstrong, and had long been regarded as a cult by evangelicals, primarily for its denial of the Trinity and other traditional Christian doctrines. Following Armstrong's death in 1986, the group re-evaluated many of its teachings, including the British Israel doctrine and various eschatological predictions.

Hanegraaff was one of a handful of evangelical apologists – along with, e.g., Ruth A. Tucker (author of ''Another Gospel'') who assisted in the reforms. The biggest changes to ensure their acceptance among evangelicals, were in accepting the doctrine of the Trinity and Salvation by Grace through Faith.

The story is told in the 1997 book ''Transformed by Truth'' by Joseph Tkach, with a foreword by Hanegraaff. The book, now out of print, is posted chapter by chapter on the GCI Web site.

Other works

Hanegraaff has defended the historicity of the Resurrection of Christ in print and on radio.

He has been outspoken against the theory of Evolution, in favour of creationism. However, has distanced himself from teaching any specific form, such as young earth creationism. In conjunction with the Christian Research Institute, he has asked "Why put heavy emphasis on a doctrine that can stand in the way of some peopleʹs arriving at Christian faith when it is not even certain that the biblical data supports the obstacle in question?" By questioning whether the biblical data supports the "obstacle" of such things as common evolutionary timeframes, some people (including Ken Ham) have seen this as shifting towards the position of an giving preference to a much longer timeframe - like Old Earth, Gap, Day-Age or Progressive creationism.

Hanegraaff is noted for his belief that Biblical inerrancy can be proven on a rational basis. He has also followed his predecessor, Walter Martin, in opposing what he describes as "pseudo-Christian" cults, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons. In recent times he has co-authored three novels with Sigmund Brouwer.

Word-Faith movement

In his 1993 book ''Christianity in Crisis'', Hanegraaff charged the Word-Faith movement with heretical teachings, saying that many of the Word-Faith groups were "cults", and that those who "knowingly" accepted the movement's theology were "clearly embracing a different gospel, which is in reality no gospel at all."

He made much of the Faith teachers' alleged tendencies to rely on visions and other experiential phenomena rather than Scripture alone.

Counterfeit Revival

Hanegraaff revisited some of the same issues in his 1997 book ''Counterfeit Revival'', in which he rejected the claims of many charismatic teachers such as Rodney Howard Browne concerning what became known as the Toronto Blessing. The Toronto Blessing was associated with the Vineyard church located near the Toronto airport, and was characterized by spontaneous and sustained outbursts of bodily phenomena such as laughing, crying, animal noises, and dancing. The proponents of this blessing believed this was a special time of refreshing bestowed on churches by the Holy Spirit. A different set of phenomena and claims subsequently emanated from churches in Brownsville, Pensacola, Florida, and became known as the Brownsville Revival.

''Counterfeit Revival'' was criticized in ''Christianity Today'' magazine's review of the book. The review, while acknowledging that ''Counterfeit Revival'' "exposes some real excesses and imbalances" in the Toronto Blessing, also states that ''Counterfeit Revival'' is a "misleading, simplistic, and harmful book, marred by faulty logic, outdated and limited research".

Works

''Counterfeit Revival'' (Dallas: Word, 1997).

''The FACE That Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution'' (Nashville: Word, 1998).

(General editor), ''The Kingdom of the Cults'' (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1997).

''Millennium Bug Debugged'' (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1998).

''Resurrection'' (Nashville: Word, 2000).

''The Prayer of Jesus'' (Nashville: Word, 2001).

''Fatal Flaws'' (Nashville: Word, 2003).

''Bible Answer Book'' (Nashville: J. Countryman, 2004).

(with Sigmund Brouwer) ''The Last Disciple'' (A Novel), (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2004).

(with Sigmund Brouwer) ''The Last Sacrifice'' (A Novel), (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2005).

''The Apocalypse Code: Find Out What the Bible REALLY Says About the End Times . . . and Why It Matters Today'' (Thomas Nelson, 2007)

(with Sigmund Brouwer) ''Fuse of Armageddon'' (A Novel), (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2007)

See also

Christian countercult movement

:Category:Cults

List of anti-cult organizations and individuals

Partial preterism

Christian Research Institute

References

Further reading

Walter Martin, ''The Kingdom of the Cults'', (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1965; revised in several editions published by Bethany House in 1967, 1977, 1985, 1997 and 2003).

J. Gordon Melton, "The counter-cult monitoring movement in historical perspective," in ''Challenging Religion: Essays in Honour of Eileen Barker'', edited by James A. Beckford & James T. Richardson, (Routledge, London, 2003), pp. 102-113.

Larry Nichols and George Mather, ''Discovering the Plain Truth: How the Worldwide Church of God Encountered the Gospel of Grace'' (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1998).

Joseph Tkach, ''Transformed By Truth'' (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 1997).

External links

Archive of Bible Answerman shows

Hank Hanegraaff Blog

Category:1950 births Category:Christian apologists Category:American Christian religious leaders Category:Christian ministers Category:Christian writers Category:Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity Category:Christian creationists Category:American people of Dutch descent Category:American evangelicals Category:Living people

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