Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

StephenGoranson wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:19 am

And, by the way, why the fictional name, mh? As for hiding an agenda, to use an old phrase, who's zooming who?

You want my birth certificate?

You'll just have to take my word for it......Mary Helena is my birth name.....

StephenGoranson wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 02, 2021 12:18 am

mary helena, and were Pliny the Elder and Dio also writing fiction about Essenes?

Philo set the agenda.......

maryhelena, what matters here is not the existence or not of the Essenes, but the concrete probability that John of Gischala was confused in a source used by Josephus as 'John the Essene', hence, even beyond the possible ethymology of 'Essaios' as 'Baptizer' (per Graetz's and Raschke's suggestion),...

Right.... Time to throw a cat among the pigeons..... The Essenes did not exist historically. They are a fiction in the minds of Philo and Josephus. Their purpose in writing fiction...... or perhaps to be generous.... allegory.... can indeed be questioned. However, once doubt has been cast re histori...

This forum is called "Biblical Criticism & History Forum," not "Criticism except for X, Y, or Z's papers." I agree with some papers, including recently as you can see, and disagree with others. Do you wish to disallow such? My point is that when one already has an axe to grind, in the debate over H...

According to the G. Doudna paper maryhelena linked to again, Josephus called Hyrcanus II John the Baptist instead of Hyrcanus II and also placed the story in the time of a wrong Herod. Each one of these seems to me unlikely. Taken together, even more unlikely. Greg Doudna's paper on the Josephan fi...

Also of interest from the John the Baptist (Online 2021) conference. http://enochseminar.org/online-2021 Shayna Sheinfeld, “Revisiting the Historical John the Baptist as Prophet in First-Century Judaism”  It is no surprise, given the eventual success of the religion we have come to know as Christian...

doing some research and presenting a shocking conclusion that so-and-so is not historical? (so you buy his book) what does "not historical" even mean? it means nothing the idea is to place people in their historical context whether they are literary creations or not or some blend of the two that wa...

It wasn’t inevitable, given Vespasian and Titus, that someone would compose gMark. The failure of the Hasmoneans doesn’t explain why Jews under the Romans got so good at writing scripture, anymore than Antiochus Epiphanes explains why the Book of Daniel was written or why it had such an impact. The...

It wasn’t inevitable, given Vespasian and Titus, that someone would compose gMark. The failure of the Hasmoneans doesn’t explain why Jews under the Romans got so good at writing scripture, anymore than Antiochus Epiphanes explains why the Book of Daniel was written or why it had such an impact. The...