Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Come on, Stephan. You may not like the idea, but νοῦς is at least a central concept of Socratic philosophy and, more importantly, gnosticism (Valentinus, Basilides, Simon Mages, Gospel of Mary). It's the other part that throws me off.

As far as I know, the scholarly consensus (I use that term lightly) has mostly shifted to a position that some form of Hebrew was still spoken in some rural areas of Judea well into the 1st century AD, but not really in Jerusalem or Galilee.

@Secret Alias: Not sure what you want to tell us here. If it were that easy to assign budding Christianity to a specific sect, someone would have done this by now. However, it isn't easy. If you look at Jesus (well, his teachings from the gospels), you may conclude that you look at 4 parts Hillel an...

Very nice post, Ben. The Passover connection looks convincing, and it's good to know that the Passover and military connotations are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other.

Acts misunderstand the conflict between Peter and Paul. Deliberately so, I think. Given they transform Paul into Peter and Peter into Paul, they try to bridge two irreconcilable positions by mincing those personalities and their views until you get a patty that is palatable for most people from bot...

I don't see any strong connection, other than the point that some quality of a moneychanger is invoked.

I know this is not going to win me any fans but 'the beginning' of the gospel narrative is necessarily Yom Kippur. So we are down to one of two choices - Yom Kippur or Passover. I think it originally took place on Yom Kippur. The Barabbas scene is also a Yom Kippur story, even though that makes Bar...

Why are you wasting so much time pretending to be doing textual analysis or criticism? That's your general issue in a nutshell. Your question betrays that you think "textual analysis or criticism" means inventing things out of whole cloth. Which explains most of your posts. A theory is based on exi...

I was referring to the disconnect that gets visible when someone is surprised that a king might be called "Christ".

It's not surprising that thought sprang from the mind of a Latin writer, given "Christ" was a title that didn't have any meaning beyond the religious one for them.