Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

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.

Note that the early church fathers usually don't source their quotes, which leads to the often heard interpretation in your sense, i.e., that "church fathers just quoted from memory". However, that's just one possible interpretation. I think Ben made a few statistics regarding certain church father...

Hitler was a good Catholic boy, until the end. He never stopped paying his church dues. Also, membership in the SS was forbidden for non-believers. It sure is a bit contentious between historians, but I guess there's still reason to think that Hitler's hate of Jews had at least one of its roots in C...

Those concise summaries are great. Thanks!