Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Whatever we today regard the genre of the Gospels to have been, they were presented as some kind of actual history, Certainly they were presented as such at least from the mid to late second century. But how do we know that's how they were originally presented? Of course the narratives are patently...

Indeed, the position of the temporal marker, "from the beginning" ("απ' αρχης"), seems to refer to their having become both "eyewitnesses" and "servants of the word" (or whatever way we understand these terms) at the same time. But what is this 'time' exactly, "the beginning"? This "beginning" can ...

Nor am I certain that we should think the evangelists subsequent to Mark thought that their versions should "settle the narrative" or be the final version. It seems very clear that at least in the Gospel of John we have multiple editings of the work, changing and adding to it over time; ditto for Ma...

I don't know if we should take for granted the common translations of Luke's prologue. There is another interpretation that I have not seen addressed yet: https://vridar.org/category/literary-an ... -prologue/

I meant "realism". That covers everything from the appearance of real to the really real.

We can't read the author of gMark's mind, but we can see how at least two, and I think three, persons read it. Notice how the authors of Matthew and Luke (and John, too!!) felt free to change and rewrite it.

The use of prophecy was a stock tool for driving the plot of both fiction and history. Herodotus, the "father of history", narrated many instances of prophetic utterances of the Delphic oracle and it has been argued that Herodotus's Histories was as theological in function as the Hebrew Bible's hist...

It is worth keeping in mind, too, that even obvious fiction was frequently structured around prophecies and their fulfillment, and would also include historical persons as part of the fictional narrative. It was all part of the realism and drama.

There is no question that the gospels are narrated as "histories". From T.P. Wiseman, “Lying Historians: Seven Types of Mendacity” in Lies and fiction in the Ancient World For Seneca, in the first century AD, it was axiomatic that historians are liars. There is a passage in his Quaestiones Naturales...

As debated a century ago.... F.C. Conybeare in his criticism of the Christ Myth advocates of his day drew a series of close parallels between Jesus and Apollonius: Apollonius, like Jesus and Pythagoras, was an incarnation of an earlier being; he, too, worked miracles, and appeared after death to an ...