Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

To try to start with something that, maybe, all of us can agree upon: there is no evidence, and no reason to believe, that the site now called Qumran included a mint for making coins. If that is agreed, it follows that all coins found at Qumran came from elsewhere (many different places). It also fo...

spin wrote: "Tangentially, great scholar Louis Ginzberg argued till he was blue in the face that the DSS were medieval and connected with the Karaites. (That was well before the batteries of C14 testing.)" Ginzberg, who died in 1953, did not argue that. Perhaps the scholar intended was Solomon Zeitl...

The 2017 issue of Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting is available: http://www.jjmjs.org/ There is also an online forum ("We hope that you will find these studies thought provoking and engaging and encourage you to get involved by posting responses and questions for further discussio...

I have suggested (and I'm not the first) that Revelation of John has some anti-Pauline aspects (if so, Rev. was after Paul), but hakeem, you seem to have made up your mind. If interested: Goranson, Stephen. “Essene Polemic in the Apocalypse of John.” In Legal Texts and Legal Issues: Proceedings of t...

Kapyong, do you claim that your 18 listed referencers to Mani contain "historical markers like a date or a place etc." each of which more reliable than Paul?

Secret Alias wrote: "Michael Stone has a new book on early Christianity as a secret society...." I haven't read this yet. If I recall correctly (I don't have it at hand), in his 1980 book, Scriptures, sects and visions : a profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish revolts, Stone said something rela...

Was selecting Mani a random choice?
Including Augustine, who was a sometime Manichean born at least a century later, but not including Paul, whose life overlapped--is that fair?

If, for example, "Sulpicia (late 1st C.) Wrote love poems, almost all lost." "missed" Christianity, as far as you know, based on what she wrote of what she knew, and what of that--love poems--survived, then so what? A list might be more interesting and worthwhile if it were compared to other tradent...

How much did some writers know and write about? Sepphoris in Galilee is mentioned often in (surviving) rabbinic literature, but there is no mention of the huge amphitheater there, now excavated. Some rabbis probably knew about Essenes, but would not call them by that (positive, self-designation) nam...

Capernaum--that is, the village of Nahum--is a pretty physical place, if you go there, physically.