Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

It is an interesting topic. I don't believe that the cross symbol had anything to do with crucifixion. It seems that the cross symbol has its own history, quite separate from the history of crucifixion. There is no evidence that crosses were ever used in crucifixions. There were no proscribed method...

The letters of Paul tell a story of the take-over of Jewish Churches scattered through the empire. The Jewish churches would have been largely autonomous due to the difficulty of controlling them from Jerusalem. Obviously the conditions of life for Jews living in Alexandria Egypt and cities of Asia ...

Hi andrewcriddle, From “Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement: An Unintended Journey” by Abel Mordechai Bibliowicz, pg. 200: Furthermore, I have posited that since the legitimacy of the Pauline-Lukan “orthodoxy” could not be based on the acknowledgment of an adversarial takeover of the Jesus...

Hi andrewcriddle, Why would it matter to Josephus if there were still Christians around? If there were a lot of Christians around in 92 C.E., every reader would have known about them. It would not be necessary to point out that they were still around. If there were just a few Christians around, the ...

I went to the Bill Cosby concert in Atlanta last week and he told a quite hilarious story about going to Church at the age of 4 1/2 years old. The preacher started talking about the "Children of Israel" Cosby didn't exactly know who the children of Israel were, but he knew that he was a ch...

Thanks Ben, I appreciate the compliment. Although, if I had started to quote page and panel numbers to show the changes in the costumes and drawings of the characters, I would really consider myself geeky. I read a funny story about how Marvel promised to give the rights to the Avengers to the film ...

Hi All, Perhaps we should think of lines of text in the gospels as members of the Avengers. They come and go, expand and shrink, and change. Original Avengers Issue #1, had these members of "The Avengers": Iron Man Thor Henry Pym - Ant Man became Giant Man in Avengers #2, became Goliath in...

Thanks Tenorikuma, This sounds like a very reasonable hypothesis. I remember being a fan of the comic book "the Fly" which started in 1959." When I first saw "Spider-man" in 1962 in an issue of Amazing Fantasy, on the candy-store comic book shelf, I thought that it was an is...

Hi Peter and Leucius, I posted this on the website, but I might as well repost it here. Fascinating stuff. It does seem that the dating of the Nag Hammadi text is more problematic than we thought. The error of saying that it was carbon dated or found to be from after 348 by the cartonnage in the cov...

Hi Steven Huller, The article says ten years more. I think it has been ten years since they first announced this. This project is taking longer than the Trojan War. If it takes them so long to invent a machine for reading a few damn burnt manuscripts, how long is it going to take them to invent some...