Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Yes, Celsus makes some claim about the "real" biography of Jesus, but it is evident that these supposed "real facts" about Jesus are themselves just alternative imaginings derived from the Gospels. "Let us imagine what a Jew- let alone a philosopher- might say to Jesus: 'Is...

What is this evidence? I am not inclined to take your word for it. I don't feel like hashing this out again, so I'll just say that there are many papers written on this topic, which argue that Matthew used Luke, not the other way around, and a lot of linguistic work has been done to show that Luke ...

i think it looks like the gospels are being massaged to fit in with the Pauline narrative rather than they (or their sources) not existing prior to the epistles. why did Acts take pains to introduce Paul out of nowhere, because he wasn't originally there? My personal thesis is that all of the mater...

I'm going to be radical here, and says it's possible Mk, Mt, Lk were the authors of the original gospels bearing their name. Or rather they may have been earlier versions of which they were authors. Irenaeus has no reason to make up Mark and Luke as authors. Cause they weren't disciples. Arguably t...

While we don't have the writings of the heretics themselves, we can get an idea of what the heresies were about from the early apologists. No-one as far as I know (purpose of this thread) ever questioned the historical existence of Jesus. There are some interesting passages that have been brought u...

Just want to point out that wile Irenaeus railed against these people who claimed to have attained "perfect knowledge" of God, he also claims that the Gospels he possessed were written by people with "perfect knowledge". We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation,...

When it comes to the four canonical Gospels we of course know their names, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All of the orthodox claims about where these Gospels came from and who wrote them are extremely consistent, to the degree that it appears really one person came up with an explanat...

also Klinghardt assumes that canonical Luke knew Matthew so I am not opposed to the idea. If we accept also that canonical Luke knew and used Matthew, then that places all three synoptic gospels before c. 130 CE. Not at all. If anything Matthew used Luke, and there is tons of evidence to support th...

What I'm saying is that I think understanding "Gnostics" has to do with the origins of the cult as a mystery religion, that then "escaped" into the wild. Irenaeus and Justin are, I think, late commers who were never a part of the mystical origins of the cult. Why were there so ma...

the two biggest problems that Irenaeus had were Valentinians and Marcionites. Perhaps, but I always considered the Marcosians to be one of Irenaeus' biggest targets. As for "gnosticism", I do think that this whole thing can be traced back to some sort of Hellenistic or Roman mystery relig...