Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

PhilosopherJay wrote:
Puzzling.

Warmly,

I try not to over read anything here.

To me, it is another method to state the people had conscious thought of jesus and carried it to many places.


To me, they found importance with keeping some humanity in their depiction

toejam wrote:I think the whole point of the Gospel of Thomas is to be vague and mysterious, to let the hearer fill in the blanks in his/her own head. It's about creating the illusion of substance. Kind of like a pseudo-intellectualism.

As do many parables from this time period in Judaism.

One point needs to be kept in mind, I think, when evaluating arguments for a separate tradition being the basis of somewhat similar texts, and that is that studies in intertextuality (e.g. by Thomas Brodie and others) show that ancient authors did re-write, rephrase, give new meanings to, previous ...

Why didn't it appear in the previous X years if it was real? There may be good answers, A married jesus fits the cultural anthropology of these people's for a wide ranges of centuries. Belief was wide and varied due to the multiple cultures that found importance in this mythology and no reason to f...

But what evidence is there that the gospel existed as a literary text independent of Jesus being worshipped as a god? It is like claiming that the Torah existed as a 'historical text' or a document 'preserving' the escape from Egypt. Nonsense. Would you deny that early on, these primitive people di...

The starting point as I see it is to begin with the Jesus we know: the literary Jesus. My understanding is that most scholars accept that the literary Jesus is a mythical figure ("the Christ of faith"). The question is to account for this literary figure. This is a quite different questio...

I'm wondering what other correspondences others may have noticed among scholars and their respective HJs? Really it depends on what socioeconomic Galilean model said scholar wishes to follow or throw out altogether. Ben Witherington follows a more middle class Jesus which makes no sense, since ther...

Yeah, I think it may be wise if mountainman got together with all of his kook friends, fans and colleagues and started their own forum, an open venue of every complicated bizarre theory of Christian origins. That used to be FRDB, and I am glad this forum does not have to be that. Tyranny is not so ...

Just a little guess I have, that were dealing with two different major time periods of persecution. One with the temple authorities that viewed the sect as a potential danger to the cash flow if they started a riot like their dead messiah had tried. And the later Roman persecution as the movement g...

Just a little guess I have, that were dealing with two different major time periods of persecution. One with the temple authorities that viewed the sect as a potential danger to the cash flow if they started a riot like their dead messiah had tried. And the later Roman persecution as the movement g...