Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

For what it's worth the gospel is obsessed with the 'boundary' (ὅρος) of things: Matthew 2:16 πᾶσι τοῖς ὁρίοις αὐτῆς ἀπὸ Matthew 4:13 παραθαλασσίαν ἐν ὁρίοις Ζαβουλὼν καὶ Matthew 8:34 ἀπὸ τῶν ὁρίων αὐτῶν Matthew 15:22 ἀπὸ τῶν ὁρίων ἐκείνων ἐξελθοῦσα Matthew 15:39 εἰς τὰ ὅρια Μαγαδάν Matthew 19:1 εἰς...

And people will say - 'whoever heard about Christianity being developed from the historical redistricting of Jerusalem?' But then they haven't understood the Apocalypse of John. There the new Jerusalem measures 12,000 furlongs on each side, the equivalent of about 1,500 miles, or 2,250,000 square mi...

So it will be out theory then that in the Valentinian gospel the transformation that took place in the Demiurge according to the Marcionite tradition was embodied in the figure of the centurion. In other words, the centurion began as the Demiurge but was 'enlightened' and transformed by Jesus into H...

The point I am trying to make here is the Valentinian sect with (a) its introduction of the Roman god Terminus (Horos) into Christianity and (b) the specific identification of Terminus with the centurion in gospel who is 'enlightened' by Christ is part of a contemporary effort in the Hadrian period ...

In case the reader didn't get the obvious connection between the centurion and Terminus: Centuriation : a form of surveying (limitatio) in which the limites divide the surveyed land into squares, or, occasionally, rectangles. Centuriations are known of various sizes from 10x10 to 20x20 actus. During...

It does seem at first blush like the myth of Horos's 'redemption' of Sophia by means of the Cross is entirely set in the primordial history of the world. Nevertheless running as a parallel understanding to this 'prehistoric' understanding is what we might call a 'reenactment' of the primordial histo...

The most striking thing then in the earliest descriptions of the Valentinian sect is that a Roman god Terminus/Horos has been incorporated into what must originally have been a Jewish mystical tradition. Horos still maintains his traditional role 'setting a limit' to the world and it is clearly with...

What makes me lean toward some sort of connection with town planning is this statement in Steiner and Sternberg's book on the similarities in 'squaring the city' practices in Roman and rabbinic sources: The fact that this allotment was understood as sanctioned by the god of boundaries – Terminus – i...

I can't help but think that Irenaeus's statement about four gospels/gospel writers acting as 'the four corners' of a gospel which is itself a square codex sounds remarkably similar to the pattern of dividing a town into squares shared by Roman and Jewish 'habits' in the period. What does this mean? ...

References in Tractate Eruvin regarding (a) the world being square and (b) the world being like a tavla (tablet, book): The Rabbis taught in a Baraita: One who comes to make it square, referring to the Shabbat boundaries of a town, should square it according to the ‘square of the world’ i.e. the poi...