Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

[Edit: Oops, looks like a had a quite old tab open of this thread when I made my reply and I've seen that Peter has already addressed all this stuff with the variable number of shared blocks and all so my first paragraph is now greatly superseded! :cheeky: ] So in simple terms, we're asking, "i...

Pliny the younger does not paint Christians as harmless and that is why he executed them once they did not worship Trajan as a God. Refusing to worship Trajan as a God was a capital crime. I tried to reply a couple times to this but deleted them as I don't think I'm equipped to take a stance withou...

So is the theory that Jesus ben Saphat was crucified for being a revolutionary leader? Wouldn't the Romans be unlikely to commute and free an opposition leader though during the war? It makes more sense to me if Jesus ben Saphat was a crucified footsoldier who later became a rebellion leader after h...

So, the letter makes no sense whatsoever since Pliny is claiming he does not know what punishment Christians deserve and is asking for advice from Trajan (Oops, sorry I missed the notification on your reply somehow.) I do agree that this sounds possibly contradictory but perhaps Bernard is right in...

What Pliny never heard before is who, and how to punish Christians: If Pliny did not how to punish Christians then why did he execute those who confessed they were Christians? Pliny had already executed Christians before the letter was written. Pliny to Trajan Meanwhile, in the case of those who we...

But doesn't Trajan's reply suggest some familiarity with the sect already? Or you mean the letter was really about another group and has been interpolated to back-date Christianity? Which sect are you referring to? Christian writer themselves admitted that there were multiple sect of Christians. It...

I regard the genealogy itself of Luke 3.23-38 as Enochic and not of Lucan origin. Nobody originally constructed a genealogy spanning 77 generations from Jesus all the way back to Adam just to claim that Jesus did not actually belong to that genealogy . The original purpose was obviously to trace Je...

Philo's Logos also has a solar aspect. His name after all is 'the rising.' "Behold a man (anthrőpos) whose name is the rising (anatole)" ἀνατολή = sunrise. +1 My first thought as well. Interesting...I might try to look into whether a pre-sunrise service was a known component of other reli...

I'm just responding to a few of these as I read along the replies. Was Jesus ever considered a would-be Jewish revolutionary, though? I don't know any early source that portrayed Jesus that way. Christians were regarded as belonging to a superstitious sect according to Tacitus and Suetonius, rather ...

Here is the text of the letters mentioning Christians from the Early Christian Writings archive (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/pliny.html): Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96-97 Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan It is my practice, my lord, to refer to you all matters concerning which I a...