Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Ben wrote: In your opinion, do Matthew, Mark, and John not care that they leave us with the impression that Jesus' brothers are all unbelievers? Or do they expect the reader to know who Jesus' brothers are and connect the dots ("ah, they converted")? Of course. How else would people have c...

Ben wrote: The mainstream solution to these problems, if such they are, is harmonistic: for example, James was not a believer during Jesus' ministry, but then he became one shortly thereafter ... That's how I see it. The same thing happened to Paul (though after Jesus' death), so why not to James? D...

Ben wrote: Think of Akiva, if he really did endorse Simon bar Kokhba as the Messiah: was he any less a rabbi, any less a Jew, for having done so? No, of course not (which I get is what you're implying). And that's exactly how I look at it from my perspective of seeing Christianity as a faction of th...

Ben wrote: ... the lack of Christian themes in the epistle ... There's a lot to chew on in this OP, Ben, and I don't have a lot of internet time today, but I thought I'd isolate this one bit. What are "Christian themes"? Hegesippus mentions some in EH. 3.20.6 regarding the grandsons of Jes...

I see the term pillar as having to do with being a protector of Jerusalem and the Temple, like in Rev. 3:12: The one who is victorious I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will they leave it. I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jer...

Ken, I'm anything but a Greek expert so any feedback from you or others is welcome, but I've been taking a look at how "delivered up" (παραδώσει) is used in the NT and it doesn't seem to necessarily always imply being delivered up to trial. It looks like it depends on what the person or th...

Good questions, Ken. I need to give this some more thought.

Ken wrote: I'm talking about official Roman persecution by a governor with the power to put people to death and interrogate under torture, such as I think is implied by Mark 13.12-13: "Mark 13.12 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parent...

Ken Olson wrote: The instruction for Christians to flee in Mark 13.14 is actually advice for how Christians should behave during Roman persecution, during which Christians were compelled on pain of death to worship statues of Caesar and the gods. Following Haenchen, I have taken the “abomination of ...

By the 2 + 2 = 4 reckoning, 390 years after the exile of Judah would be c. 196 BCE, before Daniel was even written (in my view). Maybe one could argue that Daniel was written before this, or that the pesharim pioneered the art of pesher interpretation before the Maccabean era and then this influence...