Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Origen knew the canonical version of the parable.

Andrew Criddle

Can you give an example how the Nag Hammadi made the summary outdated? What little I have read of the Nag Hammai (Valentinian Exposition, Apocryphon of James, On the Origin of the World, etc,) it still follows the general themes outlined in the summary. One specific example The Gospel of Thomas mus...

. I find the history/origins of Gnosticism complicated but very revealing in how people saw their geocentric universe. Modern science, i.e. astronomy, has all but debunked any remaining doubt that Gnosticism is pseudo-intellectual and trusts exclusively in magic. We can argue later the real motives...

It is worth reading how at least one ancient author distinguished between "fiction" and "history": http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl2/wl211.htm They are intended to have .... any verisimilitude in the piling up of fictions . .... [T]hey parody the cock-and-bull stories of a...

See the middle essays in Magic and Religion by Lang for criticism.

Andrew Criddle

The claim that some at Nicea regarded Mary as divine seems based on very late writers Elmacin and Eutychius (Patricides)
see Mariamites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Elmacin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutychius_of_Alexandria

Andrew Criddle

The trouble with this, Neil, is that this isn't necessarily an appeal to "historicity", it's an appeal to "scholarship." For example, in his Life of Theseus , Plutarch uses all of these rhetorical tropes, which "appeal to having obtained the narrative itself from some sourc...

Do the readers think that Iamblichus and Pythagoras were contemporaries? That Iamblichus is the first person ever to write about Pythagoras or his followers? Assuming no to both, then what uncertainty is Iamblichus resolving by saying there are sources for what he writes? Of course there are earlie...

Re Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as being in part a "historical writing" because it is based on information from Plutarch, is this viewpoint any different from, say, arguing that Barbara Cartland's romance novels should be considered in part historical writings because the author did her hi...

We do use the Augustan Histories (which is genuinely a work of historical fiction) as a source because it used good sources which do not survive. I'm not sure who you mean by "we" or in what ways and how you are saying we "use" them. Hadrian for the years 117-284 the principal s...