Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I may be confusing "shorter recension" with "short recension". Looks like "shorter recension" is actually the middle recension? So my comment above may be wrong. I'll have to investigate this more tomorrow. Bed-time now in the land of Oz.

Each chapter has two paragraphs, with the first one being the shorter one and the second the longer one.

The Short Recension of Three Letters - discovered and championed by Cureton - the Epistles to Polycarp, to the Ephesians and to the Romans - were almost certainly the first, original letters of Ignatius. They do not include references to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection , the Eucharist , or to C...

The pagan Caecilius accuses Christians of being secretive about their rites But the actions of the cult are not the object of the accusation. Celsus accuses "often" the Christian doctrine of being secret. Which virtually put in doubt the his own certainty about the official version (earth...

Minucius Felix's "Octavian" (my favorite piece of ancient writing!) also lays out the pagan accusations against the secrecy of Christians and their doctrine. The pagan Caecilius accuses Christians of being secretive about their rites which means they must be ashamed of them: https://www.ea...

Where Celsus is very close to put implicitly in doubt the historicity of Jesus is when he raises the accusation that 'the doctrine is secret' . The only way a such claim can be interpreted as an accusation , is that the secret belief is radically different from the public belief, to the point of be...

Yes, Celsus makes some claim about the "real" biography of Jesus, but it is evident that these supposed "real facts" about Jesus are themselves just alternative imaginings derived from the Gospels. "Let us imagine what a Jew- let alone a philosopher- might say to Jesus: 'Is...

Is this not also completely consistent with the claim made in 2 John 1:7? It appears to me that the claim made in 2 John 1:7 is consistent with both views. How do we rule one out and one in? Because we have examples of early people who seemed to have believed that there was a Jesus who was there bu...

And if 'gnostic' is a term that has some meaning, beyond just being associated with heretics, then those that are not clearly 'gnostic' in Irenaeus may not fall into the same doctrine for Irenaeus as those that are called 'gnostic.' This then could open the way to allowing us to consider non-'gnost...

However what about people who may have asserted that Jesus Christ was a fictional character? That is, that in theory there were (other) people who asserted Jesus Christ did not come in the flesh because he was fictional being - that the NT was a fiction story. If such people had a time machine, the...