Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

A certain bit of present-day mythology has inspired me to ask about ghost ships or what might be called Unidentified Sailing Objects. I checked on Ghost ship (Wikipedia), and it had a lot of entries on real abandoned ships. I checked on its "Folklore, legends and mythology" section, and af...

First, is there any *direct* evidence that either Otto Rank or Lord Raglan had constructed their hero profile to discredit the historicity of Jesus Christ? It seems to me that he was not a high priority for either of those gentlemen. They discussed several other legendary heroes, and Lord Raglan avo...

Many of us know the story of Arthur Pendragon, former King of Britain around 500 CE. He demonstrated his legitimacy by pulling a sword out of a stone, and he went on to conquer not only Britain but also nearby parts of Continental Europe. He and his friends had lots of colorful adventures, but his e...

L. Sprague de Camp wrote an excellent book about Atlantis, "Lost Continents", and in it, he has this sendup of certain medieval "history": We could not recover the history of Theodoric the Great if the Dietrich legends were our only source, since the legend, for instance, does no...

My favorite bit about that is not anything so grandiose. Alexander the Great's entourage discovered "gymnosophists" ("naked philosophers") there, ascetics who had worn little or no clothing.

Richard Carrier: Acts as Historical Fiction - YouTube , something that he discusses in OHJ. Note: the lists are transcribed from RC's slides, but with some editing for coherence. He proposes this sequence: Mark Matthew Luke / Acts Matthew tries to "correct" Mark, and Luke tries to "c...

Diogenes the Cynic beat me to it, but I'd discovered the Temple-allegory theory when I watched ▶ Dr. Richard Carrier on the Mythical Jesus - YouTube . His discussion of it starts at 35:40, and he notes his source: R.G. Hamerton-Kelly's "Sacred Violence and the Messiah". In the Bible, it's ...

I've seen Socrates and Plato called pro-Spartan, and with good reason. But pro-Persian? That's news to me. Being pro-Spartan would have made them traitors during the Peloponnesian War, which Athens fought with Sparta. Athens lost, and the Spartans imposed the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. Those 30 gen...

It's a myth. We don't need to examine it rationally vis-a-vis the sociology of lynch mobs. It never happened. I would not want to dismiss it out of hand. Do you have any reason for supposing that to be the case? In any case, I think that the sociology of lynch mobs makes for some interesting compar...

That argument fails miserably. Are you claiming that that mob was mostly of Jerusalem's non-Jewish inhabitants? That seems unlikely, since it is evident from other sources that Jerusalem had a large Jewish population. It also seems unlikely that non-Jews would have been very interested in a purporte...