Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

on the one hand, it provides answers to many old questions, some of them seemingly resolved a long time ago, others fiercely debated for many decades. While I don't see nothing of "noble" in these matters (probably because of the my own views on morality, as my avatar makes it clear: only...

I stand on this position well described here.

why not just conclude the whole thing was written at one time, by one author? The "giant midrash" could be added by only an editor, while the original author had only the short survived (not-historical) nucleus about Jesus being given to an anonymous Roman Governor who ordered the his cru...

Well, unless we can speculate a very convincing reason, I think Occam’s razor still cuts through to the much simpler explanation that the passage actually was original to Josephus I think that you have not read my confession here , where I have given up to doubt about the authenticity of the Baptis...

It seems that you are begging the question about the implications of an alternative dating. When the alternative dating carries with itself the risk of a total invention de novo of Jesus (with the first gospel), then the original Jesus is reduced to be only a tiny prototype of the invented Jesus: th...

Sorry, I meant my question in a slightly different sense: Why would inventing a trial before the Romans and a crucifixion make people believe that Jesus was the Messiah? Jews didn’t want to believe in a Messiah who’d died a humiliating death, and crucifixion wouldn’t have fitted well with their exi...

What sentence even remotely implies that Jesus never existed? it seems to me that the difference escapes to you, between the Jesus lived in the remote past (under Janneus) and, for example, the claim that the historical Jesus was Jesus ben Sapphat, crucified in 70 CE by Titus. In the first case (th...

For example: Emmaus is the same place where Varus crucified many Jews.

Marcion was disturbed by the Gerasene cry "we are Legion" and probably he omitted the suicide of Legion into the lake because he didn't imagine that the Good God could desire revenge (at contrary of YHWH).

I differ from other mythicists insofar I think that: 1) there are traces of hate against the Romans in the first gospel (or its source). 2) these traces of anti-Roman hate are evidence of mythicism. While for other mythicists the replacement of the original killers (demons) with the Romans was only ...

It is a brute fact that exactly one of : 1. The talmud and the Gospels refer to the same Jesus 2. The talmud and the Gospels do not refer to the same Jesus Is true. it is relative to the thought of the people. For example, Strömholm would answer that 1 is true, while Ellegard would answer that 2 is...