Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

A good summary of Julian the Apostate's Hymn to King Helios (the Sun) as supreme divinity, and of his blend of theology and statecraft, is given in this review, which appeared today. The book being reviewed is an Italian translation of and commentary on Julian's treatise, by Attilio Mastrocinque: Gi...

OK, here's more. Denial that Peter came to Rome goes back at least to Erasmus, and it surfaced often in anti-papist polemic (e.g. in Lorraine Boettner's Roman Catholicism ). Now Bonn classicist Otto Zwierlein backs up this denial with in-depth research. Why should we care ? What is at stake? Well, f...

Edited to add: This important contribution, and the controversy it has caused, appears still little-known in the English-speaking world, probably because Zwierlein and his critics write mainly in German. I have posted more in #6 below. I am assembling info about the recent researches of Bonn classic...

Update: Otto Zwierlein quotes archeologist Harald Mielsch from Bonn, who he says has worked on the site extensively, for the view that there never was a grave beneath the aedicula of c. 160-180 C.E. The first excavators merely inferred its existence. there is more detail to learn about this site, bu...

Today I dipped into a long article by Hugo Brandenburg, "Petrus und Paulus in Rom? Die archäologischen Zeugnisse, die Basilika S. Paul vor den Mauern und der Kult der Apostelfürsten." It's in a two-volume Festschrift for Federico Guidobaldi published by the Pontifical Institute for Christi...

Perhaps that is religiously correct history. Lets us look at the facts. Being an old-timer I remember some time in the 70s when the term "Judeo-Christian" was popularized by the redneck Christian preachers. It was part of the invention of "Christian Zionist" and a consequence of...

On VatiLeaks I read allegations that Pope Leo in the fifth century supervised the concoction of a fake tomb of Peter, and another one of Paul: http://www.vatileaks.com/_blog/Vati_Leaks/post/tomb-of-st-peter-a-shocking-invention/ I've just looked at that web page and attempted to verify a few detail...

Quite. Curran's article seems rather naive. Could one argue that the "tomba scomparsa" was built in c. 130-150 C.E. but at the spot of an earlier tomb of Peter, where Christians had venerated his remains since his martyrdom? I.e. that Peter's bones were reinterred at the spot of his origin...

"Community produced document" is a phrase that requires a lot of unpacking, no? Something like Dei Verbum is a document that was authored by a committee and voted by a group at the Second Vatican Council. But no one means this model to apply to any book of the NT. We have to imagine a lot ...

John Curran, "The Bones of St. Peter?", Classics Ireland 3 (1996) 18-46: 44 says that Guarducci and Pope Paul VI were "absolutely mistaken" in their identification of the bones that were announced by that pope as Peter's. Curran says that the supposed tomb (the so-called "to...