Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

One of his early books was a history of the Dutch Republic, which as Americans we know nothing about, even though it was a crucible of modern capitalism, toleration, spirituality, religion, theology, and republican government (as opposed to monarchy). Didn’t they have something to do with New York? ...

The canonical version contains more outrageous heresy than any patristic report about Marcionism. It stands in blaring contradiction to THE cardinal point of Christian christology, i.e., INCARNATION of the Word. He thought better of being equal with God? What? He was “found in appearance as a human”...

Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs or a theology or a sect or a style of religion. It is a political concept, meaning agreement with The Truth. Maybe in some abstract way, The Truth is whatever the authorities say it is, whether bishops, heretics, philosophers, prophets, sages, magoi, etc. But when t...

The best part of the book is the central table, which shows that most of the stories in the Gospels are allusions to the OT. Other than that, I didn't really enjoy reading it. The table is very useful. But I also like her introduction, a bracing, delightful indictment of modern hermeneutics. She tr...

Ok, but leave aside Dubourg and the epistles. Charbonnel is only dealing with the 4-Gospel book. The lack of evidence for a Hebrew text, and the unlikelihood that the Greek Gospels were a translation from Hebrew, is a more interesting point. The DSS show that Jews were writing midrash on the older s...

If Charbonnel and her predecessors are right about the Gospels being Midrash from soup to nuts, the mythicism debate of the last twenty years has been misconceived. Ancient Jews wouldn’t need to have been inspired by a historical Jesus in order to write the Gospels; they had the Hebrew and LXX scrip...

Jonathan I. Israel Spinoza: Life & Legacy Oxford UP 2023 21 years ago, Jonathan Israel—professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies—revolutionized the history of secularism and modernity with his book Radical Enlightenment (2002), which argued that Spinoza’s two great books of the 1670s ( Tr...

So, one of the ways that I conceive, and I try to reconceive of, the debate between Orthodoxy and Heresy is it's really, it's not about Orthodoxy and Heresy: it's about a theology that is rejected and a theology that is accepted: it's about Rome versus Alexandria: it's about Rome's reaction to Alex...

Charles Freeman’s 381 AD

Ah the weight of empire sits heavy on Albion’s shoulders. “You don’t have to be an expert to understand that such objects [as the Parthenon marbles] belong to the countries of origin. These objects were taken without these nations being asked,” he says. Historically, he says, the British Museum’s ar...