Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I never heard of Abraham Malherbe until seeing this review of a two-volume collection of many of his papers on the NT: http://www.bmcreview.org/2015/02/20150229.html Does anyone know his work? He maintains - and to the reviewer, shows convincingly - that the Pauline epistles are to be understood in ...

This website claims that there was a spring that supplied water to the Pool of Bethesda, near the present St. Anne's, in antiquity. I have not seen this claim made elsewhere. http://www.generationword.com/jerusalem101/51-bethesda-pool.html It's also not clear to me that the so-called Virgin's Founta...

From pg 166. . . Although the Gihon Spring was the only source of water in Jerusalem, and although it regularly delivered abundant water, the Gihon was an intermittent spring. The Hebrew name of the spring is derived from the verb meaning "to gush forth." Thus the name itself seems to ref...

Thanks for posting this article, Arnoldo. On 173 n. 23 von Wahlde says that the Pool of Bethesda, which it locates on the northern side of the city, was also a mikveh, and that the Pool of Siloam has intermittent water flow. It sounds to me as though perhaps the evangelist conflated the two pools? F...

The issue of the eruv can't be overlooked. To the best of my knowledge, carrying a pallet on the sabbath would not have been unlawful inside the city walls. So that also seems to rule out the pool at St. Anne's. Perhaps some day an excavation will be done near the Gihon Spring and will unearth a lar...

I've dug up more so am sharing with whoever is interested. Lewis Bayles Paton, "Jerusalem in Bible Times. III. The Springs and Pools of Ancient Jerusalem," The Biblical World 29 (1907) 168-82, pp. 180-82, discusses the pool of John 5:2. He says that there are only two natural springs in/ne...

The problem here is that the "stirring of the waters" is part of a disputed section of the text, not in Sinaiticus or Vaticanus and introduced into Alexandrinus by a corrector, and so on. My earlier statement needs to be made more precise. After "the withered" in the list of typ...

According to Leon Morris' commentary on John, the pool near the Church of St. Anne is the best candidate because, for one, it was a double pool. Imagine a big rectangle, cut into two. You have four colonnades, one around each side of the big rectangle. Then you have a fifth colonnade in the middle, ...

A further thought. The whole story is full of Jesus' being doubted, harassed, etc., by "the Jews." Not the "scribes and Pharisees" or whoever. The guy whom he heals at Bethesda later goes and tells "the Jews" what Jesus did. The people who upbraid the guy for carrying h...

Article from BAR on this pool

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail ... -miracles/