Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Despite the fact that numerous church fathers had access to Tacitus, no-one before the 12th letter of the spurious Paul-Seneca correspondence relates Christians to the Neronian era fire and only Sulpicius Severus supplies enough information to clearly link with the Testimonium Taciteum. The silence...

Tenorikuma wrote: Even John realizes this, which is why he adds an explanatory gloss, "the sea of Galilee, which is the sea of Tiberias" (John 6:1) so people know what he's talking about.

Whoa! Should we think, from the above (if not also from other evidence), that John used gMark?

Radiocarbon dating shows (so far) that the camel was not domesticated in Palestine until centuries later than the time portrayed in Genesis:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/scien ... paper&_r=0

Neil, I can xerox the pages from the Thucydides book in about three days from now (have to get the book from offsite). I can't make a pdf but can snail mail you the copy. PM me if this will help, and give me your address. Good luck, ficino

Have you tried interlibrary loan? Sometimes it is possible even to get just the requested pages sent as a pdf.

Yes, I'm not sure whether I can justify devoting much more time to 1st cent. Nazareth, but I've done enough research by now that I don't want just to ditch the inquiry altogether. I had to go to a library for the Shahar article because, as you discovered, Google books leaves out important pages. The...

Thanks for the explanation. I'm fascinated by this problem: if we admit that the portrait of Jesus in the gospels is heavily fictionalized, how many attributes are we justified in attributing to a hypothetical, "real Jesus," about whose factual existence we can carry on an inquiry? We can'...

@DC: my understanding is that the camouflaged underground hideouts, perhaps such as the one found nr. Nazareth by Yardenna Alexandre, and certainly the ones enumerated by Shahar in the first part of his article (cf. citation above) are not caves but man-made. Use of caves during the first revolt doe...

I'm not a mythicist by any means, as I believe the evidence is strong for a historical Jesus, even if we can say nothing for certain about him, to the point he might as well have not existed . [italics added by Ficino] Hello GakuseiDon, I'm intrigued by the part of your post that I snipped above, t...

hello Andrew, to add to what I reported from Shahar's article: Josephus says nothing about underground preparations in Galilee, although he was in charge of preparations there against Roman invasion and spent 7 mos. there. So did the Jews dig camouflaged underground hideouts in Galilee in the first ...