Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Was King David a Levite? Was Jesus a Levite? Where does Melchizedek fit?

I wonder if an overview might be of help to work out how these books were edited together. I would argue the core books are in fact Hebrews and Revelation, which are possibly the earliest. Revelation is a rewrite of something Jewish, as possibly is Hebrews. Their voices are about a new heaven and ea...

What tribe do high priests come from?

"more perfect tabernacle that...is not a part of this creation." Where is this from? Is it a translator error? I thought the idea of supernatural is an eleventh century idea. How did people of the medieval period explain physical phenomena, such as eclipses or the distribution of land and...

I think you will find that Christian expositions of Hebrews - especially of the fundamentalist pentecostal persuasion I am from explicitly accept and rejoice in the heavenly sacrifice once and for all. Fascinatingly they then elide over the Platonic secondary glass darkly one on earth. And not every...

I wonder if there is too narrow a group of contributors here, who are unaware of how thinking about symbols and religion are changing. Some of their Iron Age swords, complete with their intact hilts and scabbards, have to be seen to be believed. They’ve also found woven prehistoric fabrics, which (p...

Acknowledge that people in the 1st/2nd century (most of them illiterate) had some common sense (& religious aspirations) and were living mostly in a secular, "low-tech" (& unscholarly!) world: they thought in real time (their own day to day present). I think this fails. I don't ac...

It is actually quite surreal, an early form of the trinity, the two crucifixions, the heavenly and earthly one became one to save the universe - death where is thy sting, and usher in a new heaven and earth. It is all there in the New Testament. Read all of it as one book - it was edited to do preci...

Umm, as the one in space is fictional, why shouldn't the alleged equivalence on earth also be fictional? And the arguments here are assuming the heavens and the earth are separate things, but in the classic descriptions they are not - god walked in the garden of Eden. This separation is a later idea...

Marcion accepted only the Gospel of Luke and some of the writings of Paul and even these he had to altered to fit his Gnostic teachings. " The serious gaps Marcion had made in this epistle [to the Romans], especially by withdrawing whole passages at his will, can be clear from the unmutilated ...