Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I am not saying that no knowledge is possible but rather that any knowledge is necessarily limited to mostly irrelevant things.

It's one matter defining Irenaeus's position given that we have many writings of Irenaeus than defining Mark's.

am ha-aretz = people of the land. Sanders rejects that equation with sinners but others do.

No but it's not that simple. We're just making castles made of sand here. The study of early Christianity is principally a study of corrupt texts that aren't recognized as corrupt texts. There isn't just the potential for misrepresentation. The misrepresentation of what we are dealing with is baked ...

All studies in early Christianity are predicated on Vaihinger's 'as if' principle.

But it's like the guy playing football against the Special Olympics team. Yeah you got 46 touchdowns in the game. Yeah you might be a great quarterback anyway. But then again maybe not ... When you see this kind of uncertainty with something as basic as a name, the information as a whole is garbled....

And then this is what 'systematizers' do to mitigate the damage here. They exclaim 'so what is it? Cerinthus or Merinthus?' Honest answer 'I don't know.' They respond: 'So what does any of this mean. What do you propose is the meaning of 'Cerinthus' or 'Merinthus'? Honest answer: 'I don't know.' The...

Epiphanius on this subject: But they are called Merinthians too, I am told. Whether the same Cerinthus was also called Merinthus I have no idea; or whether there was someone else named Merinthus, a colleague of his, God knows! I have already said that not only he himself at Jerusalem often opposed t...

Of course no one here knows anything of what I am talking about so here widen your horizons:

ascribing it to the heretic Cerinthus But this is another bullshit thing. There was no heretic named Cerinthus. It's a garbled reference to something else. Time and again the desperate need for certainty makes us take bad evidence at face value (like hitting on the fattest ugliest girl at last call...