Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

The Gospel of Thomas is arranged into Sayings. Here are the Sayings lined up with the Coptic and Greek versions, with correlating Bible verses under them. http://www.thenazareneway.com/thomasgospel.htm (Question 1) Is the Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas non-gnostic, authored by a mainstream Ch...

Nice reply. To answer your last question, I am reading all the potential first century writings about Christianity, and the Early Writings website dates it to 100 AD or later, which is right at the end of the first century.

Could the Gospel of the Ebionites be a first century document? Encyclopedia Britannica says: The Ebionite movement may have arisen about the time of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (ad 70). Its members evidently left Palestine to avoid persecution and settled in Transjordan (notabl...

The Hellenistic Synagogal Prayers are a set of prayers in Books 7-8 of the 4th century Apostolic Constitutions that Christians adapted from synagogue prayers. The Prayers start on p. 677 in Charlesworth's The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: https://books.google.com/books?id=RU77ekrD_vIC The Apostolic ...

Also known as the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, it is ascribed to Baruch ben Neriah, the 6th c. BC scribe of Jeremiah. This link has the Greek and Slavonic texts' versions: http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~kazhdan/Shneider/apocr2010/3%20Baruch%20OTP.pdf (Question) Is 3 Baruch a Jewish work with later Christi...

Good input. The Gnostic "Hypostasis of the Archons", tentatively dated to the early 3rd century in Wikipedia, has the idea of things coming into being "after the pattern of all the things above": Now when Yaldabaoth saw him (Sabaoth) in this great splendor and at this height, he ...

Thanks, Bernard. One theory that I read was that the Martyrdom was the original, Jewish part, whereas the Ascension was added later. But I read another theory that sounds true to me that proposes that the Vision at the end was part of the original document, and the Martyrdom served to build up credi...

The Apostolic Constitutions and an Armenian Bible listed the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah (heretofore "Ascension of Isaiah") as apocryphal, and the existence of manuscripts in numerous translations suggest that it once had widespread use. The text for the Martyrdom and Ascension of Is...

I came across this today about the 4th-5th c. Vision of Theophilus, and I found the quote relevant, so I decided to share it. This is a modern summary of its contents: The next story takes place in Qenis (pp. 24–26), where the family encounter a friend of Joseph from Judea whose possessed son is exo...