Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

It may be worth teasing out what is at stake in the issue. It is unproductive to conflate good thinking from first principles with "bias" in its pejorative sense (failure to assess confidence independently from desirability). Of course good thinking is bias in its literal sense: not all po...

SA I am very interested in why both Origen and Eusebius think Josephus had the words ... They don't think that, IMO. Even if we allow Eusebius the anachronistic punctuation that some modern translations insert there (quotation marks, also called inverted commas), then the phrasing clearly traces ba...

John ? Eusebius claims he was directly quoting from Josephus' and that a key cause of the Jewish War was the murder of James the Just based on Josephus interpretation not his. Just because the quote is not in the Antiquities does not mean Eusebius made the quote up. Eusebius claimed he was quoting ...

John T Wrong because Eusebius never claimed he was but rather that he is quoting Josephus from another known work, which is not extant. In II.23.20 of his Church History , Eusebius doesn't say he's quoting anybody when he gives a fair description of what were in fact Origen's views, namely that Jos...

Ulan Imagine we would not have the text of Josephus and all we had were the writings of the church fathers. We would naturally assume that what several of them said would be correct, here the role of "James the Just" in the outbreak of the Jewish War as portrayed by the historian Josephus...

I was disappointed that the response to the observation that the victim looks like a European was a learned disquisition about how he looks Sephardic. Lol. The provenance of the artifact is dodgy, the identification of its subject non-existent, and the body depicted is, to all appearances, dead. The...

There's nothing about the picture of the guy that suggests he rose from the dead, but quite a bit that suggests that he is dead. Further, the guy looks awfully European for a supposed Palestinian native. I am prepared to concede that the shroud is independent in the required sense from the Talmudic ...

Neil

Thank you so much for the taking the time to clarify your take on Finley's position.

Neil I am at sea, and perhaps you will be so kind as to help me. The statement from Finley you commented upon, having bolded it: There is one school of thought, to which I belong, which holds that no reconstruction is possible from such unsatisfactory evidence. and your comment about that statement...

Secret I must be simple-minded because I simply can't reconcile in my own head how anyone who becomes aware that so much early information has disappeared can have certainty that all that material fits within the subset of 'more of the same' with respect to information about early Christianity and ...