Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Gday all, What accounts for their certainty? The weight of tradition, the tendency to go along with everyone else, the embarassment of admitting error, the comfort of being right on this crucial issue, the enormous cultural baggage of Jesus being 'our' God, and the fear of the social chaos that wou...

Although it is debatable whether the idea of the resurrection of the flesh appears anywhere in the NT... I'm surprised at such an idea, given the post-resurrection dining Jesus engages in, as for example in Luke 24:36-42: 36 As they were saying this, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them...

I think another view is much more plausible: Jesus is the first gospeler. He is constantly remembered and presented as one who knowingly expressed (directly and indirectly) his Lordly authority and the narrative / meaning of his own paschal career: three passion predictions in Mark, for example, par...

Why certainty about Jesus's existence? We do not see the star; we see the light from the star and assume the star exists. We have this datum: "the voice of Jesus." It comes through the texts, perhaps garbled here and there like a scratchy record of Enrico Caruso, but we can hear it. We can...

The conversion of Paul was manufactured and so were the claims that he heard from Jesus after the resurrection. There was never any person called Paul who heard or saw Jesus after the non-historical resurrection. Paul and the Epistles were fabricated. You still present no evidence at all that the l...

If the so-called Pauline Epistles were written before 70 CE and directly to Churches in the Roman Empire then it is not expected to take over a 100 years for the Epistles to be known or given importance. It is only 30 years to Ignatius of Antioch, and less time to Clement of Rome. In addition, it i...

You cannot show me that Paul and the Epistles are mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings attributed to Philo, Josephus, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Pliny the Younger, Aristides, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Celsus, Municius Felix, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, ...

Paul and the Epistles are very late fabrications---invented after "True Discourse" attributed to Celsus. And the evidence for this is...the (implausible) possibility of one interpretation of the writings and witnesses we have? The fact that it can be imagined to have happened this way? Wh...

I see that an entire book of essays focuses on Paul and the Second Century. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107 / 108) mentions Paul and some of the letters.

I wonder how many of the cited writers mentioned the Mithras cult. That might be an illuminating statistic.