Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

"Now of the things they keep saying about the divinely inspired Gospel according to Mark, some are altogether falsifications, and others, even if they do contain some true elements, nevertheless are not reported truly. For the true things, being mixed with inventions, are falsified, so that, as...

"Before Smith left for his visit to Mar Saba in the summer of 1958, many of the elements that comprise the letter to Theodore were already present in his published work. These elements do not simply recur in Smith's interpretation of the letter, as onewould expect; rather, they are embedded wit...

Morton Smith bio https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/smith-morton Smith was perhaps at the height of his perceived credibility during the time of his interview on the 1984 documentary TV series titled Jesus: The Evidence (Smith's bit is introduced wit...

...I still wonder what the attraction is for Christians to portray those who know Jesus best as thinking him insane, when there is so little support for that in this text, and no support at all for it anywhere else in the canon. "Jesus was either mad , bad or God" (CS Lewis). That is a pr...

A web search yielded an exegiesis on this GMark "mother and brothers" passage DAVID N. BIVIN & JOSHUA N. TILTON 2019MAY30 Re: the identity of "those near him [Jesus]" In the previous verse, it says "he (singular) comes into a house." Maybe he had left the 12 to go t...

This usage of "the son of man" in Daniel is an important part of Bart Ehrman's reconstruction of the apocalyptic vision of historical Jesus. In his reconstruction (as I understand it from a live lecture delivered by Ehrman this past Sunday on Zoom), historical Jesus spoke of "the son ...

Re: the case of Mark Hofmann and the mind of a master religious document forger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hofmann This weekend I watched the Netfix documentary on Mark Hofmann, and all the while, I was pondering the possibility that Morton Smith was an even better document forger. The paral...

Back in December, Professor James McGrath did a blog piece on Mark 3:21 https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/12/jesus-and-those-with-him.html exploring options within what is very vague Greek: something like "those near him [Jesus]" set out to "take him in hand" in a ...

... Lots of techniques were developed to make writings appears to have been written earlier than they really were, and some of those are employed in Christian writings. I delve into this in my book. I see an association between the use of performance magic to fool people in live performances and th...

Re: Secret Gospel of Mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Gospel_of_Mark The jury is still out on this one. If anyone had what it would take to create such a forgery, it would have been Morton Smith! What are the odds that he, of all people, would be the one to find an authentic one-of-a-kind d...