Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

"I saw some disciples of Bolingbroke, more ingenious than educated, who denied the existence of Jesus because the story of the three wise men and the star and the massacre of the innocents are, they said, the height of eccentricity; the contradiction of the two genealogies that Matthew and Luke...

No ancient author asserts that Daniel never existed.

Today, it is uncontroversial in non-apologetic scholarship to assert that Daniel never existed. He was created by the author of the book of Daniel.

I've never read a convincing explanation why the seven should be considered authentic. Instead we get apologetics, and a total disregard of how fatal the fake Pauline letters are to the legitimacy of the NT. The very concept of "authenticity" is extremely dubious when discussing Biblical t...

How could they have known about the Inanna myth? Through a version of Venus and Adonis otherwise lost to us?

It is always useful to know where the stupid and childish term "parallelomania" came from, and why. I encountered the term parallelomania , as I recall, in a French book of about 1830, whose title and author I have forgotten,1 in a context in which there were being examined certain passage...

As Justin Martyr helpfully explained, the paschal lamb "was a type of Christ" because it is "crucified" during Passover, i.e. disemboweled, skinned, and has rods stuck into its' carcass vertically and horizontally, resembling a body hanging on a crucifix. You don't need Inanna or...

Candidas take on it all. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/21/living/gospel-mummy-mask/ From the article: "It is unclear why anyone would start talking about a text like this, a year, indeed now at least two years, in advance." Because apologists are facing an unprecedented wave of skepticis...

1. The entire textual evidence from canonical sources to patristic sources to apocryphal Scriptures and even the surviving hostile witnesses puts the start of the cult in Judea. That counts for something . Yeah. It means that "according to the scriptures" (i.e,. the tendentious, Gentile f...

I think--if it ever amounts to anything--evangelicals will argue that an 80ce date and Egyptian provenience for the manuscript will furnish grounds for antedating Mark much earlier than the standard dating in the 70's. It will have taken time to travel there, right? They did the same thing with p52...

It's telling that we have to look to 80 year old obscure books to find this type of analysis. I'm sure that recent Josephus scholars get into it, but it seems to be of no interest to mainstream Christian theologians.