Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

What is most ironical about this topic is that you are repeating the very problem Horsley is attempting to address. Horsley is addressing the way even scholars tend to make assumptions about what the apocalyptic writings say and read their assumptions into it -- and that's exactly what you are doing...

The assumptions I wish to avoid... on both sides.... First, form criticism. Edgar V. McKnight, What Is Form Criticism? , page 18: The "fundamental assumption," and in some sense assumption which makes form criticism both necessary and possible, is that the tradition consists basically of ...

You are saying that my approach is circular, but to me it appears that your approach rules out options in advance, before they have even been properly considered. I will not vouch for everything said in quotations that I have offered; I am already on record as saying that critical methods have been...

[ Again you fail to quote Collins. I'm hoping you won't look it up for yourself and that everyone else will be fooled by my baseless assertions. Or alternatively I don't see any point in quoting words when it is clear that you consistently misinterpret what you do read, forever reading your own bel...

I have tried to explain my concerns but obviously not clearly because the same inferences about my reasons keep recurring. I have no ideological or presumptive opposition to lost sources or oral transmission and I am at some loss to understand why you keep implying that I do. Well, especially with ...

andrewcriddle wrote:
This need not imply the end of the world but it does imply very drastic changes to how the world operates.

Andrew Criddle

What does Collins say about this?

Collins concludes, … the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. In the light of that crisis, the tradents of the Daniel stories sought a new genre that could symbolize more fully the forces behind events – which seemed beyond human control – and could also articulate a hope that transcended what is p...

But as for the original question about form criticism -- it seems to me that there is a conflict between viewing the gospels as consisting of "pearls on a string" as distinct from narrative units. The former would deny the latter, I think. What if some parts of Mark originated as pearls o...

it also comes down to the sources and external circumstances surrounding the composition of the text ..... these sorts of questions are all useful for understanding the text's origins. It's not a black and white either it's a literary unity or a string of pearls. There is much more to literary criti...

We ought not to simply assume that canonical Mark was freewheeling from LXX themes and nothing more, or that Mark was the first gospel merely because earlier ones are not extant. We ought to be willing to dissect the story as well as treat it as a whole. This has never been my position -- "sim...