Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

For good or ill, the name of Morton Smith still has some purchase in corners of this forum; so it may be of interest to fill in a lacuna in his intellectual biography. This is simply a footnote in the history of ideas, not an attempt to discuss the merits of those ideas; it is about context. Any pot...

Irish1975 Origen's meaning is not fully explicated. He seems to be reserving κτισις for the act of creation in the intelligible world, while καταβολη is a secondary creation of the physical cosmos necessary to accommodate divergent wills. I think his only other extant mention of καταβολη is in On Fi...

Now you point it out, it is indeed a curious expression... Origen, Commentary on John 19.149, seems to agree with you that it is an NT neologism : "That world has nothing below, as this (world has) nothing above, to the one who examines it exactly. For how can this world have anything above, wh...

DCH Josephus tells the story in Antiquities 11.184 ff, seemingly following a Greek version, not the Hebrew. In one LXX text type, there is a foot-note at the end of the Book of Esther : "In the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Dositheus - who said he was a priest, and Levitas,...

..whereas Genesis adds that God "saw that it was good" to seven of the eight acts of creation (one is missing from Gen:1.7-8, almost certainly lost during textual transmission). As was noted by Origen, Letter to Julius Africanus 4 : "Again, in Genesis, the words, 'God saw that it was...

There is something I read recently, forgetting the reference, but I found it very interesting. Some ancient Christians identified the "Beginning" in the first words of Genesis, "in the beginning," with the Son. For the record, Jerome's Hebrew Questions on Genesis : " 1: 1 '...

It is well to keep in mind that the third evangelist explicitly announces to his readers that "those who, from the beginning, were witnesses and servants of the word" have passed their information along to himself (the evangelist). Different readings are possible, but on a plain reading h...

On the other hand, Stephan... If you don't know it, I think you'd enjoy dear old Rendel Harris' article, 'On the Stature of Our Lord'*, where he assembles a variety of C2/C3 texts about a shape-shifting Jesus whose 'natural' form was that of a very small man. Just for your benefit, he then quotes Ep...

ὑπερετής, ὁ, ἡ, past the age, i.e. of liability to poll-tax, POxy. 1030.8 (iii A. D.), etc. All this is Roman military Greek gents Martijn, you must be enjoying a VERY good holiday, as your normally sharp focus has become a little blurred... υπερ-ετης indeed means 'past the age', but υπ-ηρετης is a...

In previous posts on Ep.366, I have dealt with possible anachronisms in the letter's ideas, arguing that they are consonant with Clementine authorship, and that the fact that some of Clement's ideas were taken up in the late C4/C5 does not entail that the letter was written at this later date. If I ...