Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The version of the Flavian Testimony which Eusebius seems to block-quote has ended up in all our source manuscripts for the Antiquities . Conversation about that version often focuses on whether Eusebius made the whole thing up or instead embellished some more modest notice of Jesus written by Josep...

Thank you for your reply, andrewcriddle . If the text originally read James the brother of Jesus then I don't see how any reader could realise that this meant Jesus ben Gamaliel. I have a similar problem with Damneus under the hypothesis that Josephus didn't actually say to which Jesus he was referr...

There are as previously stated various forms of the Ben Damneus hypothesis. IF the idea is that instead of James the brother of Jesus called Christ the original text of Josephus read James the brother of Jesus meaning Jesus ben Damneus, then it would be unlikely that Josephus would describe things ...

The difficulty is greatly compounded if there was any version of a Flavian Testimony that mentioned Jesus of Galilee as another "Christ." Eliminating that serious possibility costs an additional assumption. I am fully aware of this, but would you not concede that the peer-reviewed scholar...

@ABuddhist why do you doubt the ben Damneus argument ? I personally lack any strong feelings about the ben Damneus argument; however, the arguments by other people in favour of the ben Damneus argument have made it seem to me to be at least a reasonable hypothesis. My only quibble, I suppose, is wh...

@ABudhist why do you doubt the ben Damneus argument ? There seems to be a super simple sequence of events here: "called the Christ ?" is a sidenote So the original just refers to James the brother of Jesus ... and the Jesus is qualified by the end of the passage where it talks about Jesus...

I'm uneasy about methodological naturalism in this sense. Is a critical historian required for example to deny apriori that the rather sinister theurgist Maximus of Ephesus predicted the death of the Emperor Valens ? After the general and multiform slaughter of all men, in which we shall be the vic...

@ mlinssen Here is a live example of what a graduate student from a theology school has to remark What was the context here? What work was the grad student commenting upon, and how did they have an opportunity to comment upon it (in what appears to be a personal communication with the author)? A few...

Epiphanius mentions this group in his Panarion, a heresiological work, of course, but it seems unlikely that he would fabricate this group’s beliefs about Jesus’ life. No, he really didn't attribute a non-standard timeline to the group. At least G.R.S. Mead (the source of the garbled English transl...

I think Mark and Matthew are first century, but Luke-Acts and John I think are second century. Taking the Kirby date ranges at ECW as indicators of the mainstream, that position would be well within tolerances. Mark 65-80 Matthew 80-100 Luke 80-130 Acts 80-130 John 90-120 On a point arising, Carrie...