Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

. . . Your interpretation of the loaves and fishes appears to be a classic instance of "juxtaposing mere excerpts" from astrotheological concepts and applying them wherever they fit to images in the narrative. Do you disagree? Yes, I disagree. The issue is to establish a coherent and logi...

The Gospels as diegetic transposition That makes more sense and answers some of my questions. But the new question arises: how do we decide what elements of the plots qualify for transposition? Again, here we encounter the question of selectivity, of excerpts -- a subjective choice. One can see con...

Is there any reason to assume that in the Gospel of Thomas the Jesus who is speaking is in flesh and blood as in the canonical gospels rather than a divine figure appearing to deliver his secret wisdom from heaven?

One point needs to be kept in mind, I think, when evaluating arguments for a separate tradition being the basis of somewhat similar texts, and that is that studies in intertextuality (e.g. by Thomas Brodie and others) show that ancient authors did re-write, rephrase, give new meanings to, previous t...

I cannot demonstrate that a midrashic analysis is ... incompatible with the Jesus is Caesar theory. That is a piece of rhetorical exuberance, to put it kindly, that shows why your contributions in this thread are largely useless except as false statements that deserve correction. Here is what I bel...

For what it's worth . . . . It is not impossible that Ebionites were in some sense gnostic (http://vridar.org/2011/10/24/gnostic-ebionites/) -- "Gnosticism" was not always incompatible with strict law observance. William Arnal ("The Symbolic Jesus") argues that those scholars who...

Maybe if I rephrase my question: How can either hypothesis demonstrate it is not an exercise in what Samuel Sandmel labelled "parallelomania"? Sandmel drew distinctions between parallelomania and identification of genuine parallels: http://vridar.org/2014/03/20/parallels-or-parallelomania...

I cannot demonstrate that a midrashic analysis is ... incompatible with the Jesus is Caesar theory. That is a piece of rhetorical exuberance, to put it kindly, that shows why your contributions in this thread are largely useless except as false statements that deserve correction. Here is what I bel...

That is a piece of rhetorical exuberance, to put it kindly, that shows why your contributions in this thread are largely useless except as false statements that deserve correction. I suppose it is unsurprising, since you dismiss http://vridar.org/2013/10/12/so-this-was-kick-joe-atwill-week/ the wid...

Let me try to get my point across with a mini-illustration: Crowds sit down in companies on green grass to be fed in the wilderness. That can be compared with constellations and stars and things; it can also be compared with OT passages about Israelites in the Exodus narrative and Psalms. How do I d...