Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

What do you mean by "It is the NT scholars' behavior that arouses you"? Throughout this discussion, you have compared the standards of scholarship that prevail in Biblical Studies unfavorably to the standards advocated by academic historians. You have provided examples of NT scholars putt...

Literary criticism of the sources is an essential part of historical research. Perhaps so. I don't hold a brief from the classicists, as I said, so I cannot usefully engage you on the question of whether criticism of NT literature would be a viable second career for NT scholars deprived of the assu...

@Neil Try to grasp the point I am making. I did. To avoid repetiveness, I'm going to try to move forward with what I noticed at the end of your post, rather than re-litigating the same ground. (And it is not understood as a hypothesis, either. It is stated by many NT scholars as "a fact"....

@mlinssen Because the pay is so ridiculously low in biblical academic that only zealots will take the job. Well, we're talking about people who invested in a humantiies PhD. And it's indoor work, no heavy lifting, short hours, no weekends or late nights, summers and every seventh year off with pay ...

Instead of assigning responsibility to God I could have used any other figure or name there. The point is that we have no evidence apart from the physical evidence of the volcanic eruption. Yes, you could have, and I did ("stuff happens"). The evidentiary component of the divine quasi-exp...

"God did it" There's a lot wrong with that quasi-explanation. While it earns full marks for parsimony, it lacks adequacy, it fails to explain anything (it merely restates "it happened") and lacks specificty, it is unable to explain why things that might have happened didn't (God...

If the only evidence we have is that a passage in a gospel is a rewriting of a fictional story and there is no independent evidence that the passage is derived from a "true event", then I don't know how we would justify any decision except to treat the passage as fiction -- or at least as...

In some manuscripts, Mark 14:70 also has somebody refer to Peter's speech as the basis for recognizing him as a Galilean. https://biblehub.com/interlinear/mark/14.htm But he again denied it. After a little while again those who stood by said to Peter, “You truly are one of them, for you are a Galile...

While the denial interpretation is common in English translations of gMark (no sign will be given), all that is on the page is an ellipsis (without the modern punctuation). "If you don't clean your room, ..." What might happen is left to the hearer's imagination. Yes, the suggestion is &qu...

@Neil Paul, I have had another shot at responding to you in this post in good faith. I have tried to limit the comments to the meaty questions on the topic. OK, let me answer in this post the direct questions in yours, but in order to do so, I'll need to ask you one. Then when we've disposed of the...