Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Wouldn't Mark have needed to have read Antiquities to write about John the Baptist? Not if Mark knew about John the Baptist from oral tradition (requiring no more than one or two intermediaries) from John's later followers. According to Acts, there were followers of John the Baptist's baptism in Ep...

the Jesus story was derived directly by manipulating the Septuagint and the writings of Josephus. Once again, I agree with this. :cheers: Hmm, so gMark would have been written after 78 CE, the year when Josephus' Wars was published (or completed). But the internal evidence points to soon after the ...

I hope that you get some responses as I would love to know more about them as well.

There are sayings which make no sense in Greek but which make perfect sense in Hebrew or Aramaic: http://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3718 , implying that they hail from a Semitic environment. There are Semitisms in the gospels which, while they are not enough to prove that the t...

. . One really good reason for [Paul] being in the areas that he was (Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Illyricum), that I can see, would have been him being part of the conflicts taking place there in the 1st century BCE. What conflicts in those areas, if you don't mind me asking? AFAIK Paul is the o...

1: If Paul is writing in the 1st century BCE and referring to people of the cult that he is promoting, what cult might that be? 2: When one discards Acts as the political and theological fiction that it obviously is why then do we suppose that Paul was involved with groups in Greece and Macedonia? ...

And why does he call it Illyricum BTW when it was called Dalmatia and Pannonia in the mid 1st century since 10 CE (a fact that whoever wrote 2 Timothy corrected)? The province was still known as Illyricum under Tiberius (emperor from AD 14 to 37) and Claudius (emperor from AD 41 to 54), and even la...

Hi back. :) First of all, I'm glad that you started a new thread to continue this discussion as I don't like derailing other peoples threads. As to the syncretistic nature of Christianity from Judaism, I also feel that Roman Mithraism and modern Wiccaism are poor matches, as you say, as they are ess...

MrMacSon and Jax, is the proposition on the table simply that Christianity started as a Greek/Hellenistic sect, with little to no Jewish/Semitic influence at all, and only later spread to Jewish/Semitic people groups? Hi Ben, in my case, I note that all of the places that we normally associate with...

I suppose not, but there is at least a Messiah (or the expectation of a Messiah) in the DSS, particularly in the Damascus Document where it is always a singular Messiah. And I've always been intrigued by the ending of the Damascus Document, which says that when the Messiah comes in the Last Days, &...