Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

There have been lots of threads about Marcion and early Christianity recently. I was wondering what theories people have around the implications of Marcion for early Christianity. Not necessarily HJ vs MJ, though that could be a part of it, but on the development of early Christianity itself. For my...

In which case Celsus is referring to John the Baptist, probably using the Gospel of John: which cannot explain why Celsus uses the plural to describe the group of the person who witnessed the presumed miracle: the statement of another of those individuals who have been punished along with you He do...

When you were bathing, says the Jew, beside John, you say that what had the appearance of a bird from the air alighted upon you. And then this same Jew of his, continuing his interrogations, asks, What credible witness beheld this appearance? Or who heard a voice from heaven declaring you to be the...

But could such an arrangement where four gospels correspond to the four types of heresies be descriptive. Could there have been a situation out there were God arranged for there to be four gospels ... and ... it just so happens that four heresies "sprung up" around these four gospels? The...

It's intriguing, not uncomfortable. You can't have heresy without orthodoxy, and you can't have orthodoxy without power. Before the proto-orthodox gained power, different Christian groups split out and modified a central story about Jesus, creating their own Gospel story. Why would a group decide to...

Yes the late medieval dating is well known. What is not as well known is the claim (BeDuhn) that the patristic scholars are "terrified" of this fact. This is the subject of the OP. I'm not aware of patristic scholars being "terrified" of this fact from my reading of secondary sc...

So the question is: Are patristic scholars terrified that almost all patristic manuscripts are medieval and later? Isn't the late dating of most extant texts well-known, though? I've seen it acknowledged in lots of secondary sources when discussing provenance of texts like Justin Martyr's. The more...

IMHO, the Context group, at least as presented by Bruce Malina, are/is perpetuating stereotypes of modern Mediterranean peoples as somehow gross, sexist and brutal. "Oh, how fortunate we are live in a western culture which has been transformed, by application of Jesus' social gospel message (b...

If these views pre-existed Marcion, then perhaps the gospel now associated with Marcion pre-existed him too. I think something along those lines: that there were oral or written beliefs about Jesus Christ/Chrest that pre-existed Marcion that Marcion or Marcion's Gospel writer put together, probably...

Why use that Gospel at all? Why not? It depends on the starting point, of course. Marcion's Gospel was about a Jewish man (by appearance) who walked around Galilee and Judea, interacted with Jews, cheesed off the Jewish religious leadership and was crucified by the Romans. His Jesus didn't preach a...