Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The earliest account which we have of Cerinthus is that of Irenæus (Adv. Hær. I. 26. 1; cf. III. 3. 4, quoted at the end of this chapter, and 11. 1), according to which Cerinthus, a man educated in the wisdom of the Egyptians, taught that the world was not made by the supreme God, but by a certain p...

Remember that in marcionite theology the demons are not allies of Demiurg but his enemies (they would be the pagan divinities, protectors of pagan peoples as YHWH is protector of Israel), and enemies of Jesus, too. Usually is said - under Doherty/Carrier paradigm - that the demons didn't know the tr...

Assuming this is found in Mcn : And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art the Son of God. the question arises naturally: why the demons would tell the truth? Demons should tell always a lie, by definition . My suspect is that the devils are insinuating the exact (false) susp...

Carrier & the consensus' view about Marcion is exemplified by this title of Burkitt's book: Marcion, or Christianity Without History They mean that was the precise interest of Marcionites the deliberate removal/negation of all the previous (evidently, Jewish) History from Christianity in order t...

I was wrong to use the unfortunate term ''political fiction'' to convey what I meant. I mean the idea that the first Gospel was a theological manifesto that created from scratch all the actors of drama: not only Jesus, but also its Jewish followers (therefore that Gospel had no specific ideological ...

To be honest, my view of Earliest Gospel ( Mcn ) is political fiction because his condemnation of Jewish messianism in its entirety (in its political/theocratic implications), a critique of Judaism per se , not a mask of some more or less specific political/messianic figure uncomfortable. In this se...

So Richard Carrier: If 'Jesus Christ began as a celestial deity' is false, it could still be that he began as a political fiction, for example (as some scholars have indeed argued-the best examples being R .G. Price and Gary Courtney). But as will become dear in following chapters (especially Chapte...

The difficulty of course is accounting for how 'Jesus' entered into the Christian pantheon.

I don't understand what precisely would be your accounting. Do you mean that the proto-catholics historicized a previous fictious god X identifying him with the man Polycarp and calling him 'Jesus' ?

I find the book online and I read this: Thus not all will agree with my proposal that the Diaspora uprising of 115–117 and the Judean revolt of 132–135 should both be understood within this context, in both cases directly relating to the frustrated desire of Jews to see their Temple rebuilt so that ...

There is a recent book of Jewish scholars against the (likely Christian) myth of 70 CE as fateful historical caesura in the eyes of contemporaries (or something of similar). http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15700631-12340089 I dont' have the book linked above, but I r...