Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The angelic vision in private is followed by another miraculous performance of charades. The old man is able with mere gestures to explain to the crowd so that they clearly understood that he had seen a vision. (He never thought of writing anything at that time.) Our "historian" then goes ...

The Gospel of Luke falls right into the mode of fiction immediately after the prologue is dispensed with. The omniscient narrator begins his story by relating a private conversation between an angel and an old man in the privacy of a restricted space in the temple. By the standards of the day, from ...

I'll quote Luke 1:1-4 (NRSV): Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefu...

It may be that Roger Parvus is correct. Lot's of people have identified the parallels. I am one of those and used to have an article up on Detering's website (before I questioned his research about Marcion). But even with these parallels between the Passing of Peregrinus and the Ignatius letter - d...

And to make clear, I am asking to what degree can we get beyond a vague 'maybe.' Is it possible to saying ANYTHING with any degree of certainty? In theory, no. In theory there is always room for doubt. In mathematics absurd propositions are given positive probability numbers like 0.0000000000000000...

But if our sources couldn't make the distinction how do we hope to do so? We can't. Is it any different that determining whether Hercules was a historical person or not? Or Theseus? Yes. Quite different. Just compare the sources we have for Hercules and Theseus with the sources you have described p...

A little "test" of the hypothesis that Bar Kochba actually did rebuild the Temple can be devised. What would we expect to find in subsequent surviving literature that addresses Jewish hopes for rebuilding the temple? We would not expect the only and sole references to be to the fall of the...

But now that you bring up Lucian, is satire 'history'? Is, for instance, the Passing of Peregrinus a(n) historical account of a philosopher named Peregrinus? Is it proper to identify the narrative as 'historical'? If we judge Passing of Peregrinus by what Lucian wrote in The Way to Write History th...

If I may take the liberty of closing on-topic, Gore Vidal was an excellent example of a non-academic whose novels about the human past were valuable to many readers as (in the felicitous phrase of another poster) educated opinion. I have no idea whether or not Paul Steven McGrane approaches that le...

I guess my question is - how do we separate myth from history with an event that (allegedly) took place seventy years ago? If we can't do this in the case of recent history and a well known witness how much more difficult for something ancient without discernible human attestation. If we cannot sep...