Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The historian always needs to establish what sort of text is being studied, first and foremost. That requires literary criticism as one fundamental process before we know what sorts of questions we can expect the text to be able to answer. Many scholars tried to determine what sort of text the NT d...

Very early interpolations have to be argued for entirely on internal evidence Why? (It point is a secondary one to the method I am attempting to argue for, but it's still of special interest since it sounds like another one of those idiosyncratic rules biblical scholars make to enable them to get t...

Why not engage with the actual processes and methods deployed in those posts? Why not follow plausibility? its exactly what is used during this time period to determine historicity. Fiction authors follow plausibility. Only "biblical scholars" use plausibility as the criterion of historic...

andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2017 1:48 am
Both arguments . . . they can't both be true.

That's why I presented both. I was being very humble and not presuming that my argument should replace Tim's.

to Neil, About your post http://vridar.org/2012/04/22/putting-james-the-brother-of-the-lord-to-a-bayesian-test/ : For Book of Acts we have what is surely a strange silence about James being related to Jesus, gLuke and Acts do not mention the name of the brother of Jesus (contrary to gMark & gMa...

Well, I can agree with that. As for corroboration for Jesus/Christ from non-Christian sources, there are Tacitus' Annals & Josephus' Antiquity 20 (which of course has been challenged my mythicists). Please, Bernard, can we discuss the method. You know damn well that the passage in Annals is not...

Every detective, judge and jury wants to see corroboration for any and every claim. And when they don't get what they want to see, does every detective, judge and jury drop the matter? On the contrary, judges and juries in American civil cases decide cases on the basis of "preponderance of the...

But in verse 11:45 while some Jews (Jewish Christians) convert to John's Jesus, it seems Mary does not. Your thought is in synch with that of Thomas Brodie in his commentary on the Gospel of John : Mary is mentioned first and, through the reference to the anointing, her prominence is underlined (vv...

Randel Helms, "Gospel Fictions", raised the possibility that Mary and Martha originated in the Signs Gospel used by the author of the Gospel of John. His suggestion is that the Signs Gospel contained an Egyptian inspired story about Lazarus. The Egyptian myth contained two sisters of the O...

You would not assume that a popular anonymous publication about a long-ago murder was a true record of a true event unless you applied various tests to it. The tests typically applied to the epistles and gospels in the NT fall very far short of the tests that are applied by classicists to ancient d...