Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

One issue is that doing Science (producing new scientific results) as distinct from learning the established wisdom seems to come to almost a full stop before 200 CE. This is probably too early to blame Christianity. One possible factor in the 3rd century and later is the hostility of the developin...

RC then continues with Jewish and Christian attitudes. In the more conservative and strict places, education was mostly on the Bible and religious law, while Jews in Alexandria and other such places got a pagan-like education. Philo argued that scientists and natural philosophers ought to dedicate t...

RC discusses what various schools of philosophy thought about science. The Stoics: important, though not as important as moral philosophy. The Platonists and Pythagoreans: theoretical science important, empirical science not so important. The Aristotelians or Peripatetics: the most scientifically-mi...

He has published a book, " Science Education in the Early Roman Empire", that is an expansion of part of his PhD thesis. The rest of it he is still working on, and it should come out as "The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire". He discusses ancient Roman education with an emphas...

Alexander of Abonoteichus (or Abonutichus) Paphlagonia is at the central north coast of what's now Turkey. Abonutichus got renamed Ionopolis, and it's now Inebolu. Alexander of Abonoteichus (Ancient Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Ἀβωνοτειχίτης), also called Alexander the Paphlagonian (c. 105-c. 170 CE), was a...

As to anyone similar in earlier centuries, an obvious one is Joseph Smith, treasure hunter, con artist, and founder of Mormonism. JS claimed that the angel Moroni visited him in 1823 in upstate New York, complete with showing him a copy of the Book of Mormon on golden plates. After he transcribed th...

George Adamski was a fraud and a nutcase. I've seen him called a pathological liar. In the late 1920's, he started developing his philosophical ideas, a mishmash of somewhat-Xianity and sort-of-Theosophy. He even founded an organization for pushing his teachings, the Royal Order of Tibet, in 1934. ...

George Adamski was a fraud and a nutcase. Angels ? Solar eclipses. Beings with wings dates from the renaissance artists impressions Total solar eclipses don't happen very often, so they are unlikely to be much of an artistic inspiration. Winged angels go back to the early Middle Ages, so it's not j...

WRT the relationship between the nature of historical narrative, fiction, and the rationalizations individuals will make to reduce cognitive dissonance, it should be noted that postmodern linguistic theorists such as Hayden V. White (see the 40 page introduction to his 1974 book Metahistory ) and o...

Back to Democritus, I've found an English translation: CHURCH FATHERS: Refutation of All Heresies, Book I (Hippolytus) Chapter 11. Democritus; His Duality of Principles; His Cosmogony. And Democritus was an acquaintance of Leucippus. Democritus, son of Damasippus, a native of Abdera, conferring with...