Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I have one Enoch anecdote - which I will try not to repeat too often... I had a Catholic colleague at work who was an agnostic. One day he began expounding on the book of Enoch which he said was very unusual because it was written in the first person. To keep the conversation going I made what I tho...

During the 60s and 70s I made a half hearted attempt to interpret the songs of Bob Dylan. The idea was that there are certain code words that always mean the same thing - for example "rain" is a code word for "war". In this passage we have code words like "pierced" &quo...

The Christian translations translate dqr as pierced such as all of the one's here http://biblehub.com/zechariah/12-10.htm This is the entry for Strong's Concordance http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?strongs=H1856 Note that while dqr does have a primary meaning of pierced most o...

6: Now let us consider the rabbinic attitude to the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in the daily liturgy. The Talmud of Eretz-Israel contains the following statement: Both Rav Mattanah and Rabbi Shemu'el bar-Naĥman say that logically we should recite the Ten Commandments [liturgically] every day;...

In the old forum, Duvi somehow wound up arguing that the Black Madonna of Częstochowa was actually Jacob Frank's daughter Eve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cz%C4%99stochowa The city is known for the famous Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra, which is the home of the Black Madonna painting (Polish: Jasn...

I looked up the famous reference in Genesis 36 to the Kings of Edom and found this, Just What Was Meant by "Israel"? by Stephen Van Eck http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/001what.html In response to my article "Not Wholly Moses" in the issue of TSR cited above, Roger Hutchi...

Makes sense. Four or five major branches in the US and all of them seriously fucked up in one way or another. In the old place, I made some comments about Reform in conjunction with their dubious interpretation of Hanukkah - where they claim that Maccabees 2 is Pharisaic (even though it is written i...

Jesus_in_the_Talmud http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_the_Talmud During the Middle Ages a series of debates on Judaism were staged by the Roman Catholic – including the Disputation of Paris (1240), the Disputation of Barcelona (1263), and Disputation of Tortosa (1413–14)- and during those disput...

Jesus in the Talmud by Peter Shafer http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Talmud-Peter-Sch%C3%A4fer-ebook/dp/B002WJM5Y6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1381925871&sr=1-1&keywords=jesus+talmud is a book I have. I don't understand Duvi's claim that this is a different guy. There are more r...

Thanks for setting this up Peter. DNA Research Sheds Light On Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131008112539.htm The young science of archaeogenetics has been used to settle a long-standing controversy -- the origin of Europe's Ashkenazi Jews. Are they principal...