Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Interesting idea. They would have been using any source they could find on Herodian Palestine, so it's not unreasonable. Do you think tracing ancestry back to Babylon could have been an indicator of status in the vein of Americans tracing ancestry from the Mayflower? Perhaps such a pedigree would ha...

I think the fact that none of the Gospels following Mark exhibit any commonalities at all in their appearance narratives show that there could not have been any strong tradition about them. The other Gospels all invented completely de novo appearance stories which share no details or overlap and all...

The Vatican Library is not an ancient collection. It was basically assembled by Leo X in the renaissance. The idea of secrets in the Vatican library is a 19th century idea. It arose because of the extreme difficulty that scholars had in gaining access to the collections. These contained the manuscr...

First, I think a distinction has to be drawn between "physical" and "bodily" resurrections. They are not necessarily the same thing. A soma does not have to be made out of meat. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, makes it clear that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God...

Don't forget that Deutero-Isaiah specifically calls Cyrus a "Messiah," ( Christos in the LXX), so it's doubtful he had any conception of a future liberating Messiah at all. That's what Cyrus was supposed to have been, and that specific title had no unique significance. We know from the De...

If you follow the rest of Isaiah 44 and 49, the Servant appears as a cryptic reference to Messiah because it says it is the Servant's job to bring the tribes of Jacob to him This refers to Diaspora Jews. Jews that had not returned to Judah after the exile. The servant represents those Jews who were...

I think that the resurrection is singular because Jesus was the only one resurrected out of the class of "dead ones", which is plural. The text does not quite say that. The resurrection is genitive singular and the dead is genitive plural, but it is αναστασεως that is governed by εκ (whic...

Trump was for the Iraq War, no matter what he says now. He publicly supported it.

It's in the singular too. I would expect a collective rising of the dead to use νεκροὺς.

It's ex nekron , so it has to be "from the dead." (lit. "out of the dead"). I would argue that this is probably not really Pauline, though. It appears to be formulaic and probably pre-Pauline. In Romans he is talking to Christian communities he did not found and appears to be rec...