Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Afterall, just as 'called Christ' breaks the context (the brother of Jesus ben Damneus being the victim of Ananus), a similar breaking of the context is in action in Galatians 4:4: the argument is the Son being sent by god in the predicted time, and the 'birth from woman' is not a detail of interes...

The possible interpretations may be numerous and contradictory. Jesus may be the son of El Elyon, he may be the son of YHWH. Literally or spiritually. I think there is also the question of timing. If Christianity started from a Jewish context, then "son of God" probably was a term that di...

Yahweh was one of the sons of El Elyon; and Jesus in the Gospels was described as a Son of El Elyon, God Most High. In other words, he was described as a heavenly being. Isn't "son of God" also used in a spiritual sense in the NT? For example, in the Gospel of John: Jhn 1:45 Philip findet...

4) Marcion was, by his own standards, honest. He was trying to restore the gospel to what he thought was its original form. He worked with existing material, omitting a great deal of material from Luke, and some form Paul, and perhaps occasionally using readings from Mark or Matthew, as well as edi...

As Peter noted, the thread isn't about trying to prove one theory or another, but rather what is people's best guess about how Marcion fits into early Christianity? I'm interested in reading the range of views people have developed based on their intuition, and not challenging anyone to 'prove' that...

There have been lots of threads about Marcion and early Christianity recently. I was wondering what theories people have around the implications of Marcion for early Christianity. Not necessarily HJ vs MJ, though that could be a part of it, but on the development of early Christianity itself. For my...

In which case Celsus is referring to John the Baptist, probably using the Gospel of John: which cannot explain why Celsus uses the plural to describe the group of the person who witnessed the presumed miracle: the statement of another of those individuals who have been punished along with you He do...

When you were bathing, says the Jew, beside John, you say that what had the appearance of a bird from the air alighted upon you. And then this same Jew of his, continuing his interrogations, asks, What credible witness beheld this appearance? Or who heard a voice from heaven declaring you to be the...

But could such an arrangement where four gospels correspond to the four types of heresies be descriptive. Could there have been a situation out there were God arranged for there to be four gospels ... and ... it just so happens that four heresies "sprung up" around these four gospels? The...

It's intriguing, not uncomfortable. You can't have heresy without orthodoxy, and you can't have orthodoxy without power. Before the proto-orthodox gained power, different Christian groups split out and modified a central story about Jesus, creating their own Gospel story. Why would a group decide to...