Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

For one thing, what I suspect is that belief in Jesus wasn't the start of the communities of earliest Christianity. Most likely thee were existing "churches" that shared some set of Christian type beliefs, and then "visions of Jesus" were introduced into the cult. In other words,...

I dispute that Paul is the founder of Christianity; I dispute that he is even the founder of Greek Christianity. No one knows who founded the churches at Rome and Alexandria, for example. Yeah, it depends on what one means by "founder of Christianity". In some sense I'd say that the write...

@John2 "thousands of Jews have believed." There is no question about "belief in Jesus". That is very different from "knowing Jesus". Millions of Jews also believed in angels and demons. Millions of Jews believed that they were descendants of Abraham. Thousands or perhap...

@john2: Then it says that Paul's mission was to be a witness for Jesus "to everyone," which presumably included those in power he encountered. First of all, it says nothing about Jesus, it talks about the Righteous One. The very point is that doing stuff like associating "the Righteou...

Far as I know, Odes of Solomon is considered to be Christian.

There are many statements about the coming of the Lord prior to Christianity. I've always found in odd that Paul called Joshua "Lord Joshua". In the Septuagint the name YHWH was typically translated as Kyrios, which means Lord. So, generally, YHWH = Lord. The name Yeshu'a means "YHWH ...

Do you think that your Ur-Acts has something to do with the so called "we" passages in the second half of Acts? Something to do yes, but what exactly is difficult to say. Far as I know, there has been no satisfactory solution to explaining the we passages. I certainly think its possible t...

Comments about Paul being innocent of their blood I think was more to do with Paul saying that he had tried to tell them about what they needed to to before the end times, and if they didn't listen, then whatever happened to them at the end times would be their own fault. I think that some ur-Acts p...

It seems to me that the narrative about Paul must pre-date the Gospel of Mark. The question is, was this narrative a reliable account or was it itself a fabricated story? Some of this comes down to figuring out what parts of the narrative are original to the source and what parts were made up by the...

Well, I think that from about Acts 15-27 has a good chance of being based on an authentic and accurate source. I also think that that source was likely the inspiration for the Gospel of Mark, whether written by the same person as Mark or someone else.