Biblical Criticism & History Forum Forum

I have to update this information. To this day, I know that Van Manen didn't consider none of the our known gospels as the more old. It was my fault, thinking that since the incipit is better preserved in *Ev, then *Ev would be that oldest gospel. I will update this thread just I have new informations.

But later, when the Galatians had stopped believing Paul's argument that Christ crucified had become a curse, then they went back to following the 'curse' of the Law. This in fact is the very argument going through the thread of Gal 3:1-13. Like I said in my view Galatians 3:1 is referring to an apocrypha text that shows Jesus written as crucified, not simply an motif. The Galatian community believed the apocrypha text for a while, but when the circumcision party came the Galatians community went back to the Torah. I believe that is the conversation in Gal 3:1.

And you can see through these tactics clear as day. He starts by obscuring the passages then making up some bogus meta-analysis to clarify the passage he just obscured. He didn't even bother to quote the passage at all. Just made an allusion to it and a vague description. I'm sorry that my first week here (maybe last, who knows?) has seen me be hostile at Tony and StephenGorenson, but my God. This is isn't even bad scholarship. It's just bold as brass ignorance on one hand, and arrogance on the other. How do people stay sane here? They don't. There's a lot of interesting information on here but don't even bother arguing.

I don't think we need to suppose that Marcion held Jesus to be a bodiless phantom (as Tertullian infers must be the case) who could not be touched. We only need to suppose that Marcion would not have accepted Tertullian's claim that a heavenly being needs to take on a form of terrestrial matter in order to interact with human beings on earth. Best, Ken Could Jesus have been understood as having been made from non-terrestrial matter? Was there any similar claim in the Mediterranean about other religions' gods? I don't think we need to go to other religions. We have the Old Testament theophanies and Jewish angel texts. Tertullian seems to be arguing that all of these theophanies and angelophanies (is that a word?), the heavenly beings who appear in human form must necessarily have taken on genuine terrestrial human bodies in AM 3.9-11. I think that claim would have been heavily disputed in the ancient world. We have, for instance, stories in which angels eat (heavenly beings appear to come into contact with terrestrial matter). But whether they actually ate or only appeared to eat or something else was disputed. The part I quoted: 'take note besides that we do not admit your claim that in those angels the flesh was putative' was meant to illustrate the point. Tertullian rejects the claim (I take 'you' to be Marcion or the Marcionites) that angels who appear on earth have only putative human forms. He's insisting that they must have taken on genuine human forms of terrestrial ma

I don't think we need to suppose that Marcion held Jesus to be a bodiless phantom (as Tertullian infers must be the case) who could not be touched. We only need to suppose that Marcion would not have accepted Tertullian's claim that a heavenly being needs to take on a form of terrestrial matter in order to interact with human beings on earth. Best, Ken Could Jesus have been understood as having been made from non-terrestrial matter? Was there any similar claim in the Mediterranean about other religions' gods?

Sorry to have deserted the thread for so long - and I will probably need to desert it again. I'm trying to finish off a writing project and then get to my SBL papers for November. I'd like to reformulate what I think about the ostensible contradiction between the contents of the Evangelion and Marcion's theology according to Tertullian with regard to the physicality of Jesus' form, which GakuseiDon brought up earlier in the thread in this post. viewtopic.php?p=210332#p210332 What I think is going on is that Marcion, in the Evangelion, argued that Jesus did not have a body of flesh or terrestrial body, but descended from heaven. Tertullian argues that this is impossible because of the texts where Jesus appears to have physical substance and can be touched by terrestrial human beings, which would require that he had a body of terrestrial matter. Tertullian argues on this topic extensively in Adversus Marcionem , Book 4, chapters 9-11, which is too long to reproduce here, but I'll give a link: https://www.tertullian.org/articles/eva ... k3_eng.htm Tertullian even says: 'take note besides that we do not admit your claim that in those angels the flesh was putative (AM 9.4). Tertullian thinks God necessarily gives angels forms composed of terrestrial matter for them to interact with humans. I don't think we need to suppose that Marcion held Jesus to be a bodiless phantom (as Tertullian infers must be the case) who could not be touched. We only need to suppose that Marcion would not

I would say that in reality, when many if not most people actually see Him, Their terror will be so strong that they actually pee and crap themselves! That is the unvarnished, biological reality of what absolute, bottom-dropping terror actually looks like. When people are so insulated by their own institutionalized delusions and self-righteous rebellion that they genuinely believe they are running the show, the sudden, undeniable impact of raw reality hitting them like a freight train doesn't just make them cry or beat their chests. The autonomic nervous system completely gives way. The bowels and bladder let go because the brain registers total, inescapable annihilation. It strips away every shred of human dignity in a microsecond. There is no posture left to maintain, no intellectual defense mechanism to hide behind, and no ideological narrative to spin. Just pure, unadulterated panic when the true Master stands before them and the game is permanently over. That is exactly what Revelation and Zechariah 12:10 are actually describing! Take Zechariah 12:10 back to the Hebrew and study the deep root meaning of the words. The English word mourn is a really poor translation.

I do not see a dead man or death at all. I see the Master coming who the people crucified and rejected. I see the people beating on their chests in terror and grief over realizing that the Master has arrived and they have denied Him and realize judgment is at hand. The definition of kopsontai does not necessarily mean mourning a funeral. A clear example appears in Nahum 2:7. The prophet describes the capital of Assyria falling: the queen is exiled, and her maidservants moan like doves, "beating upon their breasts" (literally striking their hearts/chests) out of utter devastation and the collapse of their empire; not over a single individual's funeral, but in response to sudden, cataclysmic judgment. Similarly, Isaiah 32:12 calls for women to beat their breasts in grief over the devastation of the land and fruitful fields during a time of national desolation. In every one of these instances, the physical act is a visceral reaction to structural collapse, exposure, and the shattering of a false sense of security. When dealing with a text written in Greek that heavily draws on Hebrew prophetic imagery, you have to look past the specific lexical choices and examine the physical and psychological reality of the action itself. The physical gesture; striking the chest or body in response to sudden, overwhelming shock is a universal human language for crisis, terror, and devastation, whether it is rendered with koptō in the Greek New Testament/Septuagint or with equivalent roots in t

Paul had taught that Jesus died for their sins. There's no evidence that the specific hermeneutic logic of Galatians 3:13 had previously been taught to them, before the letter.

We actually did have a couple humans fall to the earth from outer space, when their shuttle disintegrated over Texas, USA. On the ground, rescue workers located I believe two bodies still in their space suits, and a VCR camera that was still switched on. Since they were not wearing their helmets (normal for reentry) meant that the sudden depressurization or the g-forces of disintegration had caused their tragic deaths, not the multi mile fall at 120 MPH or the sudden stop at the end. Do their deaths in outer space "prove" that they died by crucifixion there? DCH

Thus, the Sibylline Oracles never explicitly identifies Nero, and the apocalyptic segments in Daniel never explicitly refer to the Seleucid empire. Pilate is not referred explicitly. Not even implicitly. Whereas Nero and the Seleucid empire are referred implicitly. My point still stands. Fair enough.

It does depend on what you mean by Gnostic. There is no suggestion in Colossians that the world was created by a being other than the supreme God acting independently of the supreme God. Andrew Criddle Yes. I thought that stylistic features also were determining this, because the vocabulary was not Pauline. The stylistic arguments against authenticity for Colossians and Ephesians are much weaker than in the case of the Pastorals. Andrew Criddle Yes, and weaker for Colossians than for Ephesians. Here's the text of the Hymn (without prejudice as to whether it is pre-Pauline or non-Pauline) Col. 1.15 He [the Son] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in[j] him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God[k] was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. The text seems to be claiming that God created the universe, including the material world, through the Son. That God created the physical world through the Son sets the text apart fr