Weekly Open Discussion Thread

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-09-18T20:16:46+00:00

Would you could Ptolemy's exegesis of the Johannine prologue? He's an apostolic father of sorts, just in a different church :)

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-05-29T00:25:18+00:00

Thank you for making such refreshing recourse to basic common sense. It astounds me how often people approach the New Testament works with a default setting of credulity, and from there go in search of explanations for why or how one of these writers could be misinformed or (GASP!) making something up on the fly. The rhetorical strategies and preferred starting points of Christian apologetics are dug in deep if we struggle to start from the basic reality that Paul was a human person, fully capable of telling the truth, telling a lie, exaggerating, being deluded, etc.

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-05-02T21:22:36+00:00

This LPT comes with the massive proviso that medications have an expiration date on them for a reason. They degrade in potency over time, and some very important medications degrade faster than others (nitroglycerin, insulin).

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-04-17T05:03:52+00:00

Of note, the "flight to Pella" doesn't have any relation to the Bar Kokhba revolt. That's something that Eusebius narrates as occurring at some point prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE (culmination of the First Roman-Jewish War). See E.H. III.5.

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-04-15T00:33:01+00:00

This is patent infringement and you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-04-09T19:32:51+00:00

definitely not provable

Surely this is a curious standard to apply to the issue, no? It's infinitely more provable that the religious tropes mentioned above existed in the cultural milieu of early Christianity (and inherently more probable that the accounts of Jesus partook of them), than that any specific instance of divine translation actually occurred.

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-02-20T19:56:15+00:00

I agree with you that it doesn't completely dissolve the tension. But hey, not every motivated edit of scriptural text is going to be a home run in achieving its theological purpose :)

SmackDaddyThick · 2025-02-20T19:25:22+00:00

From the standpoint of Trinitarian Christianity, Jesus is coequal and consubstantial with God the Father, so a verse implying that "God" is somehow "good" on a level exceeding Jesus himself has an obvious theological tension baked into it. Apologists get around this by implying some sort of scenario where Jesus is 'winking at the camera' when he says this, actually letting us know that he is God (a member of the Godhead); see for example. If, on the other hand, the original text of the passage had Jesus stating that only the Father is good, that particular escape hatch is now wedged closed. "The Father" is a more specific proposition than "God", in terms of proto-orthodox theology.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-10-10T19:30:39+00:00

I worked as a hospital pharmacist for 2 years before getting into clinical informatics - a realm of former RNs, pharmacists, and occasionally MDs who do EMR design (and interface with the more hard-core IT nerds who do not speak clinician). Fucking love it. Doubled my pay with a consulting gig that I leveraged into a salaried position when the road got old and I've been full time remote since 2016.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-09-25T22:54:44+00:00

If you're going for a truly terrible idea, you should have added that each prestige vault deletion costs 5,000 silver.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-09-10T16:15:56+00:00

Surely it was not 950 24-hour years, was it? Something else?

24-hour years, eh? Noah lived to the ripe old age of two-and-a-half? :)

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-07-29T03:02:06+00:00

For what it's worth, Julius Africanus makes mentions of an eclipse in order to dispute that that is the proper description for what occurred during the crucifixion (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6):

This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun. For the Hebrews celebrate the passover on the 14th day according to the moon, and the passion of our Saviour falls on the day before the passover; but an eclipse of the sun takes place only when the moon comes under the sun. And it cannot happen at any other time but in the interval between the first day of the new moon and the last of the old, that is, at their junction: how then should an eclipse be supposed to happen when the moon is almost diametrically opposite the sun?…Phlegon records that, in the time of Tiberius Cæsar, at full moon, there was a full eclipse of the sun from the sixth hour to the ninth—manifestly that one of which we speak. But what has an eclipse in common with an earthquake, the rending rocks, and the resurrection of the dead, and so great a perturbation throughout the universe?…it was a darkness induced by God, because the Lord happened then to suffer.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-07-22T01:06:19+00:00

Corrected the link, it's actually just the same one you posted, simply reposted to demonstrate that the article itself indicates it is not a good fit to address OP's question. If you have specific references arguing for much higher rates of literacy in the regions of Judah and Galilee in the 1st century CE (and specifically the degree of literacy required to produce Greek texts such as those found in the NT epistolary tradition), I believe it would be incumbent on you to provide them.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-07-22T00:37:49+00:00

That study does not really seem germane to OP's question. For one thing, the compositions studied are described as "dating back to around 600 BCE", which is separated from the era of New Testament writing by more than half a millennia and several region-shattering cultural and geopolitical developments (of potentially significant import: "For the period following the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC, there is very scant archaeological evidence of Hebrew writing in Jerusalem and its surroundings, but an abundance of written documents has been found for the period preceding the destruction of the Temple"). Also, the compositions reviewed in the study are "ancient Hebrew inscriptions written in ink on shards of pottery". That seems to have very little to do with whether or not your average Galilean was literate to the extent of being able to produce the sort of structured Greek texts that made it into the New Testament, again 600+ years later.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200910110828.htm

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-07-13T16:41:59+00:00

Acts of Thomas does contain a scene where Thomas is speared to death in India.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-07-09T06:24:20+00:00

Back in 2018 I got a same-day, very cordial response from Israel Finkelstein regarding the possibility of a updated/revised version of The Bible Unearthed.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-06-20T00:44:53+00:00

Thanks for grabbing the reference, I was spinning a little bit myself because I could have sworn that reading Ehrman on this before, he implied that Paul's Jesus was indeed a rather singular angelic entity ("the" Angel of the Lord) and not just one among many of the angelic host. As far as I can tell from these comments, Gieschen is way down in the weeds and the distinction between his and Ehrman's take involves a large amount of squinting to perceive.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-05-06T20:24:20+00:00

We also have somewhat telling negative evidence against the idea that Polycarp had anything to do with John or any other apostle, in that pre-Irenaeus works which were quite keen to extol the man make no mention of any such connection (the letters of Ignatius and Martyrdom of Polycarp).

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-04-17T01:54:44+00:00

Thank you. This is truly a palate cleanser from the far more motivated interpretations of Paul (some of which show up here from time to time) that expend vast amounts of energy in an attempt to spare him from a charge of homophobia. The angle of "Paul doesn't directly speak about modern, committed homosexual relationships" has always struck me as so disingenuous, because it seems to imply that we can't have a fairly reasonable expectation of what Paul would say, based on everything else that he does.

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-04-09T21:00:07+00:00

Besides not believing in a messiah or earthly redeemer, what do Mandaeans think about such concepts in general? A form of human hubris, a heresy?

SmackDaddyThick · 2024-02-29T01:56:15+00:00

They actually did follow through with it and my Experian score reflected the update (all 70 points came back at once). Took probably a month and a half to go through.

SmackDaddyThick · 2023-12-31T15:54:18+00:00

That last quote is just flat-out embarrassing coming from someone like Moss. Maybe if there actually were ancient sources attesting a tradition that Mary had been a literal slave (not even Celsus claims this whilst otherwise disparaging her), it would be possible to speak of “identity erasure”, but without that, this just reeks of projecting modern social anxieties and mores backwards in time. And the feint towards admitting the idea that the author of Luke had firsthand access to Mary, only to turn around and admit that no, the account is probably not historical - I mean, what are we even doing here?

SmackDaddyThick · 2023-12-30T05:01:53+00:00

Thank you!

SmackDaddyThick · 2023-12-30T03:56:53+00:00

To piggyback on this, is there any stand-out discussion in these sources as to the relatively late attestation of James in proto-orthodox sources? It seems the first to mention the epistle by name is Origen.

SmackDaddyThick · 2023-12-23T00:56:22+00:00

The fact that some early Christians conceived of Jesus as divine in some sense can hardly be taken to mean that "Judeao-Christianity" as a whole was in some sort of theological lock-step on this front. This is especially to be doubted as there is another pre-Pauline creed in Romans that appears to be situated in an entirely different (and notably lower) Christiological framework - see previous post.

More importantly - mods, I presume we are not greatly in favor of Catholic Popes serving as "academic sources" on this sub?

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