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Showing posts from November, 2018

The Enemies Within: Purveyors of His Slop (Hislop)

This week my target is mainly someone who died decades ago, but his legacy lives on today in garbage found in Chick tracts, and of late has been promulgated by a conspiracy theorist minister named Mark Fairley, and sadly, even by John MacArthur. Alexander Hislop was a clergyman with a dislike for Catholics and an even greater dislike for sound history. So he put together a ridiculous panorama of history dominated by the figures of Nimrod and Semiramis, who together supposedly founded an evil world religion that lives on today in, among other places, the Catholic Church.  I won't be addressing Hislop's claims here; if you want to see some of them addressed, a couple of my ebooks cover the territory (if you're feeling masochistic). The main point is that Hislop's nuttery today infects the background of too many prominent teachers. The fact that someone as allegedly prestigious and intelligent as John MacArthur gives props to is bad enough to pronounce an epitaph over

Papias and The Daughters of Philip

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Tomb of Philip at Hierapolis  Our understanding of Philip comes to us form four major soruces: Papias, Irenaius, Eusebius, and Polycrates. Papias (70?-155?) was Bishop of Hierapolis (in Phrygia, sort mid southwestern Turkey), where Philip lived. He knew the daughters of Philip after their father's time. What we know of him comes to us priarily form his student Irenaeus. Irenaeus is important as the connecting link not only to Philip but to Papias and Polycarp. Irenaeus is a major figure in the chain.   Papias and The Daughters of Philip  Papias had several important connections to the history of Jesus. He studied with his friend Polycarp and they both studied under the Apostle John. There is a controservy about weather it was the Apostel John or another John, I will deal with that on Papias own page. He lived in Hierapolis where he was Bishop there was also Philip and his four virgin daughters. The daughters of Philip were prophetesses, Paul is said to have met them in Ac

Instone-Brewer evidence on Historicity of Jesus

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Church of Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem This essay was originally written as an answer to Peter Kirby's straw man argument where he set up his best case for Jesus' historicity then knocked  it down. I am not going to deal with any of the Pagan historians who document Jesus existence, such as Tacitus. Tacitus is defensible but it's not really the best evidence. Going by the best I've done Kirby's attempt at making the case on Josephus, Here I will deal with his  straw man on the Talmud .[1]  Then on NT and Church "fathers." Remember Kirby is doing a straw man argument, making the alleged "best case" for Jesus historicity so he can tear it down and say "I made the case and it doesn't stand up to my fierce onslaught." That's what I expect from a coward who is so threatened by better scholars that he chases them off his message board with the flimsy excuse that they have too many posts on the bard. So here we have the section

The Enemies Within: End Times Hucksters

My focus this time is one I have put together a whole e-book related to titled The Encyclopedia of End Times Fail. I could probably write several volumes. But the narrower focus is on those who fail to come about their erroneous eschatology honestly and use their failures as a way to sell merchandise. I won't hesitate to name the name that exemplifies this the most: John Hagee. This crank has written enough books on the end times to build a formidable bomb shelter, and he's made enough wrong prognostications about the future to earn himself a dunce cap the size of the Pyramid of Giza. However, he doesn't care: Every time a book of his ends up vastly wrong, he extracts some of the material and puts it inside a new frame. Then he sells millions more copies to the same suckers who bought it last time. In the last several years, he has seen the end fomenting in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Y2K bug, the financial crash of 2008, and the blood moons.  Each time, he wr

Community as Author

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My argument "Community as author" postulates that if we don;t know the individual authors of the gospels we can still look to the communities that produced the gospels as the authors because they contained not only the actual authors/redactors but many eye witnesses, to the events of Jesus' life. That involves a discussion of the role or oral tradition in the making of the gospels because it was oral tradition that persevered the testimony of the  eye witnesses in the gap between the events and the writing of the gospels. Modern liberal theology has given the name "form criticism" to this discussion. Form criticism is a philosophy and methodology of Biblical criticism, "Criticism" in relation to the Bible does not mean talking about how bad the Bible is (too long and hard to understand) but refers to a means of analysis in a systematic sense. Form criticism seeks to analyze the historical development of  the New Testament by understanding the fo