On Creationism

I debate frequently with a guy called Joe Hinman, who used to post on CARM as Metacrock. He frequently cites Brown in Death of the Messiah, volume 2, to support his position. He gets it wrong, and it is useful for me to have easy access to some quotes. Brown on the Gospel of Peter Brown made his reputation of the Gospel of Peter, so is pretty much THE authority. The relevant part of the book is the section "Overall Proposal About Composition Based on Sequence and Content", which is from page 1332 to 1336, where Brown first looks at alternatives, and why they fail, before, at the bottom of page 1334, he presents his own hypothesis: After working with the tables and lists above (and the massive vocabulary difference), I am convinced  that one explanation makes better sense of the relationship between GPet and the canonicals than any other. I doubt that the author of GPet had written any gospel before him, although he was familiar with Matt because he read it carefully in ...

In the Canaanite polytheism, the head of the pantheon was El, with his consort Asherah. El had 70 sons, and each (or some?) was connected to a specific people. Yahweh was the god associated with the people of Israel and Judah. That connection was very much analogous to a marriage between the god and the nation (at least for the Hebrews), and it may be that Old Testament ideas about marriage were derived from he relationship between God and Israel/Judah, though it might just as easily be that the relationship derived from ideas about marriage. God was very much the husband, so he set the rules, and he was free to have more than one wife; Israel and Judah specifically. On the other hand, if the people of Israel or Judah started to worship other gods, this was analogous to adultery or even prostitution, and would make God very angry. Ezekeil sums this up nicely: Ezekiel 16:6 “‘Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “Li...