05-09-2003, 08:43 PM
|
#1
|
|
Veteran Member
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Singapore
Posts: 2,875
|
Hidden History in Acts
Sid Green's Hidden History in Acts is now on-line, for those who are interested.
Quote:
Although Gospel information is absent from the early writings, most notably from the Pauline epistles, it has been successfully retrojected into the Christian perception of the world of the epistle writers, for which Acts must take much of the credit. Acts is the only book of the NT that is not completely either pre-Gospel or post-Gospel in character, allowing us to see something of the Nazoreans, if only in order to present them to us as implicitly "Jewish Christians."
The presence of so many tantalising clues scattered about in Acts can be attributed in large measure to its obscurity before the third century. Thus Acts 24:5, the most valuable of its clues, intended to show that Paul was a Nazorean leader on a par with Cephas, was left undisturbed so that today we can appreciate its true significance. Even the most cursory comparison with Matthew 2:23 shows the definition of "Nazoraios" in Acts to be infinitely more feasible than the obscure and contrived distortion of Judges 13, misrepresented by Matthew as a messianic prophecy.
Through the many clues left in Acts itself, and with our knowledge of Josephus' testimony as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Damascus Document, we have enough evidence to prise open the received understanding of Christian origins and allow some new light to fall on the subject.
|
|
|
|
