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Category Archives: Ancient Novel
Margaret Froelich on the Death of Aesop and Luke 4:16-30
Both teaching and dissertation work have been keeping me occupied of late. I have an exciting announcement about an important conference that I have been accepted to present at later this year, which I will discuss here at some point … Continue reading
Bayesian Analysis of Craig Keener, “Otho: A Targeted Comparison”
Recently I received feedback from ancient historian Richard Carrier about my previous review of Craig Keener’s article–“Otho: A Targeted Comparison of Suetonius’ Biography and Tacitus’ History, with Implications for the Gospels’ Historical Reliability”–which is chapter 6 of Biographies and Jesus: What Does … Continue reading
Posted in Ancient Biography, Ancient Novel, Apologists, Classics, Guest Blogs, Historical Jesus, History, Philosophy, Reviews
Tagged Bayes' Theorem, Craig Keener, Richard Carrier
3 Comments
Review of Craig Keener, “Otho: A Targeted Comparison,” with Emphasis on the Citation of Eyewitness Sources and Textual Independence of Historical Biographers
While doing research on my dissertation, which works to situate the NT Gospels within the generic spectrum of Greco-Roman biography, one recent publication (October 2016) that has popped up on my radar is Craig Keener and Edward Wright’s new volume … Continue reading
Posted in Ancient Biography, Ancient Novel, Apologists, Classics, Historical Jesus, History, Reviews
Tagged Ancient Biography, Are the Gospels biographies?, Are the Gospels eyewitness accounts?, Are the Gospels historically reliable?, Are the Gospels like Plutarch?, Biographies of Jesus, Craig Keener, Historical reliability of the Gospels, Jesus
16 Comments
Eyewitness Recollections in Greco-Roman Biography versus the Anonymity of the Gospels
In the genre of Greco-Roman biography (as well as historiography) ancient authors did not always name all of their oral or written sources, and there were no footnotes in the literature of the period. Nevertheless, biographers from the early Roman Empire … Continue reading
Diegesis and Mimesis: A Very Brief Introduction
Another major part of working on a dissertation in the humanities is that you will usually incorporate some form of literary theory into the central thesis of your argument. I have discussed in a previous post some current theory of … Continue reading
The Historical Reliability of Popular Biographies, Part 2: Redaction Criticism
In my previous post I discussed the complexity of historical criticism, and how even texts of the same literary genre can vary substantially in terms of historical reliability, based on their date of composition and their available sources of information. In part … Continue reading
The Historical Reliability of Popular Biographies, Part 1: Framing the Comparison
Recently on Κέλσος I have been discussing the generic features that the NT Gospels share with Greek popular-novelistic biographies. Such features include the simple vocabulary and sentence structure found in these texts (as I discussed in my most recent post), which distinguish popular … Continue reading
Grammatiki Karla on Ancient Greek Popular Literature: Language and Style
Seeing that I will be comparing the NT Gospels to the genre of Greek popular-novelistic biography in my Ph.D. dissertation, a major component of this project will be identifying the features and characteristics of “popular literature.” Fortunately, a new academic book on … Continue reading
Idealized Portraits of Jesus, Alexander the Great, and Aesop
I have been busy working on my dissertation recently, which has taken away some time from blogging, but today I will (briefly) share something interesting from my research. The topic of my dissertation is an analysis of the generic and thematic … Continue reading
Κέλσος 
[…] very good paper on how cults, aka religions, can invent nonsense and end up believing it to be true.“The…