On reviewing Revelations 7, one thing that is striking to me is that the 144,000 (Rev 7:4) is the number of “marked servants of God” (the nature of the marking relates to the scene in Ezek 9, where the righteous are sealed on the forehead, reflecting amuletic practices like the placement of “tefillin” (Deut 6.8;…

Probably not, but we can go over some speculation.There are areas where they may disagree on issues (such as the matter of food sacrificed to idols). One relevant fact is that Revelation 2:8-11 is addressed to the church in Smyrna and the later bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, was so heavily steeped in the Pauline epistles…

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Revelation, 160ff) and David Aune (Revelation 1–5, cxff) each list out attempts by scholars to reconstruct earlier sources incorporated into the Revelation. A number of them find a pre-AD 70 source and a later one, but the contents vary considerably from one scholar to the next.Erbes saw three main Christian texts within…

David Aune in his WBC volume (p. 205) translates as “Behold I will throw her into a sickbed” and explains as follows:“The expression βάλλω αὐτὴν εἰς κλίνην, ‘I will throw her into a sickbed,’ is a Hebrew idiom that means ‘to cast upon a bed of illness,’ i.e. to punish someone with various forms of…

Intro The final book of the New Testament in the Christian Bible is the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of “John”. It is a book of prophecy that talks about when the world will end and what happened before it. It is written in a highly symbolic and cryptic style, and scholars…

Article Meanwhile, the 1945 discovery of a cache of thirteen Coptic papyrus manuscripts near the city of Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) revolutionized the study of Gnosticism, for these ancient books seem to contain many works whose contents resemble the teachings of the gnostic school of thought mentioned by Irenaeus, Porphyry, and others. Scholars widely recognized…

The idea that the docetics changed Jesus’ appearance and that he was not actually crucified stems from the belief that Jesus was polymorphic. Similarly, Origen (b. 184/185 – d. 253/254) argues in Contra Celsum that Jesus can appear in more than one form. There are also examples in the Canon Gospels where Jesus changed his…

The interpretations of the gnostic movements of early Christianity are very entertaining. Men read the Bible and say, “What kind of God is this?” This must be the devil or something, not God. He says he is a jealous god, he doesn’t know where Adam is in the garden of Eden.

DeConick writes: My take away from the Gospel of Judas is that Christian Gnostics were a big part of the Christian movement and had developed sophisticated forms of Christianity that were at odds (even violently) with catholic or apostolic Christianity (precursor to Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy). The Gnostics who wrote the Gospel of Judas thought…

J. Quasten writes (Patrology, vol 1, pp. 274-275): Another representative of the Encratites is Julius Cassianus. Clement of Alexandria mentions two of his writings in Stromat. 3,13,92. The first of these was entitled Exegetica. We learn from Clement that the first book of this dealt with the age of Moses. The title of the second…