Pantera, a Roman legionary, remains a plausible biological father for Jesus
You have only minutes left to get an interesting gift – a stocking-stuffer for an intelligent, literate, argumentative teen, say.
You could order them a copy of The Gospel According to the Romans for $14.95 here, or from Amazon.com
or you can send it to them as an e-book for 86p in the UK, or 99 cents in the US, or EUR 0,99 at one of Amazon’s main European websites (for example Germany, but you can substitute other country letters for the ‘de’), where you/they can also get a free Kindle app for reading it (look on the right-hand side)
or you can simply point them at this blog, http://robinhl.com, where they can enjoy random religious rants and sniping year-round!
(Discussion of Pantera is at https://robinhl.com/2011/11/06/jesus-son-of-pantera/, fyi. And Merry Christmas!)
You mention a Roman Legion of “80000.” Try 5500 when not tasked for battle and 6600 when tasked. You hypothesize too many transfers of info between the deaths of the 2000 pigs and the time of the recording of this event by Matthew. Wrong: Matthew recorded this event while writing his gospel whilst Peter and Paul were laying the foundations of the Church in Rome(Irenaeus wrote his five-volume “Adversus Haereses” and in volume 3.1.1()are walking garbage
You ponder who owned the pigs that cast themselves into the sea. Much of the time pigs are free to wander around in villiages. They eat everything from garbage to human etc excrement.
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My apologies for the typo. Can you give me a reference for it? I will correct it to the 8,000 I intended.
And, no, pigs were not “free to wander around” in Jewish villages! Jews – don’t – like – pigs!
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