I did not think that is not 'OK' to discuss this as a topic. This is AH.com, after all. I was merely responding to a poorly evidenced assertion regarding 'edits' made to the biblical texts. Nonetheless, in retrospect my reply did not really move the thread forward. To remedy, here are my 2...
Are you making a textual corruption argument ala Bart Ehrman? If so, I think you are misstating Dr Ehrman's position. While he does say that corruptions (i.e. edits) in the manuscript tradition did make into the Bible that we have now, and that some of these corruptions were theologically based...
Ok, but once you were forcibly conscripted into the Black Army, you were part of a distinct institution, wholly divorced from the rest of society and dependent on the beneficence of the Sultan for everything. According to your source, Chouki El Hamel,
The same could be said for any of the...
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding of the role the Black Guard played within Moroccan society of that time. As a literal translation of their Arabic name would suggest, the Jaysh al-Abid were a slave army, the expression of a centuries old Islamic practice of recruiting a royal guard...
I would say in arguing for predestination Wycliffe may well have had a different theology, especially when coupled with his notions around the primacy of scripture in deciding things of faith and practice. But obviously, it is dangerous to read back later developments on to Wycliffe when...
While it is true that the St Thomas/Nasrani Christians trace their apostolic lineage by tradition to a church founded by the Apostle Thomas, we don't have a solid line of evidence for this. What evidence we do have is to a wave of Syriac speaking settlers who arrived in Kerala between the 4th...
I don't think it is actually all that surprising that parents are more skittish of naming their children 'the Praised One' (Muhammad) than giving their children a name meaning that their God saves (Jesus being a shortened form of Yehoshua meaning 'YHWH saves'). After all the latter is full of...
Well its not like Khalid ibn Walid was the only skilled commander who led the Arabs. The role he played could just as easily have been played by Abu Sufyan (the most prominent tribal leader opposing Muhammad, until he submitted when Muhammad peacefully entered Mecca) or his sons Yazid (who was...
All I'll say is you have a lot more optimism in the survivability of both the records and the ability to read them.
Imagine for example that the Persians win the war. The major Greek City states who defied Xerxes are razed to the ground and new people's are imported to serve as colonists for...
I think you misunderstand. It's not the fact that laws can successfully erase memory, but that our knowledge of history is ultimately a fragile thing.
As you say, it is possible that the Spartans can be remembered like the Etruscans, where we can match the artifacts we dig up to the records...
I'd actually say that given enough destruction and passage of time it is actually not impossible for Sparta to be made damnatio memoriae.
A good illustration of how this can happen is in the fact that to much of the Sassanian Persian world, the existence of their Achaemenid ancestors some 500...
While I agree that the butterfly effects could potentially be massive in both Worlds, I'd argue that the delay would not be less than 10 years.
IIRC, Basque fisherman were already exploiting the Cod Banks off Newfoundland by the 1400s, and it was following these tales that John Cabot discovered...
Having just completed reading The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's book about the first month of WW1, I think there are a few obvious PoDs. The most obvious one is for the BEF to not take part. OTL, Sir John French as well as Murray, his chief of staff had both refused to join Joffre's battle...
First of all, I'd like to expand on my two sentence response since I fell I could have been a lot clearer. Although the INC had been formed in 1885 and had some some success in galvanising popular support after the 1905 partition of Bengal, it had spent the pre-WWI years as a shell of its...
Although without Gandhi's much derided spirituality the independence movement would never had the kind of mass movement appeal it did IOTL and IMO it would have ended up as a long drawn out guerrilla war between Marxist inspired guerrillas in the mold of Bhagath Singh and the British and...