Yes! That!

Hopefully they will ask for donations during the event. I would appreciate everyone giving what they can, to support more events like this in future, and the community.

I’m pretty sure the event is free, but ACSJ has to pay $400 for the room, so if you come prepared to donate a few bucks it would be appreciated.
I’ll be there, Richard.

No. At least, not as there proposed.

The earliest Christian crucifixion ritual was baptism. It did not involve any actual acting out of a crucifixion. And Hebrews is not describing such a thing, but explaining cosmologically what Jesus actually did.

And citing Galatians 3:1 is a major mistake, looking at English translations and not the original language: the word in the Greek is fore-written, not “openly set forth” or “displayed publicly” or any of the translations in print. Paul is simply referring to the fact that he personally showed them the scriptures foretelling the crucifixion (i.e. they saw the verses with their own eyes).

But still, one thing is correct: the first Christians almost certainly regarded the crucifixion of Jesus as an expiatory sacrifice just as Hebrews 9 explains. That was in fact fundamental to the gospel, without which there would have been no Christianity. And Christians shared in that through baptism, which for them was a symbolic death and resurrection.

Earl Doherty sees this possibility:
While Paul provides us with no graphic visions or descriptions pertaining to Christ’s death at the hands of the rulers of this age (although he may have alluded to such a thing in Galatians 3:1), the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews does give us a fairly detailed and graphic description of Christ’s sacrifice of his blood in the heavenly sanctuary. (Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.151)

For Dujardin, some traces of this old rite are found in Luke 22:36-38, the ”two swords” representing the knifes of the sacrifice, ”used by the priest to slay the victim” (p. 42), and in Matt. 27:24-25, the sprinkling of blood ”in origin a sacrificial ritual” (p.43), at least simbolically.

What do you think about this thesis? It’s true that the rite precedes the myth?

thanks,
Giuseppe

Look forward to meeting you then, or at least seeing you, lol.

See above.

Yes, yes, and yes–so far as I know.

(Although they might reserve some seating for the disabled; and they might have a sign-in sheet; but I’m just guessing.)

If it’s anything like San Francisco, you might be expected to order a meal or a drink (as compensation to the establishment).

No idea. Not only has the publisher not given me a release date yet, the release date won’t be when it ends up in “shops” (if it ever does at all; “shops” can only take in a tiny fraction of books released in any given year), though it will be close to when it’s able to be ordered via Amazon in the US, and beyond that I know even less. I can at best only guess that, based on where they are now in the production process and how delayed they’ve been in the past, that we are looking at early Summer.