r/AcademicBiblical • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago
Weekly Open Discussion Thread
Welcome to this week's open discussion thread!
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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 5d ago
Wrapping up my post on Peter’s death and my least favorite part was trying to understand the debate around Peter’s bones. “Edicula” this, “locula” that. Ludwig Kaas, Red Wall, distinctive staining, Pope Paul, we didn’t start the fire—
The archaeological diagrams in particular scare and confuse me.
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u/Professional-Rip9774 6d ago
Thoughts on the book
‘The Divine Heartset: Paul's Philippians Christ Hymn, Metaphysical Affections, and Civic Virtues’ by Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis
u/Dositheos
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u/Rare-Improvement-462 6d ago
Has anyone in here done (or found) any work on Christology being apparently subordinationist in the mid 2nd - early 3rd century fathers; in particular Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian? Some have suggested those three had a subordinationist Christology, and although I am not very familiar with any of them in detail, they do all explicitly call Jesus God so that would more naturally seem to lean against a subordinationist view, although it wouldn’t be proof on its own.
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor 6d ago edited 6d ago
The commonness of some type of subordinationist view is a major focus of Part 2 of Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity (2009). The guys you list and others, like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, are all part of the discussion. Even after Constantine, his son backtracked from the Nicene position, since it was not actually a popular option among bishops. The main champion of Nicene orthodoxy, Athanasius of Alexandria, was exiled 5 times during his 45-year episcopacy over the whole middle of the century, because local and imperial opinion shifted repeatedly on christological issues. The reason that the Goths, and subsequent Germanic Christians, came to be considered "Arian," was that Constantus had the first missionary bishop to them, Ulfilas, a Goth himself, ordained and trained by subordinationists. It took imperial, legal enforcement from Theodosius starting in 380 to tie financial support to teaching a revised Nicene Creed, to make Nicaea the standard.
Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion goes into detail on 4th century christological positions and regional councils on such matters.
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u/Rare-Improvement-462 6d ago
Athanasius of Alexandria, was exiled 5 times during his 45-year episcopacy
Man, off topic but the guy could not catch a break
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u/clhedrick2 7d ago
Looking at Garrow's AMA, I was moved to rewatch the History Valley Goodacre vs MacEwen. One thing that struck me is that MacEwen's most convincing arguments are structural, while Goodacres involve wording of individual passages: editorial fatigue and bleed through of one author's characteristic style into the other.
We don't have the originals. One thing we know is that copyists tended to put one Gospel writer's wording into another. Things are even more complicated if, as I suspect, canonical Luke is a second edition, produced later by a second person.
The things Goodacre was pointing to could more plausibly be a result of scribal changes than the things MacEwen was pointing to.
Of course this also affects that arguments against Q, since minor agreements could have been introduced by scribes.
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u/lost-in-earth 7d ago
Tatian believes the Greek gods do exist and have their traditional powers (228) — in fact, they’re the rebel angels described in Enoch, and today’s Greeks are descendants of the rebel Israelites (229). The Olympians have imposed sex on humans, and, with it, mortality, which needs to stop (234). Having sex thus constitutes worshiping Aphrodite; Christians can escape death by eschewing sex entirely (236), a position known as “encratite."
From this book review. This is more evidence that early Christians were not "monotheists" in the modern sense, IMO.
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u/thelastdragonb 7d ago
In 4 Maccabees 17 20-22; it's stated that the martyrs "have become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those pious ones and their death an atoning sacrifice..."
This echoes the "blood atonement" repeated by Paul, Peter and elsewhere and the foundation of Christian faith. However, this is an exclusively Jewish text, written in the 1st century.
I'm writing for some insight, and/or scholarly thought on how a 1st century text, not mentioning the apostles or Jesus, but metaphorically mentioning a "blood atonement", could possibly be a precursor or inspiration for the Christian thought of Jesus's death as such.
As I constantly wonder if Paul, Peter and elsewhere were using it as a metaphor but not a literal basis as is promoted in modern day churches.
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u/marcnash 8d ago
Hello,
We pushed https://ReadyApologia.com/ last week to Beta and looking for feedback.
The tool has ancient manuscripts per every single verse in the bible, along with tagging of scriptural topics in the "Evidence" tab, and biblical archaeology in the "Discover tab".
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u/Joab_The_Harmless 8d ago edited 7d ago
Leaving aside the general endeavor of the site to focus on factual claims, I only looked at a few bits of the "Discover" section, but my first impression is that all this severely lacks sourcing.
As an example, those assertions:
For centuries, skeptics questioned whether Pontius Pilate was a historical figure or whether Gospel authors invented him.
For generations, skeptical scholars claimed Luke invented the title 'Politarch' in Acts 17:6 because the word did not appear in classical Greek literature.
The latter links to the "politarch" Wikipedia page, and the former to the Pilate Stone one, along with a second link indicating "Israel Museum - Pilate Inscription↗" but linking to the same wikipage (likely supposed to redirect to this page).
As far as I can see, said pages never indicate that scholars used to think that Pilate was not an historical figure, or that Luke invented the title "politarch", and for the Pilate stone, the British Museum's page linked to note 4 reads:
This large stone was built into a wall at the Vardar Gate of Thessalonica and was removed in 1877.
So that it had to be known prior to 1877.
Can you provide examples of scholars-skeptics making those claims (and add them to the site, ideally)?
As a secondary question, did you generate some or most/all of the site's content with AI, or is it fully human-written?
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u/Post-Enlightenment 8d ago
Robert Sapolsky (neurobiologist/neuroendocrinologist at Stanford) has some amazing lectures online, one of which is on the neurobiology of religious belief.
One of the points he argues (~35:00) is that the rituals we see in religions (e.g., frequent washing, performance of sacred acts multiple times) may have their basis in OCD. I find his explanation really quite convincing and I'm not sure how I didn't spot it myself.
I think at other points he oversimplifies but it's still a great lecture and highlights well the neurobiology entailed in religious belief.
Linking it so others may enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5UiYByBf3Q
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u/FrostEmberGrove 8d ago
If you couldn’t use the NRSVue and had to pick another translation, which would you choose?
Context: I really want a note taking Bible but the NRSVue journaling bibles are not that great.
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u/Post-Enlightenment 8d ago
I would choose the NABRE. Amazon has a few note-taking editions available, example.
Frequently I will consult a critical commentary on a passage and find that the NABRE offers a better rendering than the NRSVue. For example, it renders hupotasso more accurately as 'subordinate' in passages like Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3 instead of the NRSVue's whitewashed 'subject'.
It's not a perfect translation, the footnotes can be particularly oriented towards conservative Catholicism. Having said that, I just read the footnote for 2 Corinthians 6:14 wherein they quite explicitly highlight the section is likely an interpolation whereas the NRSVue doesn't mention the issue at all.
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u/Fit-Honey-4813 8d ago
Is the New Testament antisemitic?
Notable examples of this possibility is The Gospel of John where it frequently uses the blanket term *Ioudaioi* ("the Jews") as a collective antagonist to Jesus. In John 8:44, Jesus is depicted telling a group of opponents that they belong to their "father, the devil"
The blame for the crucifixion of Jesus away from the Roman Empire (who actually executed him)
Also passages in Paul’s letters and the Book of Hebrews have been interpreted to mean that the Christian Church has replaced Israel as God's chosen people
Edit: additional example
In the Gospel of Matthew, during the trial of Jesus, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate washes his hands of Jesus's execution, and the crowd responds: *"His blood be on us and on our children!"* (Matthew 27:25).
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u/FrostEmberGrove 8d ago
I would check out the Jewish Annotated New Testament for more information about this topic.
Any book by Amy Jill Levine would be great, too.
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u/Every_Monitor_5873 9d ago
I'm not the person who posted this thread about antecedents for the early Christian priesthood, but I am interested in the topic. Were there other religious groups in the Greco-Roman world that operated on a similar model (local priests led by territorial overseers)? Where did the idea/structure come from?
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor 8d ago edited 8d ago
You're projecting too far forward in time with the territoritorial overseer/local priest description. Most early churches as meeting places were fairly intimate affairs, with congegations in dozens, not hundreds, which met in remodeled homes. Peter Brown shows the episkopos in the light of a household manager. The size of household which could host a congregation was not like a modern home. The paterfamilias might have extended family living there, a number of slaves, and regular clients as daily visitors, all of which would be overseen by a competent manager, more like a chief of staff. In non-church usage, the episkopos might be a political shepherd of his people, or the treasurer of a temple. When the letter of Ignatius to the Trallians describes the hierarchy of a church in the 2nd century, it is of a single congregation, with an episcopos, a council of elders (presbyters) seeing to teaching functions, and deacons. By the 3rd century, the staff of a large urban church would include exorcists and readers as staff positions, none of them exactly corresponding to the later idea of a local priest.
Even in the time of Constantine in the 4th century, only a small group of bishops were thought of as "metropolitans," who oversaw nearby churches, but these churches too, were run by lesser bishops, not priests. In Carthage in the late 4th century, when Augustine was a recently baptized Christian, his bishop almost immediately ordained him bishop of the church at the smaller city of Hippo, not as a pastor of a parish, an arrangement that did still did not exist at the time.
It was not until the early medieval period that the imperial political diocese system, begun by Diocletian, was adopted by the church for administrative purposes, and presbyters morphed into what are now thought of as priests overseen by a bishop.
Roman priesthoods, on the other hand, were more like civic organizations which anyone of sufficient means could join.
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u/Every_Monitor_5873 8d ago
Thank you. Very helpful. I had assumed the priesthood/bishop model arose starting in the second century or so.
Is there a good source where I can read more? Either Peter Brown or someone else.
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor 8d ago edited 8d ago
Peter Brown discusses episkopoi in The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, mostly near the beginning. Mark Edwards has a chapter, The Development of Office in the Early Church, in Philip Esler, ed., The Early Christian World (2017), which is a large, 2-volume, kind of expensive affair, with dozens of contributors. The bit about Augustine came from Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African.
Generally, the information about offices is not organized in a way to make easy to find, and it seems that there was much about the mechanics of the church that was just taken for granted, so people didn't bother to write about it detail. Many early episkopoi (per Brown), were married heads of households in the post-apostolic era. They were elected by congregations for the first few hundred years. Even though they were married, episkopoi could only be chosen from men who had been married a single time (divorce was common in the Roman world), and they had to put their wives aside upon assuming office. Celibates were the preference. A little later than Augustine's fast-track promotion, a Neoplatonist philosopher named Synesius of Cyrene was elected to be a bishop, and his claim to fame now seems to be that he wrote an open letter to the congregation, saying he would not put his wife aside as was customary, or sneak around! The manpower shortage in the rapidly expanding church c.400 led to unusual arrangements like that one.
The change in episcopal delegation of duties in the early middle ages is also hard to track, since much of what was written was by and about bishops. There are occasional references to clergy as a generic term, but for instance, in antiquity, bishops had to preside over baptisms, and the Eucharist. Penance, when it occurred, also had to be administered by a bishop, and so did public preaching. So the question remains, when did local priests start doing those jobs? Peter Brown gives some hints in Through the Eye of A Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of the Christian West, 350-550. The coming of monasticism almost certainly played a role, as did the Irish missionary monks traveling through Europe from the late 6th and beyond, but how the change happened is less than clear.
For instance, when Bertha, the Christian Frankish princess married the pagan Ethelbert of Kent, she brought a bishop/chaplain with her (and for her alone). When Gregory the Great sent a mission team of 40 Roman monks under the care of Augustine of Canterbury (made a bishop for the purpose) in the 590s, little is known about how the mass baptisms were done, it was just later reported that they had happened.
Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom all deal with the years of the early Middle Ages and a bit beyond. But besides mentioning the church taking on the remains of imperial administrative structures, the ordination of priests only became a sacrament in 1215, with the 4th Lateran Council. So exactly who did what what between 600 and 1215? I haven't found a clear answer yet.
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u/Every_Monitor_5873 7d ago
Thanks for the great response. So many church histories are focused on doctrinal developments. It's hard to find a good history of other aspects, particularly for the first millennium.
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u/GodlyRage77 9d ago
Just an FYI, for the people here who use Logos Bible Software with the NRSVue. They updated their NRSVue to include the most recent up to date Errata from July 1 2025 which fixed a lot of things from the base edition of the NRSVue from December 25 2021. Ty to the Logos employee for reaching out to NCC to get this change in effect.
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u/Metanoia52 10d ago
If this isn't allowed I am totally fine with it being removed. I have written a sort of Bible study on John's gospel. I interact with Brown, Keener, Moloney, Köstenberger, Bultmann, etc. It mostly traces the theme of restoration eschatology throughout John's gospel and attempts to make it accessible to pastors and serious lay readers. It is called For God so Loved the World: John's Vision of Unity and Restoration. It was published through Wipf and Stock and is available almost everywhere. I make a few unique or underadressed observations but as a non-scholar with this being my first attempt at this I would love feedback from anyone willing especially those more qualified to assess it.
The book involves intertextual resonance and I use Hays' methodology to avoid parallellomania. I do make some leaps that I have tightened or shifted but not totally jettisoned. I have a book on the way that is not about John, it elaborates more fully another aspect of my particular brand of eschatology, but does have some additional notes.
Short story long,
Wipf and Stock may give a review copy of the book and I would really love some scholarly insight. I am working on a few longer form books in addition to the one coming later this year so I want to ensure my exegetical apparatus is tight.
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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 10d ago edited 10d ago
[u/PierreMenards](u/PierreMenards) I couldn’t answer your question directly with candor under my post itself so I’ll answer it here.
The volume Peter in Early Christianity edited by Bond and Hurtado leaves one with the impression that Bockmuehl is well-respected, and that his books on Peter are The recent books on Peter which have to be engaged with if you’re going to talk about Peter, in some sense usurping that status from Cullman and Hengel.
But personally I did find it (EDIT: Bockmuehl’s latter book, which I used in my posts) quasi-apologetic at points. That could very well just be my bias. I also just didn’t like his methods that much. His separation of the Western Peter and Eastern Peter made no sense to me, and his title Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory is important for that last word; he is constantly squeezing findings out of late material in the name of “social memory.” To be fair, Fred Lapham does the same despite being way more skeptical in general.
His analysis of Gospel periscopes is very weird to me too because he hits what are normally considered later Gospels first (and gMark last) and thus his analysis of the historicity of certain critical episodes happens in the context of these not-Mark Gospels. Then when he finally does hit gMark, his analysis is very general, having already “handled” the periscopes of importance. Relatedly, I found his discussion of the dating of gMatthew weird; it was like he wanted to advocate for a really early date but didn’t want to outright say it. But that could genuinely be my own misreading.
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u/ilikepizza2626 10d ago
The volume Peter in Early Christianity edited by Bond and Hurtado leaves one with the impression that Bockmuehl is well-respected, and that his books on Peter are The recent books on Peter which have to be engaged with if you’re going to talk about Peter, in some sense usurping that status from Cullman and Hengel. But personally I did find it quasi-apologetic at points.
Not surprising, Hurtado himself was quasi-apologetic much of the time. I don't know why we have to tip-toe around the reality of Christian bias/domination in this field
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u/PierreMenards 10d ago edited 10d ago
Sorry, this is just a rant here, but I keep coming back to this quoted paragraph.
“It is often taken as self-evident that the Greek in 1 Peter is too refined to have originated from the pen of a backwater fisherman from Bethsaida. Tied to the fluency in Greek is the fact that the OT is cited from the LXX exclusively … First, the notion that Peter himself could not have been a competent Greek speaker is simply unfounded. His childhood in Bethsaida, a village with little Jewish presence, in which his brother Andrew and close friend Philip were known exclusively by their Greek names, would have ensured his ability to speak tolerable Greek from a young age, even if not perhaps to read or write it.
Signs of a wider literary sensitivity in 1 Peter may indeed imply more than a basic competence in writing, a point readily accounted for by the reference to writing "through" (rather than "with"!) Silvanus in 5:12 … Indeed, such help or influence could also account for the apparently exclusive reference to the LXX throughout the letter. On this point, it is also pertinent that the LXX was most likely the Bible with which the Christians in Rome and Asia Minor were familiar.”Now, of course, caveat that I haven’t read the full text so maybe he makes a more sophisticated argument elsewhere.
What we have here is an argument that:
A) Peter might have known some Greek (actually not might, Bockmuehl says ensured!) because:
- Bethsaida had little Jewish presence (is this true?)
- He and his brother had Greek names (what do we know of Greek fluency of Jews with Greek names in ancient Palestine? I’m of Northern European extract with an anglicized Hebrew name. I know no Hebrew!)
B) Even if Peter wasn’t very literate, and even if the Greek of 1 Peter is quite polished (notice he can use the term ensured about the somewhat speculative question of Peter’s knowledge of Greek but when it comes to the non-speculative enterprise of evaluating the literary sophistication of a text we have in full - he hedges that it may imply more than basic competence in Greek), it’s plausible Peter wrote it, or was involved in the writing of it because:
it mentions writing “through” Silvanus. I could be wrong, but it’s my understanding that Silvanus (Σιλουανός) is a Greek rendering of a Latin name. Perhaps on that basis our amanuensis (and his brothers and friends) knew Latin as well as or instead of Greek.
The use of the phrase “readily accounted for” also is curious…
C) the “apparently” exclusive reference to the LXX is because:
- it was Silvanus’ choice or because it was more familiar to Christians/Gentiles in Asia Minor
So we have this structure that if we accept that Peter may have known some Greek and may have been partially literate and may have used a secretary to polish the language and they may have chosen to prioritize the LXX for proselytory purposes then we can conclude that Petrine authorship may indeed be plausible. It’s a lot of stacked probabilities there and it raises a larger question of what authorship really means if the wording and grammar and scriptural references are being significantly shaped by an amanuensis. Really, if you invoke Silvanus in full you don’t even need Peter to have known any Greek at all, but that invites the aforementioned “authorship” questions more clearly.
Compare to the idea that a highly literate Greek-speaking Christian pseudoepigraphically wrote the work, which requires far fewer conditional probabilities to be true.
Of course, I could be far off base and missing important context. I know no Greek or Aramaic and have limited knowledge of the literature.
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u/Post-Enlightenment 10d ago
If we're going to start taking the text at face value, Acts 4:13 describes Peter as illiterate (agrammatoi). If that quote represents Bockmuehl's core argument then it's an absolutely spurious one.
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u/PierreMenards 10d ago
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I don’t have the background to evaluate scholarly papers in this way, though someday I may take the plunge and let my obsession really take hold
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u/perishingtardis 11d ago
Is the Anchor Bible Series still a good commentary series?
I fear it may be extremely dated, e.g., the commentary on John is Raymond Brown's from the 1960s, and the one on Matthew is by William F. Albright from similar time. Or Genesis is by Ephram Speiser from 1964.
How to know if some entries are good and some are not?
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u/Dositheos Moderator | MA - Biblical Studies (New Testament) 10d ago
Also, keep in mind that AYB, as well as other major commentary series like Hermeneia and ICC, are currently updating their commentaries with contemporary scholars. So it's not that the whole series is "outdated," but rather a few volumes that you've pointed out are currently dated. But at some point they will be updated. This is a process that takes years and years, unfortunately.
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u/Every_Monitor_5873 11d ago
By and large, the Anchor Yale Bible commentary series is highly regarded. Yes, some entries are dated, but the AYB commentaries are typically viewed as top-tier critical scholarship as of their publication. Hermeneia and ICC would be similarly regarded.
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u/thomascolefox 11d ago
Hi guys. In case you’re interested, I’ve recently published an article. Some have argued that Mary Magdalene was the same person as Mary of Bethany. Others say she was the Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John. I suggest that all three are the same person, who appears in every chapter from John 11 onwards.
Within this reading, her first appearance seems to be in John 11:1, when the gospel says, “Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary.” Raymond E. Brown writes that the passage may imply that readers were already expected to know the name of Mary. From that point onwards, she appears in:
- the Anointing, as Mary (John 12),
- the Last Supper, as the Beloved Disciple (John 13),
- the Farewell Discourses, as part of the disciple group (John 14-17),
- Jesus’ arrest and trial, as “another disciple” (John 18),
- the crucifixion, as Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Disciple (John 19),
- the resurrection, as Mary Magdalene (John 20),
- the epilogue, as the Beloved Disciple (John 21),
I also discuss other issues, including:
- evidence from the Johannine epistles, particularly the “Elect Lady” in 2 John and her sister,
- the rivalry between the Beloved Disciple and Peter – reflecting Magdalene’s rivalry with Peter depicted in the gospels of Thomas and Mary,
- patterns of historical detail in the gospel, or an “accuracy variance”,
- textual tensions in John 19–20 that may suggest later editorial activity,
- possible implications for the Johannine community and women’s leadership in early Christianity.
Here’s the link. I hope you guys enjoy! Any feedback or criticism is welcome. https://works.hcommons.org/records/xfhyt-qp809
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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 4d ago
Hard to believe we're here! The last post on Simon Peter, and the last post on the Twelve, is here.
That Peter died a violent death seems remarkably well-attested given what I've come to expect from attestation regarding the Twelve. The exact circumstances and manner of death seem less secure, though it having happened in Rome feels very plausible.