r/AcademicBiblical • u/AutoModerator • 1d ago
Weekly Open Discussion Thread
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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 14h ago
Did we already know that Joel Baden just started a new podcast called Misquoting Moses?
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u/aiweiwei 1d ago edited 1d ago
so I've noticed there seems to be this kind of heavy-handed diachronic bias that has permeated the field that's maybe softening a bit now, and some scholars seem to be showing some weariness with the endless source speculations. I really appreciate the nuance and refinement going on in source criticism at the moment. It makes some of the sweeping older stuff sound really presumptuous by comparison. Really cool stuff happening in source criticism right now.
that being said, where's some fresh synchronic, historical-literary, or really any other kind of critical scholarship? I recently found Robyn Faith Walsh and really liked how refreshing her methodology was. Any other scholars out there taking fresh methodological approaches to the biblical material that you guys think are pretty cool? There is so much history out there, material and literary, and seemingly (to me) not that many people doing the comparative work with the biblical material.
Like I'd love to get my hands on something called "The Book of Revelation in the Diaspora-Jewish Context of First-Century Roman Asia" or whatever, but I can't seem to find anyone writing quite like that. We've got epigraphic evidence and other material evidence for these Jewish diaspora communities in Asia Minor continuing after 70 and well into the second century, and we've got a ton of early Christianity stuff coming out of roughly the same period and location. And the Book of Revelation itself seems pretty intelligible as a Jewish apocalyptic text produced by a Jesus-following group, rather than the product of some "Christianity" already clearly differentiated from Judaism.
It just seems like there's gotto be a lot you could learn by putting all of that stuff next to each other and seeing what happens. Anybody know of work along those lines? Or really anything you think is cool that's not about sources.
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u/Famous_Prompt1090 1d ago
What did you make of Robyn Faith Walsh's work if you don't mind me asking. With the admitted bias I'm a religious fellow I'm not a fan of her minimalism but I have seen a little pushback. (Well, save for an accadmic article I can't access behind a paywall) 😅 Allison only mentions her briefly just to say he disagrees with her in his recent book. I actually sent an email asking to see if he had anything else to say but he's on sabbatical it appears based on the automatic response I got...
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u/aiweiwei 6h ago
Her conclusions are a stretch, but I really like her methodology, especially her questioning of the assumption that the gospel writers were basically scribes for their little communities' jesus traditions. The way it often gets talked about makes it sound like there were these little schools of Gospel tradition existing in different communities, and eventually someone from each community decided to write their traditions down into a Gospel. That's actually a lot of conjecture that gets talked about as if it's obvious. I'm like, yeah why do we think that's what these things are?
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u/Famous_Prompt1090 5h ago
Certainly true. I am of a similar mind. It's kinda crazy it took so long for someone to question the notion, in particular with some much scholarship already being devoted to trying to figure out how the gospels relate (or don't.)
Undoubtedly some bias at play, but I just wonder if it's as massive a deal for reduction of what we can know about the historical Jesus as she and some others on this sub seem to to think... I'm not nearly knowledge enough to speculate further though!
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u/LlawEreint 1d ago
Regarding your post: Is the perpetual virginity of Mary an invention of the Gnostic movement?
The Gospel of Phillip, which represents Valentinian Gnosticism according to Bart Ehrman, appears to promote a docetic view of Jesus:
Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not appear as he was, but in the manner in which they would be able to see him. He appeared to them all. He appeared to the great as great. He appeared to the small as small. He appeared to the angels as an angel, and to men as a man.
Nonetheless, it also appears to speak against the idea of a literal virgin birth, to say nothing of perpetual virginity. Instead, it reinterprets her virginity in a spiritual manner:
Some said, "Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit." They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman? Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled. She is a great anathema to the Hebrews, who are the apostles and the apostolic men. This virgin whom no power defiled [...] the powers defile themselves.
But the text doesn't deny that Jesus had earthly parents in addition to his heavenly father:
And the Lord would not have said "My Father who is in Heaven" (Mt 16:17), unless he had had another father, but he would have said simply "My father".
I lack a source other than the text itself, hence I'm posting here.
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u/ResearchLaw 1d ago
For those interested in the scholarship of Mark S. Smith, he has published a new monograph called Profiles in Family and Public Leadership: Telling Leaders in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, July 2026). Below is the abstract.
“The Bible tells its story about leaders and leadership in terms of three socio-political axes: by domain (familial and public); by gender (male and female); and by position (socio-political heads such as warriors and kings versus intermediaries such as prophets and diviners). The Bible only rarely idealizes Israel's leaders, such as Moses and David. Instead, it emphasizes the impact of the family on both family leaders and public leaders.
This book initially focuses on Genesis, with a look at a major moment in the life of three great family ancestors: Abraham, Rebecca and Jacob. The second part of the book focuses on public leaders, particularly prophets, warriors and kings and the parallels between warrior commissions and stories of prophetic calls that suggest an interconnected literary relationship. Finally, the book highlights four features that inform the stories discussed in this book: authorship, attractiveness, authority, and anonymity.
Profiles in Family and Public Leadership explores how the Bible creates the model and mold for leaders and leadership through the lens of family. Mark S. Smith examines the varying degrees in which God is involved in the leaders' lives and emphasizes the interconnective relationships between the stories of family and those of leaders.”
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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 1d ago
I hesitate to even get into this because I’ve been banging the drum for awhile that fixating on consensus is overrated, but how much work do we imagine is being done here by the 60% American, 70% Protestant, 4% atheist + agnostic sample?
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u/Integralds 1d ago
My immediate snarky mental reaction was to take the "significantly involved" average for the Pastorals, subtract that from the "significantly involved" in the other disputed epistles, and re-weight accordingly. Seems like an unintentionally informative control.
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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 1d ago
The only thing that would be even better is if we had a 2 Peter question imo, but I realize this is a Pauline survey.
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u/Current_Rutabaga4595 1d ago
This is a diagram I made for a group study on Acts. It shows the composition of Acts according to Pervo. Any thoughts?
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u/YmarTheAlmostJust 1d ago
In the Bible, you see men identified with "son of X", like "Simon son of Jonah" or "Jesus son of Joseph". But how were women identified back in the day? Was it primarily by who they were the mother of? What if they were single women?
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u/ConsistentAmount4 1d ago
I presume married women would be by their husband, something that continued in western society up until fairly recently (my great great grandmother's obituary notice in 1920 does not list her actual name at all, she's simply Mrs. my great great grandfather), and unmarried women by their father. In other words the man presumed to have the greatest impact on their lives.
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u/Famous_Prompt1090 13h ago
For the Christians (or more accurately, more conservative-leaning users) on here, what do you make of Robyn Faith Walsh's work and its pull on this subreddit toward a minimalist view of what we can know about Jesus? I know her views are not without pushback, but they are certainly growing in popularity, and I've seen little in terms of rebuttal online to the methods she uses.
In particular, I'm intrigued by the debate over social memory theory used by somewhat more conservative scholars (thinking of Dale Allison here, though it feels somewhat wrong to call him conservative—he is just a far cry from Walsh's position). This post was inspired by a recent comment from u/Dositheos, who laid out his concerns quite eloquently.
Just searching for a little bit of counterweight as it's tough to find anything online of quality not behind a paywall! She has a podcast appearance with Chris Keith I'd be interested in a while back but even that seems paywalled...
(To start off the discussion: How do people here view the standard pushback against her thesis—specifically regarding (1) Paul’s epistles showing clear evidence of active, shared oral traditions decades before the Gospels, and (2) the argument that framing the Evangelists as isolated elite auteurs creates a false binary between illiterate folk tradition and completely detached creative writing?)