r/AcademicBiblical

I’ve noticed that when Jesus says something that could suggest divine authority or identity, scholars sometimes argue that the saying reflects the theology of the early Christian community rather than something the historical Jesus actually said.

I’m curious about the methodology behind this. The Gospels are our earliest surviving narrative accounts of Jesus’ life, and much of what we reconstruct about him comes from these same sources. Paul’s letters also suggest that remarkably elevated beliefs about Jesus existed very early.

And I’m not just referring to John’s Gospel. The Synoptics also contain passages that could suggest an unusually elevated understanding of Jesus’ identity or authority, such as Mark 2:5–12, Mark 14:62, and Matthew 11:27/Luke 10:22. I recognize that these passages can be interpreted differently and don’t necessarily amount to explicit claims of being God.

I also understand that the Gospels have different theological emphases. Some focus more on Jesus’ earthly ministry and mission to Israel, while John emphasizes his relationship with the Father and heavenly identity. But couldn’t these differences reflect what the authors chose to emphasize rather than necessarily indicating that the more explicit claims were later theological developments?

I’m not suggesting that every saying attributed to Jesus must be authentic, or that early belief in his divinity proves he claimed to be divine. I’m wondering what historical criteria scholars use to distinguish authentic sayings from later theological developments.

Is there a risk of circular reasoning if sayings suggesting divine identity are considered inauthentic partly because they’re inconsistent with a reconstruction of Jesus that was developed by excluding those same sayings?

I’d appreciate scholarly perspectives on how historians approach this question, including arguments both for and against the historical authenticity of these sayings.

Sources:
● Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014).
● Dale C. Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Baker Academic, 2010), especially chapter 5, “More Than a Prophet: The Christology of Jesus.”
● Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Eerdmans, 2008).
● Biblical passages: Mark 2:5–12; Mark 14:62; Matthew 11:27; Luke 10:22; John 8:58; John 10:30; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Philippians 2:6–11.

What is the most widely accepted model in current academic scholarship for explaining the formation of the four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—considering the Synoptic Problem, the Q source hypothesis, the possible written sources and oral traditions used by the evangelists, the literary relationships among the texts, and the latest developments in historical-critical research?

“And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
‭‭Revelation‬ ‭13‬:‭8‬ ‭KJV‬‬

“and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slaughtered.”
‭‭Revelation‬ ‭13‬:‭8‬ ‭NRSVUE‬‬

One reads like militant Calvinism.

One reads like temporal displacement.

What is the right way to understand this passage

I’d like to know when trinity came about, since it’s not in the Old or New Testament

Not sure if it's just me, but the key on p. 33 has them looking practically the same.

The Hebrew speaks of a sheol, a grave or shadowy underworld, new testament speaks of lake of fire, both are extraneous until I read the original text 1200 bc to 400 bc, has anyone seen any glimpse of this scroll before?

I have often read Contra Celsus and I think it is interesting the degree of confusion Celsus appears to get into establishing what Christians believe in what position, sometimes stating something we think is orthodox and sometimes assuming gnostic concepts apply to all Christians. It seems like in Alexandria during his lifetime, if he asked some Christian their opinions, he was getting gnostics answering him just as often as proto-orthodox Christians. Origen finds it strange how frequently he quotes Ophites and assumes their opinions apply to all Christians, saying that in his own time he had looked around for Ophites who could explain their diagram but never found any, guessing they may be entirely extinct. They somehow both came across the same mystery diagram, indicating it must have been making the rounds quite a bit.

This all seems to indicate that in Alexandria the number of people in different gnostic sects was huge and that adding them all together were similar in number to the orthodox Christians, or perhaps even more numerous. Has any scholar tried to make demographic estimates of the sects in the 2nd century?

I’ve been reading about the proposed literary relationship between Luke-Acts and Josephus, particularly the possibility that the author of Luke-Acts used Antiquities as a source. I’m trying to get a better sense of the main positions in current scholarship and the evidence for each.

What are considered the strongest arguments for and against direct literary dependence on Josephus?

I’m particularly interested in the proposed parallels involving Theudas and Judas the Galilean in Acts 5, and the Egyptian and Sicarii in Acts 21. In the first case, Acts places Theudas before Judas, while Josephus places Judas historically much earlier but discusses Theudas shortly before returning to Judas and his sons in Antiquities 20.[1] In the second, Acts associates the Egyptian with the Sicarii, while Josephus discusses the Sicarii, wilderness prophets, and the Egyptian in related material without straightforwardly identifying the Egyptian’s followers as Sicarii.[1]

How are parallels like these evaluated when trying to establish literary dependence? In particular, how do scholars distinguish Luke directly using Josephus from both authors having access to overlapping oral or written traditions? I’m also curious how much weight is given to the relative lack of sustained verbal agreement between Luke-Acts and Josephus compared with something like Luke’s use of Mark.

I’m also interested in the implications for dating. If Luke-Acts did use Antiquities, its publication around 93/94 CE would provide a terminus post quem. Does the evidence for dependence itself tell us anything beyond that? What do we know about the early circulation of Antiquities and whether access to it around 95-100 CE would have been plausible?

I’d appreciate recommendations for recent academic work representing different positions on these questions as well.

Sources
[1] Steve Mason, “Was Josephus a Source for Luke-Acts?” in On Using Sources in Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Early Christian Literature (Peeters, 2022), 199–246.
[2] Richard I. Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Polebridge Press, 2006).
[3] Andrew Gregory, “Acts and Christian Beginnings: A Review Essay,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 39.1 (2016), 97–115.

This might be a bit of an unusual question, but I was reading the Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies, and the Introduction said this:

>Interpretation leads to a proliferation of meaning: as their reception across the centuries demonstrates, Shakespeare's texts mean many things to many people. Textual studies, by contrast, involve a return to origins, a movement ad fontes, to the sources. As Erasmus put it in a humanist manifesto half a millenium ago: 'First and foremost, however, recourse must be had to the sources themselves' [...] Whereas the primary textual object of Erasmus and other humanists was Holy Scripture, that of the Shakespearean is what some have considered its closest secular equivalent: the text of Shakespeare.

So we have a general sense of trying to find out the 'world behind the text' in both Shakespeare's texts and the Bible, even though they were written, edited and compiled under very different circumstances. But then it goes on to say that

>Shakespeare's much praised verse [....] reaches us as an editorial collage whose modern origins are ignored by all but the initiated. Shakespeare's editors are often the unacknowledged mediators of the word.

I found this extremely interesting, because it goes on to elaborate on how much of Shakespeare's plays were originally written in fragments, and were edited and compiled into quartos (cheaper copies), and then the First Folio (generally more expensive, and I suppose more 'official'?) But even this compiling and editing was something that Shakespeare was less involved in. Even after he died, people continued to edit, censor, readapt and add certain lines to the texts for publication - people still edit Shakespeare for their own goals today, a little like biblical translations being carried for a certain purpose/s.

My question is, because of the multiple similarities in textual construction, was there any institutional link between the two? Was there ever any influence by Shakespearean scholarship on biblical scholarship/the rise in the documentary hypothesis, or vice versa? If so, I'd love to know which sources I can look to for more information. Thank you!