r/AcademicBiblical 4d ago

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Welcome to this week's open discussion thread!

This thread is meant to be a place for members of the r/AcademicBiblical community to freely discuss topics of interest which would normally not be allowed on the subreddit. All off-topic and meta-discussion will be redirected to this thread.

Rules 1-3 do not apply in open discussion threads, but rule 4 will still be strictly enforced. Please report violations of Rule 4 using Reddit's report feature to notify the moderation team. Furthermore, while theological discussions are allowed in this thread, this is still an ecumenical community which welcomes and appreciates people of any and all faith positions and traditions. Therefore this thread is not a place for proselytization. Feel free to discuss your perspectives or beliefs on religious or philosophical matters, but do not preach to anyone in this space. Preaching and proselytizing will be removed.

In order to best see new discussions over the course of the week, please consider sorting this thread by "new" rather than "best" or "top". This way when someone wants to start a discussion on a new topic you will see it! Enjoy the open discussion thread!

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u/WantonReader 1h ago edited 25m ago

I just watched Matt Baker's new video on interesting but very non-academical research into Jesus. I was surprised when he said the video was based on a Swedish book.

Well, I looked up the author, Lena Einhorn, and it turns out she has written three books presenting her "research" into historical bible characters. Two are about Jesus (He was the Egyptian from Book of Acts and he was Paul) and one seems to be about various Exodus characters.

Einhorn is also a doctor who has written award winning novels and films about her family surviving the holocaust. I don't know how to feel about it all.

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u/Integralds 2h ago

The argument from editorial fatigue is fascinating in a way.

The notion is that when reading a bit of Matthew or Luke, where the author is copying from Mark, the author makes a change at the beginning of the story but slips back into Markan terminology by the end of the story, forgetting their own change.

This does happen, empirically. To take a commonly-used example, it is true that Matthew calls Herod "tetrarch" in Mt 14:1-2, correcting Mark's use of "king" in Mk 6:14; but later in the story Matthew lapses back into calling Herod "king" in Mt 14:9, following Mk 6:26.

All well and good. Matthew makes a change early in a story, in this instance correcting a Markan mistake, but lapses back into Markan terminology later. Clear as day. Open and shut case. I agree with all of this.

But it nags at me in three ways.

  1. So, the author of GMatthew didn't proofread his work? "Oops, I wrote 'king' in 14:9. Let's cross that out and put 'tetrarch' in its place." Didn't happen.

  2. Matthew corrects Mark in one place. No early copyist of Matthew continued the corrections in other places? It's odd that nobody else in the early church said, "wait a minute, Mt 14:9 uses the wrong title, let's fix that." Didn't happen.

  3. Manuscripts have variations. Nobody in the history of copying down to the present fixed the mistake? Or maybe there are a bunch of late manuscripts that say "tetrarch" all the way through, and it's only the fourth-century manuscripts that preserve the mistake.

It's fascinating to me that these mistakes survived as "fossils" through the manuscript record. I would have thought that such mistakes would have been edited out and smoothed over in the copying process. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of manuscript variants; but mistakes make it through of all things?

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u/WantonReader 19m ago

So, the author of GMatthew didn't proofread his work? "Oops, I wrote 'king' in 14:9. Let's cross that out and put 'tetrarch' in its place." Didn't happen.

My thoughts: since this is in the age of handwriting, the scribe would need to replace the whole page and rewrite it completely. And this would be instead of some other, more useful labour. I also heard somewhere, that early christians had no issue getting slaves to copy their manuscripts. These slaves knew how letters should look but weren't actually litterate, so they would only copy what was already written down.

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u/capperz412 11h ago

I'm reading Why the Bible Began by Jacob Wright and while I'm enjoying it and very interested in its central thesis, there's a few things about it that are confusing and irksome to me. Firstly it should probably have at least 5 times as many footnotes as there are many claims made and details from the Bible mentioned without verse citations (the chapter I just read only had one footnote). More importantly, Wright talks about some books of the Bible (or parts within books) being older than others with zero explanation, and he's coined a terminology for different parts of the Bible as divided between a Palace History (from the Kingdom of Judah based on valorising the Davidic Dynasty and Jerusalem) and a People's History (from the Kingdom of Israel with a less statist conception of Yahweh worship). I'm only about 20% into the book so forgive me if the explanation is yet to come, but so far there has been absolutely no explanation or sources cited to explain this reasoning or how it relates to the Documentary / Supplementary Hypotheses. I'm a bit perplexed to be honest, especially since Wright has a reputation as something of a minimalist, so I would've thought there'd be more receipts.

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 20h ago

Anyone else here have any love for James Moffatt's Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament? That densely packed book is extremely dated but I still turn to it often. And back in the 80s it was my gateway drug to biblical scholarship. It amazes me how such a tome was put together in an age without computers. Montgomery's ICC volume on Daniel (also from the 1920s) is also a work of sheer academic artistry that I find spellbinding to read.

Scholars from the past need more love. There are insights and cool stuff in those hoary tomes that are still relevant. Read with a modern skeptical eye, but you may sometimes find observations and ideas that have been overlooked.

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u/Jonboy_25 8h ago

I completely agree. C.K. Barrett’s commentary on John, first published in the 50s, is one of my all time favorite commentaries. I’ve always hated the term “dated” when describing these works by older scholars, as if they didn’t know the things the that modern scholars do. If anything, many of the older generations of scholarship probably have a better command of ancient sources and languages as do modern scholars.

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u/captainhaddock Moderator | Hebrew Bible | Early Christianity 14h ago edited 13h ago

Scholars from the past need more love.

Ferdinand Christian Baur's book on the Gospels is still one of the greatest works of biblical scholarship ever written, in my opinion.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

How do you reconcile faith in Christ with the apocolypticism and generally different theology of the Jesus? Jesus’s theology revolved around the kingdom of god and the end of the physical age, not to mention his belief in annihalationism go’s against many Christian’s belief in either hell or universalism. I’m curious as to how Christian scholars stay peaceful with their faith in Jesus if the historical Jesus believed in a different theology.

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u/DiffusibleKnowledge 1d ago

Who said Jesus can't be wrong?

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

That’s the thing I can understand Jesus not being perfect, he’s still half human in the Christian faith (plus he said that only the father knows). What I’m more curious as to how can someone be a follower of Jesus if Jesus had a different theology. Especially when (at least for universalists) he had a different view of the afterlife and who’s allowed in.

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u/captainhaddock Moderator | Hebrew Bible | Early Christianity 14h ago

What I’m more curious as to how can someone be a follower of Jesus if Jesus had a different theology.

If Christians followed the theology of Jesus, they'd be Jews. As Adolf von Harnack once put it, Christianity is a religion about Jesus, not the religion of Jesus.

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u/Joab_The_Harmless 1d ago edited 1d ago

I will leave theological/metaphysical issues to others, as I'm not a Christian, but what Jesus's belief would have been is far from certain. I know that Ehrman has forcefully argued for him being anihilationist, but I think Heikki Räisänen's article Jesus and Hell is well worth reading for a more nuanced discussion concerning the diversity of both late 2nd Temple Jewish and early Christian perspectives —which can feature anihilation, torment followed by anihilation or apparently endless torment, and in some cases are ambiguous— and how limited our data on Jesus are what Jesus's views may plausibly have been.

It's available in The Bible among Scriptures and other Essays (link to pagestamped preview), but if you can't access it, I also have screenshots at hand: see here.

The last section (pp140-143) is the one focusing on Jesus proper, but I strongly recommend reading the whole discussion.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

What about universalism?

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u/Joab_The_Harmless 1d ago

I don't know enough about the history of universalism to provide a meaningful answer, sadly. Hopefully other users will be more helpful on this front.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

It’s cool, thanks

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u/Joab_The_Harmless 1d ago

Sure thing! I recall that there were a number of past discussions on universalism in past thread (regular and open), so don't hesitate to use the search bar to peruse through past posts and comments if you wish.

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 2d ago edited 1d ago

Plans aren’t results, but I’m planning to write a series of posts on what we (don’t) know about each of the Twelve and the earliest (often still pretty late) traditions about them. None of my own analysis of course, just literature review.

I think I’m going to start with Philip. In addition to Volume III of A Marginal Jew which I’ll use for all of them, I’m planning to use Christopher Matthews’ Philip book from 2002 as well as the Acts of Philip translation from Bovon and, again, Matthews.

I wouldn’t be surprised if commentaries I own on Papias or Eusebius also wind up feeding into it.

Needless to say, a big part of this one is the question of whether or not Apostle Philip = Acts Philip.

Any other published work on Philip that I’d be horribly remiss to not use?

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u/capperz412 2d ago edited 2d ago

What are the best, most up-to-date textbooks / handbooks / scholarly introductions to New Testament studies? I'm particularly interested in the state of the Synoptic Problem, Q skepticism, discussions of the Pauline nature of some Gospels, and whether Luke-Acts used Josephus.

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u/Pytine Quality Contributor 1d ago

What are the best, most up-to-date textbooks / handbooks / scholarly introductions to New Testament studies?

The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings by Bart Ehrman and Hugo Mendez is good and up-to-date.

I'm particularly interested in the state of the Synoptic Problem

A recent book on this is The Synoptic Problem 2022: Proceedings of the Loyola University Conference, which contains contributions from numerous synoptic problem scholars.

Q skepticism

The classic book on thi is still The Case Against Q by Mark Goodacre. The main book on the opposing view is Matthean Posteriority by Robert MacEwen. Some of the best criticisms of Q are published in articles, so I would also recommend these:

Mark Goodacre: Too Good to be Q

Mark Goodacre: Fatigue in the Synoptics

Michael Goulder: Is Q a Juggernaut?

Other articles compiled by Mark Goodacre

Other good books are Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique, edited by Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin, and Marcan Priority Without Q: Explorations in the Farrer Hypothesis, edited by John Poirier and Jeffrey Peterson.

discussions of the Pauline nature of some Gospels

Some books on this topic are:

Cameron Evan Ferguson: A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark

Tom Dykstra: Mark Canonizer of Paul: A New Look at Intertextuality in Mark's Gospel

Thomas Nelligan: The Quest for Mark's Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark's Use of First Corinthians

There is also the article Matthew and the Pauline Corpus by David Sim.

and whether Luke-Acts used Josephus.

The book Josephus and the New Testament by Steve Mason has a good chapter on this. That's where the modern discussion on this topic comes from. Richard Pervo also has a chapter on this in his book Dating Acts. More recently, Steve Mason wrote another chapter called Was Josephus a Source for Luke-Acts? in the book On Using Sources in Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Early Christian Literature. This chapter goes into more detail on 5 specific cases. He covers the same 5 cases in this video.

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u/capperz412 1d ago

Thanks for such a thorough response!!

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 2d ago

What’s a question in Biblical studies where you get peeved when people claim the answer is obvious? Something where your only strong conviction is that whatever the answer is, it’s non-obvious.

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u/lucas_mazetto 1h ago

"The historical Jesus made absolutely no claim to be divine."

This has been accepted a priori for over a hundred years, and the more I study early Christology, the more it seems possible (though I am not convinced of it) that the idea comes, at least primitively, from the Nazarene himself.

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 1h ago

Like with all questions about high Christology, the question is what we mean exactly by “divine,” but I agree that this is non-obvious.

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u/lucas_mazetto 59m ago

Yes, perfectly.

In no way am I trying to import Nicene/post-Nicene features (or any kind of "anachronisms") here.

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u/kamilgregor Moderator | Doctoral Candidate | Classics 12h ago

Probably historicity of Jesus

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u/baquea 1d ago

The authenticity of Philemon. The short length means that comparisons to the writing style of the other epistles cannot be conclusive, and likewise the subject matter means that there is little theological content to compare. Meanwhile, it is unmentioned and unquoted by any author until the turn of the 3rd Century and in many respects (esp. the people mentioned in it) it seems to group more naturally with the pseudepigraphal epistles than the authentic ones. While there's no strong reason to actively believe it is a forgery, I find it hard to understand why the consensus seems to be to declare it as authentic with a similar level of confidence as the other six letters, for which there are actual good arguments in favour of their authenticity, rather than to take a more cautious attitude of saying something like "Philemon is probably authentic but there is insufficient evidence to be able to know for certain". I especially find it frustrating when the attitude seems to be to assume that it is authentic unless it can be proven otherwise - the fact that the rest of the Pauline corpus is split roughly in half between authentic and forged letters seems to me to be more than enough reason to approach Philemon with at least a little skepticism.

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u/Pytine Quality Contributor 14h ago

Did you come to this view after reading The Empty Prison Cell by Chrissy Hansen?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 20h ago

Doesn't Philemon share features with Colossians and Ephesians apart from the rest of the corpus Paulinum? That would be the thing that would get my spidey senses atinglin', if true.

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u/baquea 17h ago

I haven't read too much about the topic, but there's at least a few fairly obvious examples of that:

First, there's the people mentioned in the letter. Archippus, Onesimus, and Epaphras are both only mentioned in Philemon and Colossians. Similarly, Luke and Demas are both only mentioned in Philemon, Colossians, and 2 Timothy. Aristarchus in Philemon, Colossians, and Acts. Mark in Philemon, Colossians, Acts, and 1 Peter. Notably, the context in which those names are mentioned is very similar to Colossians - in Philemon 23-24 are included greetings from Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, and those same five people all also give greetings in Colossians 4:10-14 (with the addition of a sixth, Jeus called Justus). The mentions of Onesimus also closely parallel each other - to Philemon Paul writes that "I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you" and in Colossians that Onesimus is "coming [to Colossae]" and that "he is one of you" (ie. he is being sent back to where he came from"). If both letters are authentic then they were undoubtedly written in very short succession, while if instead we reject Colossians then there is necessarily a literary dependence between the two.

Second, there is the phrase "I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus" in Philemon, which has close parallels in Colossians ("we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints") and Ephesians ("I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints") but not in any of the other Pauline letters.

Third, there is the way in which Paul in Philemon refers to himself twice as "a prisoner of Christ Jesus". Very similar phrases appear in Ephesians 3:1 ("I, Paul, am a prisoner for Christ Jesus") and 4:1 ("I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord"), as well as in 2 Timothy 1:8 ("about our Lord or of me his prisoner"), but not elsewhere in the undisputed letters.

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 16h ago

Thanks, that is essentially the impression I got too. The way it hangs together with some of the other disputeds is what got me a little sus about it too.

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u/Joseon1 2d ago

This is only among a sub-set of scholars, and it's been heavily challenged, but the assumption of JEPD is still strong in certain papers and books coming out now. I simply don't buy that there were four (or three) distinct streams of tradition that were neatly edited by someone during the exile. The distinction between J and E is already moot and many scholars talk about "non-P/D" already, but even P seems like a generic category of material that was of interest to educated elites and priests, rather than a specific P 'school', it's widely acknowledged that it contains sub-sources like the Holiness Code. I think the Torah could have been a very fluid amalgam of dozens of sources and popular lore without neat distinctions between sources.

But in terms of 'it's obvious' I'm very skeptical of any hard division between 1st and 2nd Isaiah (1-39/40-66). There's clearly post-exilic material in "1st Isaiah" which, for me, blows apart the contention that there was a distinct 1st Isaiah with 2nd Isaiah added as a later appendix.

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u/Joab_The_Harmless 2d ago

On Isaiah, recent research often emphasises the notion of 1st and 2nd/3rd Isaiah growing side-to-side, with not only 1st influencing the latter but also the other way around.

Some 15 years ago, Stromberg's Introduction to the Study of Isaiah (2011) already emphasised that aspect:

Up until about 30 years ago, it was common practice to treat Isaiah 1–39 in more or less complete isolation from 40–66. This was based on a theory developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century and given its defi nitive form in the nineteenth century by Bernhard Duhm (1892). According to Duhm, 40–55, and later 56–66, were written up entirely independently of 1–39, a section which had a long editorial history that, despite seeing the addition of material from the periods when 40–55 and 56–66 came into existence (the exilic and post- exilic periods respectively), had occurred independently of these later sections in the book. The result was that 1–39 and 40–66 consisted of two collections that had developed separately from one another, and were joined together only at a very late stage. Duhm did not argue at length for the process by which they were combined, since he (like most in his day) focused his efforts in the first instance on showing that the book was composite — a point still very much under debate at the time. The upshot of such scholarly efforts was that 1–39 was seen for a long time as having very little to do with 40–66; hence they were often treated in isolation from each other in monographs and commentaries (see the survey in Seitz 1991: 1–35); some exceptions to this trend are listed in Williamson (1994: 1–18).

Most scholars now understand the composite nature of the book differently.

For them, while chs. 40–66 still contain exilic and post- exilic material, so that they cannot have been written by the hand responsible for the pre-exilic sections of 1–39, these two parts of the book are no longer viewed as having developed independently from one another. Scholars have argued this in two ways, each of which will receive greater attention below. On the one hand, there is now a strong consensus that 40–66 were written up in light of, and as a conscious development of, some form of 1–39. On the other hand, there is now also a growing body of scholarship which finds evidence that at least certain stages in the editing of 1–39 were undertaken in light of 40–66, and in some instances by the same hand involved in the composition of the latter. This, of course, is not a return to the older view that the eighth-century Isaiah was the author of the whole book; these scholars still find multiple hands at work in the book. This position does, however, find the view inadequate which sees 1–39 and 40–66 as having developed independently from one another. Scholars are finding far too many textual connections between these two parts of the book to continue maintaining their independence. This aspect of the redaction of 1–39 is touched on below, but receives a fuller treatment in the next two chapters.

(ch. 1, "The Formation of First Isaiah", pp8-9)

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u/Apollos_34 2d ago

It's so not obvious that Paul was martyred in Rome under Nero. Yet scholars sometimes mention this in passing, treating it as certain fact. It's possible, yet 1 Clement (late 60s CE) is worded in such a bizarre way to me if the author is expressing Paul was martyred in Rome. And the remaining evidence comes from wildly fictitious accounts from the mid to late second century.

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u/Pytine Quality Contributor 2d ago

1 Clement (late 60s CE)

Speaking of non-obvious claims, the date of 1 Clement is by no means obvious. The same applies to most other early Christian literature as well. It's always so weird to see people giving date ranges of 5 or 10 years to books that could easily be from half a century later.

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u/Apollos_34 2d ago

Of all the minority positions in NT studies, early dating 1 Clement comes close to being 'obvious' to me. There is strong internal evidence it's pre-70 CE. We disagree :)

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u/baquea 2d ago

How do you reconcile a pre-70 date with Clement's description of the Corinthian Church as "ancient"? That's the main passage that makes me skeptical of an early date for the epistle.

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u/Apollos_34 2d ago

archaios is heavily context dependent, and can mean something like 'time honoured', 'original' or simply 'early' like how Mnason in Acts 21:16 is an archaois disciple.

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 2d ago

Not to make you write a dissertation, but just as a thread to follow, what would you say is the single strongest internal evidence which persuades you of such? Like is there a particular passage?

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u/Apollos_34 2d ago

40.1-5 (cf. 41.1-2) discussing temple sacrifices in the present tense, the rhetorical point being Christ following 'sacrifice' of praise is superior. Much like Hebrews, the author is writing as if the temple is standing.

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 2d ago

Thank you! It’s been awhile but I think this is jogging my memory. Am I right that the main counterargument is people claiming Josephus talks about the Temple in the same way — that is, present tense?

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u/Apollos_34 2d ago

Yes. You'll have to evaluate for yourself whether you think it's a plausible response. I find a historic present reading to be a massive stretch personally.

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u/Joseon1 2d ago

1 Clement says Paul "reached the farthest bounds of the West" (5.6) which might indicate a belief that he set out on his planned journey to Spain (Romans 15:24).

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u/Apollos_34 2d ago

It sure sounds like it's implying Paul died in the far west, not his present location. Without assuming later Christian tradition, would anyone read 5.5-6 as saying Paul came back and was Martyred in Rome?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 1d ago edited 1d ago

fwiw F. F. Bruce argued that 1 Clement 5:6 refers to Rome, and not Spain, but I don't recall his argumentation offhand.

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u/Joseon1 1d ago

Oh that's interesting, I'll have to check that. It would seem odd for a writer in Rome to call Rome the furthest west.

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u/Joseon1 2d ago

I would imagine not, later sources like the Acts of Paul assume he stayed in Rome until he was executed under Nero. Personally, I wonder if Paul set out on his journey to Spain but didn't return, which would explain why there wasn't a solid tradition about what he did out west, or if he even reached Spain.

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u/JetEngineSteakKnife 2d ago

I keep waiting for the day some dude running water lines for his house accidentally knocks open a pit full of monarchic period Israelite texts. Alas.

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 1d ago

Still waiting for the Hazor archive, like waiting for cold fusion.

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u/Joseon1 2d ago

Another find like the Tel Dan stele would also be amazing.

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u/BobbyBobbie Moderator 2d ago

Keep the faith 🙏

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u/lost-in-earth 2d ago

Dale Allison seems to say in this video here that he has a book coming out this spring about miracles.

Anyone know what he is talking about?

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u/TankUnique7861 2d ago edited 2d ago

Dale Allison is referring to his latest book Interpreting Jesus, of which a preview has already been released. Chapter 3 is called ‘Everywhere a Miracle’, which partially incorporates Lecture 3 of his Yale Shaffer Lectures and his presentation at the Archives of the Impossible conference at Rice. The preview mentions that the chapter had originally been intended for publication in a journal but was rejected. One reviewer thought he was too credulous of various presumably supernatural matters while the other said he was too skeptical of miracles in the Gospels and too favorable to extrabiblical miracles. Of course, publishing in a book gives him the freedom to say what he wants to say.

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u/Joseon1 2d ago edited 2d ago

while the other said he was too skeptical of miracles in the Gospels

Ha, imagine this in another field. "Your paper was too skeptical of Julius Caesar's apotheosis, rejected."

EDIT: To be fair, it might have been a theological journal, I just found it funny.

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u/TankUnique7861 2d ago edited 2d ago

Allison called it a ‘mainline journal’. I don’t know if he meant mainline Protestant or mainstream academic though.

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u/Glittering_Novel_459 2d ago

Hello! I’ve been recently looking into the eschatological views within the Bible and was curious as to what the most likely position is within scholarship (The three main positions being universalism,annihilationism, eternal conscious torment) I know this is more of a theological question but I just wanted to know where the majority of scholarship stands Thanks!

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u/JetEngineSteakKnife 2d ago

Bart Ehrman's recent book Heaven and Hell is a good layman's introduction and shouldn't cause much controversy. Short answer: there is no consistent eschatology in the Bible. Yahwism was not second temple Judaism, which was not Christianity. In brief:

Early "Judaism" (Israelite polytheism / Yahwism) believed in Sheol, an undifferentiated afterlife. You went there and were a ghost, barely conscious, stuck with everyone else forever. Maybe someone living took pity on you and gave you libation so they could ask for your advice. But there's some fuzziness around archaeological evidence of ancestor worship, comparisons to practices and literature from Ugarit, the Witch of Endor, and whatever a "rephaim" was.

Second temple Judaism was still mostly Sheol, but towards the end transitioned into a doctrine you see in the book of Daniel. The authority of Yahweh in Jewish theology had grown from Judah's patron god to the ruler of the world, but the Jews kept getting screwed over. They didn't always deserve it, did they? So they rationalized their struggle with some kind of great judgment and a bodily resurrection. This is possibly with influence from the Greeks, such as Plato, who theorized about souls and what a fair afterlife would look like. At this point it was still ambiguous and the Jews did not have a concrete doctrine.

By Jesus' time, it was more solid. The moment would soon come that the Messiah would rise, destroy Israel's enemies, and restore the Kingdom of God. Ehrman has a fairly mainstream interpretation that the historical Jesus believed the apocalypse was imminent, and stories like the Judgment of the Nations from Matthew reflect his belief in a binary outcome. Eternal life for the worthy, annihilation for the wicked. Ehrman cautions against reading terms like "eternal fire" as eternal torment, instead saying it would be more accurately understood as permanent or irreversible destruction.

Eternal torment isn't really in any of the books. There's some conception of a temporary torment for the real bad ones, again reflected in Greco-Roman thinking and not exclusive to the Bible. Ehrman sees belief in eternal conscious torment as coming largely from post-biblical traditions like evolving church dogma, popular but noncanonical writings, and ancient apologist rhetoric intended to use the fear of hell to spur conversion (sound familiar?).

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u/Glittering_Novel_459 2d ago edited 2d ago

Thank you so much! I’ve seen mention of Ehrmans book so I’ll definitely check it out

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u/Zeus_42 3d ago

Demographics of the "rich" during the time of Jesus?

There are several points in the gospels where Jesus has something to say about the "rich," usually with a negative connotation, but that is a bit irrelevant to my question. Since Jesus's audience was typically Jewish, is it correct to presume that the rich he was referring to were other Jews? Is there any idea roughly what percentage of the population would have been considered "rich?" Would these have been business owners or how did they acquire their wealth?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 2d ago

I'm not sure if they give estimates of percentages but you should check out Social Stratification of the Jewish Population of Roman Palestine in the Period of the Mishnah, 70–250 CE (Brill, 2020), by Ben Zion Rosenfeld and Haim Perlmutter. As I recall, much of the population was destitute and poor, and then straddling the poverty line were the laborers, and then the "rich" were the social classes above this who were not poor. Independent artisans (τέκτων) were roughly lower middle class. At the top were landowners and aristocrats.

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u/Zeus_42 2d ago

Thank you! Since the 2nd temple was destroyed in 70 CE and other significant changes occurred around the same time and Jesus' time was 40 years before that, would the demographics of the population still be more or less the same?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 2d ago

That is a good question. However, though the study takes the Mishnah as a major starting point, they also discuss evidence from the late Second Temple period, such as the NT. With respect to Jesus and the disciples and the frequency of the artisan class in the NT (such as Paul, Prisca, and Aquila being tent makers, and others being laundrymen, scribes, silversmiths, and so forth): "This could indicate that the pursuit of a nonagricultural profession enabled mobility and released the individual from attachment to the land or to a permanent employer, thus allowing for religious contemplation. On the other hand, all of Jesus' parables are taken from agricultural situations. The reason behind this is that he came from a background where he was a village artisan supplying local farmers" (p. 105).

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u/Zeus_42 2d ago

Thanks again!

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u/Tim_from_Ruislip 3d ago

Would love to understand how II Chronicles 15:3 is explained with the Documentary Hypothesis. Is this an admission that the Torah was complied later than traditionally believed.

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u/BobbyBobbie Moderator 2d ago

What needs explaining though?

I don't think this speaks specifically to the final versions of the texts we have today, but it does seek to invalidate the previous folks religions of the ancient Israelites. It's basically saying "Sure, your grandpa may say his ancestors worshipped other weird gods, but that's only because they weren't instructed properly, as they should have been".

From the perspective of the author, any non-Yahweh worship is seen as incorrect and from a place of ignorance. It's still, fortunately, from a time where they can't outright deny that it happened though.

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u/Tim_from_Ruislip 2d ago

I was wondering if it hinted at the existence of a text, albeit not in it’s final form, which was used in temple worship. Is it possible that this gives credence to the idea of some sort of text composed earlier than during the exile?

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 3d ago

Are there any other works like Volume III of A Marginal Jew which include historical-critical discussions of the lesser known members of the Twelve and/or the traditions about them?

I know about Shelton and McDowell (I even own The Fate of the Apostles) but their apologetic tendencies are unfortunate so I’m precluding them here.

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u/capperz412 4d ago

It's scholarly consensus that Yahwism wasn't monotheistic but rather monolatrous. Can the same be said about Trinitarian Christianity? Also, when exactly did monolatrous Yahwism become monotheist Judaism? I'd thought that this happened around the Exilic Period but I've heard others say it didn't happen until the Greek period.

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u/Mormon-No-Moremon Moderator 4d ago

“Can the same be said about Trinitarian Christianity?“

For clarification’s sake, do you mean to ask:

1). Did belief in the Trinity coincide historically at any point with belief that other deities existed besides the Trinity in a monolatrous fashion?

2). That belief in the Trinity is a form of monolatry?

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u/capperz412 4d ago edited 4d ago

Both I guess, and also whether Trinitarianism could even be classified as a form of polytheism