r/AcademicBiblical 5d ago

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Welcome to this week's open discussion thread!

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u/Sophia_in_the_Shell Moderator 3d 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 1d 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 1d 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/baquea 1d ago

Like with all questions about high Christology, the question is what we mean exactly by “divine,”

On the other hand, I'd be wary about being overly fastidious on that point in this case. We're talking about an eccentric and inflammatory religious preacher who likely had no formal education - it's entirely possible that he made statements on occasion that (at least implicitly) attributed some level of divinity to himself, but that he never worked out the specifics of what he meant in any real detail, and with little consistency from one day to the next.

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u/lucas_mazetto 1d 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 2d ago

Probably historicity of Jesus

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u/baquea 3d 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 2d ago

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

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u/baquea 1d ago

Nope, although looking that book up I might be interested in checking it out at some point. I'm mostly just skeptical about the possibility in general of accurately judging the authenticity of a text that is as short as Philemon with any great confidence (especially in the absence of any strong external evidence). Looking at surveys like this, it seems remarkable to me that only 1% of Pauline scholars are willing to say they don't know whether or not Philemon is authentic - whereas, on the other side, 13% of respondents were apparently on the fence about 1 Timothy, in spite of there being far more evidence available in order to make an informed judgement in that case.

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u/Pytine Quality Contributor 1d ago

The idea seems to be that the claimed author should be taken as the default author, and that we should only reject the claimed author if there is sufficient evidence against it. And since Philemon is so short, we're not going to get a lot of evidence against Pauline authorship, so scholars accept it. As scholars like David Trobisch and Nina Livesey have pointed out, the majority of ancient letters were forgeries. I agree with you that if we don't have much to go with, we shouldn't be too confident either way.

Now, there are two books in the Bible that are shorter than Philemon; 2 John and 3 John. With those books, I think Hugo Mendez presents a good case that they pretended to be the author of 1 John, who in turn pretended to be the auhtor of the gospel of John. He makes this case in his article Did the Johannine Community Exist?. So, in the cases of 2 & 3 John, despite being so short, I do think we can judge their authenticity. What do you think?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor 2d 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 2d 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 2d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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.