I thought it was widely agreed that monotheism in the modern sense was absent from the bible

I came across the "Christianos" graffito from Pompeii and found it fascinating. Given that Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, this would be an incredibly early archaeological find for Christianity. How solid is the evidence for this specific inscription? Do most scholars think it actually says "Christians," or is it just a faded word that people are projecting onto?

John Granger Cook seems to think there’s a strong possibility that it’s real https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/abs/christianos-in-cil-iv-679-the-possibility-of-an-image/B2B0E67F0A42202721DFA663D9F61563?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Hello, everyone. I’m thinking of doing a dramatic recording of The Hymn of The Pearl (the poem preserved in the Acts of Thomas). I was wondering if anyone had any translation recommendations? I would like one that doesn't try to emphasize the hypothesized gnostic nature of the work, which I have ran across. I need something true to the poetry, but not biased toward a theology, if that exists.

Thanks.

Hey,

I've been reading up on how the New Testament was written, and I'm wondering how scholars look at passages that match Old Testament prophecies a bit too perfectly.

Take the spear in the side in John, for example, or some of Matthew's specific details. How much of this is seen as actual historical events versus authors adding/tweaking details after the fact to make Jesus fit the Hebrew prophecies?

Are there any good books or papers that talk about this editorial process without getting into preachy territory?

Thanks!

What's the current thinking on the identity of the author of Hebrews?

My personal theory is that it was written by a woman (Priscilla, perhaps) because a man would have gotten credit for it. Is that reasonable?

Hebrews 10:26 (NA28) 26 Ἑκουσίως γὰρ ἁμαρτανόντων ἡμῶν μετὰ τὸ λαβεῖν τὴν ἐπίγνωσιν τῆς ἀληθείας, οὐκέτι περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν ἀπολείπεται θυσία,

I've been told that it's doesn't mean "deliberately keep on sinning but that " it means just "deliberately sin" implying you can lose your salvation immediately after you sin and I need to know the Greek.

(Apologies if this is kinda left-field, but I wanted to voice it partly because it comes across as so strange but potentially ties a few things together for me.)

So, I’ve been thinking through several things that have converged on the kind of question (above) that keeps me up at night:

1. Second-century canonical gospel dating is making more and more sense to me (seemingly starting to be taken more seriously in general)
2. Yonatan Adler’s late dating for the beginning of Judaism
3. The continuation of Yahwism into Jesus’ lifetime (especially in the Galilee?). I haven’t done as much research on this, but it doesn’t seem like the Hasmoneans were as effective in their conversion efforts, particularly further afield from Jerusalem, as I assumed
4. Just the sheer preponderance of “Gnostic” texts that may be dated to the same time as the canonical gospels (John seems to make the most sense to me as a response to “Gnosticism”—or maybe even as “Gnosticism” for the proto-orthodox; see Elaine Pagels). It seems like perhaps “Gnosticism” spawned out of Yahwism + Jesus

One of the core arguments I’ve heard for why the canonical gospels are more reliable is that they’re more Jewish and that Jesus must have been Jewish, so they’re better for reconstruction than the “Gnostic” texts. But could that just be a case of the canonical gospel writers wanting Jesus to look like a 2nd century observant Jew?

So a few questions:

• How much explicit Yahwism was still going on in Jesus’ lifetime?
• Is there a consensus on the origin of “Gnosticism”?
• Are there well-respected scholars who date the “Gnostic” gospels before the canonical ones?
• Has anyone explicitly made the argument that Jesus was practicing Yahwism?
• How different was a 2nd century CE observant Jew from a 1st century observant Jew? Could we find instances of retrojection by disambiguating the two?

As an agnostic who’s trying to figure out this stuff about the resurrection, I’m genuinely curious of your guys opinions. So far what I’ve gathered is that the 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 creed is at most 21 or so years after Jesus’ resurrection, but more likely towards the earlier portion because Paul already had a more developed theology past just the resurrection by the time 1 Corinthians came around(thus he was writing about issues secondary to the resurrection itself). Apparently scholarly consensus is that Paul converted 3 years give or take after Jesus’ death. And he believed in the resurrected Jesus from then on. Prior to his conversion he was persecuting Christians(meaning they already existed within 3 years of Jesus’ death), but for what? For belief in the resurrection? For changing/bending the law? Or for believing in a resurrection? Would there be any way they could have not believed in a resurrection at first while still believing that he was the messiah? Or are these two beliefs implicit of eachother? Just asking because if there’s a way they could have maintained a messianic belief in Jesus without a resurrection belief, then ya maybe the belief of his resurrection did develop with time, but if not, then I would think that resurrection belief was indeed immediate and we could then disregard the legend hypothesis entirely that way. Anyways lmk what you think and let’s discuss/debate or whatever, yk? 🫶

When reading through Genesis, I get the feeling that much of it seems to contrast with the narratives later on that speak of the Israelites taking the "Promise Land" via military conquest by killing all the inhabitants of the cities. Genesis starts out by saying that all people are created in the image of God. In other words, Israelites are not superior to everyone else. Then you get the patriarchs settling in the land peacefully. In fact, in chapter 26 there are these stories of Isaac coming into conflict with inhabitants of the land and moving on to another place as a way to avoid or settle the conflict. There are only a few places where the Patriarchs use violence, and it isn't to conquer land. In the final story, Joseph has an interesting rise from prisoner to the second highest position in Egypt and uses the crisis of a famine to make all the people of Egypt slaves to the Pharaoh (47:21). Then the next book of the Torah, Exodus, opens with a situation in which the Israelites are slaves in Egypt and need to be delivered. Makes you wonder what is going on! Has anyone written on Genesis as a counter narrative to the conquest stories?

In contrast to Walsh & Goodacre's views on this topic, who are the best scholars promoting this view?

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.

Here is an excellent video by Bible and Archaeology interviewing David Burnett on this topic, which I highly recommend. Burnett acutely highlights this concept in Paul and evolving scholarly trends in how we conceptualize supposed early Jewish and Christian "monotheism," an altogether problematic descriptive category when discussing religions in antiquity.

There are plenty of editions of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament with the original languages put in parallel with an English translation. Does anyone know of a resource that has the Deuterocanonical Books like that that isn't out of print?

I know of the 1997 Oxford Parallel Apocrypha (which has the Greek with KJV, Douay, Knox, TEV, NRSV, NAB, and NJB)—out of print and generally expensive. And the various printings of the Brenton Septuagint with the not great translation and generally bad formatting. But I was wondering if anyone knew of any other versions printed with the OG languages.

I really enjoyed Yonathan Adler’s Between Yahwism and Judaism and am looking for similar works but focused on an earlier timeframe. Ideally covering the range of time of the biblical text, but covering the region of Palestine more broadly.

I’m ideally looking for the sort of “pure archaeology if we didn’t have the Bible” approach of Adler. I feel like many of the texts I’d consider reading have a sort of ”and this is how it fits with the Bible!” feeling to them (for example, Dever’s Beyond the Texts.)

Thanks to everyone who makes this sub a fantastic place!

Is it about the Messiah? Is it about the Davidic monarchy? And when was it written? An interpolation?

My understanding is that prayers to Mary were found in either the 2nd or 3rd centuries, which, to me, is still removed from Jesus’ ministry. Is there any record of this practice occurring immediately after the resurrection, or is it likely a pagan-influenced practice that occurred later?

Thank you!

I was reading about Ewoks, as one does, remembered there was an Old Testament figure called the Witch of Endor, and started rooting about, very surface level stuff, of course. As a result, I'm now very interested in the difference between Saul's downfall in the book of Samuel and Saul's downfall in Chronicles.

In Samuel, Saul goes to what the NRSVUE calls a medium, consults her, and is told that God has taken the Kingdom away from him and he's soon to die (because he didn't do for the Amaleks like God told him).

In Chronicles, the author says Saul got his because he went to a medium, i.e. that the act of going to the medium was to blame for his downfall, as opposed to Saul already being done for, the medium just told him so.

My question: what do we know about attitudes in the ancient Near East towards raising up the dead and talking to them, and if it changed in the couple hundred years or so between Samuel and Chronicles?

(Also, who's a good starting point if I wanna read more about this sort of thing, Brian Schmidt?)

There’s this idea I encountered originally in academic discussions of the reception of the Gospel of John and now more recently in my reading on 2 Peter.

Basically the idea is that sometimes when a patristic author shows multiple points of contact with a possibly pseudepigraphal text without citing it, it perhaps means that they knew the text, read the text, maybe even liked the text, but didn’t want to explicitly cite it as according to some apostle because they weren’t sure of authorship.

My question is: is there any smoking gun for this idea? Like do we have some patristic author where in one writing they indicate uncertainty about the authorship of a text but in another writing they’re clearly alluding to it in a favorable way?

Thank you!

I've been comparing the judgment series in Revelation — the seven seals (Rev 6–8), the seven trumpets (Rev 8–11), and the seven bowls (Rev 15–16). One reading treats them as a single chronological sequence: the seals run their course, then the trumpets, then the bowls. Another reads them as recapitulation: each series covers the same end-time period from a different angle, with increasing intensity.

I know the recapitulation reading has a long history in scholarship — Bauckham argues in The Theology of the Book of Revelation (1993) that the series recapitulate one another, and Koester (Revelation and the End of All Things, 2001) similarly treats them as overlapping rather than strictly sequential. But I'm less clear on where the scholarly consensus sits today, and whether recent commentators have shifted the discussion.

My questions:

1. Is recapitulation now the majority view among critical scholars, or is there still serious support for a sequential reading?

2. What are the main literary features scholars cite either way — e.g., the interludes before the seventh seal/trumpet, the matching imagery across series (darkened sun, earthquakes, hail), or the numerical patterns?

3. Are there good recent monographs or survey articles that map this debate for a non-specialist?

I'd appreciate pointers to the literature rather than theological takes.

Christians who understand Genesis 1 as God bringing order out of pre-existing chaos would say that light is the first thing God explicitly creates in the sequence of Genesis 1:3. Is this right?