I am a writer currently working on a novel set during the reign of David. I try to make my work as close to historically accurate as possible, as well as reflecting real Judeo-Christian interpretations of the characters.

I was pretty shocked on my first read-through of 1 and 2 Samuel. David does not come across as a virtuous man, despite repeated assurances that he is. I found it fairly easy to read through a critical lens, and it seems like a lot of the tale of David is just propaganda.

Not a unique take, I know. I'm well aware that David is a complex character, and a retelling of his life in the Bible is not necessarily an endorsement of all his actions. I can't demonize David too much, lest he become a boring character.

I'm looking for more resources to do a critical deep dive on David. (For example, Baden's "The Historical David".) Can you point me in the right direction?

Specific questions of interest:

-Did David violate Deutermonony by taking multiple wives, or did that rule come later?

-What was the role of a royal concubine, and what would have been the consequences if Abner slept with recently-deceased Saul's concubine?

-In the context of the time period, what would have been the "correct" response to the rape of Tamar? (This will likely be the central conflict of my novel.)

-How did historical Hebrews deal with the contradiction of war vs. the commandment not to kill? What is the Bibilical/Torah-ical explanation of all the killing in the Old Testament?

An apologist gave me the following arguments in favor of the traditional authorship of the Gospels, against the idea that the Gospels were anonymous:

1. From the earliest centuries of Christianity, the Gospels were associated with the names we know today. In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons, in his work Against Heresies, explicitly attributed the four Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
2. Who would accept the authority of a document whose author is unknown?
3. In the early centuries, manuscripts did not circulate anonymously; the writer’s name was always written at the top of the document.
4. Even if someone were to choose well-known names to give the text more authority, there would be no reason to choose Matthew, Luke, and Mark.
   • Matthew: He was a tax collector, a profession despised by many Jews of the time.
   • Luke: He was not one of the Twelve Apostles and is mentioned by name in only three passages in the New Testament.
   • Mark: He was involved in a disagreement between Paul and Barnabas and was not one of the Twelve.

The idea is that forgers would choose more famous names to give the text greater authority.

Are these claims valid?

How was the person of Marcion received amongst the Marcionites?

Hi all! Listening to one of my favourite podcasts, Literature and History, and am curious about a section. I will quote liberally from the podcast:

From Cleanthes, we have our first text from the stoic canon proper – a hymn to Zeus. The Homeric hymns, back in the 600s BCE, had followed Homer and Hesiod as a mosaic of stories and devotional passages about prominent Greek deities – lengthy hymns survive to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite. So again Cleanthes, Zeno’s most important immediate successor, wrote a hymn to Zeus. In Homer, and much of the ancient Greek literature we currently possess, Zeus is a sort of sexual viking – a blundering hedonist who goes from rape to rape only pausing occasionally to blow something up. Zeus appears a bit differently in Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus. Let’s hear a section of this Hymn to Zeus, likely written at some point between 300 and 250 BCE, and consider how much Cleanthes’ Zeus sounds more like a wise and omnipotent deity than a churlish thunder god.

This entire cosmos which revolves around the earth obeys you, wherever you might lead it, and is willingly ruled by you; such is [the might of] your thunderbolt, a two-edged helper in your invincible hands, fiery and everliving. . .By it you straighten the common rational principle which penetrates all things, being mixed with lights both great and small. . .Nor does any deed occur on earth without you, god, neither in the aithereal divine heaven nor on the sea, except for the deeds of the wicked in their folly. But you know how to set right what is excessive, and to put in order what is disorderly, for you, even what is not dear is dear. For thus you have fitted together all good things with the bad, so that there is one eternal rational principle for them all. . .Zeus, giver of all, you of the dark clouds, of the blazing thunderbolt save people from their baneful inexperience and disperse it, father, far from their souls; grant that they may achieve wisdom with which you confidently guide all with justice so that we may requite you with honor for the honor you give us praising your works continually, as is fitting for mortals; for there is no greater prize, neither for mortals nor for gods, than to praise with justice the common law forever.

That again was the stoic philosopher Cleanthes, more or less the second prominent stoic philosopher after Zeno. And that quote came from a book called The Stoics Reader, edited by Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson. Now, the notion of Zeus as the dispenser of divine justice wasn’t new in, say, 275 BCE, around the time Cleanthes wrote this hymn. Hesiod had called Zeus the aegisholder of justice in Works and Days (321-39) almost five hundred years earlier, and in general the notion of divine justice dates at least back to the ancient Egyptian concept of ma’at, or universal order chronicled in the Book of the Dead sometime after the First Intermediate Period.

What’s important to notice in Cleanthes’ hymn is its the way that it emphasizes Zeus’ ubiquity, and rationality – Cleanthes writes, “[Y]ou straighten the common rational principle which penetrates all things. . .Nor does any deed occur on earth without you, god, neither in the aithereal divine heaven nor on the sea.” In the same decades Cleanthes was writing this hymn, on the southern side of the Mediterranean, Alexandrian Jews were producing the Septuagint. And within the first Greek language Bible, Yahweh is comparably more temperamental than Cleanthes’ Zeus. Yahweh, who passive aggressively spars with the Egyptian pharaoh at the outset of Exodus, who intermittently massacres his own people in Numbers, who slays Job’s family and brags about wrestling sea monsters rather than explaining himself – this is not the numinous and omniscient entity we encounter in the early stoic philosopher Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus. Now, I don’t mean to cherry pick ugly episodes from the Old Testament, by the way – just to offer a simple point of contrast on a general line of evolution. Between 1,000 BCE and the birth of Christ, deities in Ancient Mediterranean texts were becoming less anthropomorphic and ornery, and more omnipotent and otherworldly. Because the various books of the Old Testament were written over the course of about a thousand years, we can see this evolution taking place in them, and we should note that plenty of Psalms and selections from the Prophetic Books do portray Yahweh as a distant, omniscient being more like the god of stoicism than the ones in the Homeric epics.

Is anyone aware of books which discuss this evolution of divinity, preferably from a comparative perspective? It's especially interesting to me that you have a temperamental and passionate storm god (Zeus/Yahweh) who becomes something more focused on divine wisdom.

When we look at early Christian history, we see a roughly 30-40 year gap between Paul's last authentic letters, Philemon and Philippians (commonly dated to the early 60s), to 1 Clement in 96 AD. During that gap we have nearly all of the New Testament written. At least 3 of the 4 gospels, Hebrews, Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. And possibly more! For example the Johannine corpus might have been coming around at the time of 1 Clement.

What's fascinating is we don't properly know ANYONE who was alive in that time period do we? And this is arguably the most important period of early Christian history, where writing texts became a common thing, where beliefs started to formalize and solidify. When churches started to have structures. When Christians became known to other Jews and Romans. We know of how these other groups saw them (e.g. Josephus, Pliny the Younger) but we don't know anyone there. Apart from Clement and the later Apostolic Fathers.

We don't know the ministries and fates during that time of any of the Twelve, the other apostles, Barnabas, Timothy, Priscilla, Apollos, Mark, etc. We know Philip of Hierapolis had prophetic daughters, we don't know much else. We don't know when this Philip moved there or when he died. We don't know anything about "The Elder" and he appeared to have been a big guy. But even the church traditions of the second century seem awfully quiet on this specific major time period.

We know enough about the second century church for people to propose that Polycarp was the author/redactor of Luke-Acts and/or the Pastorals (e.g. David Trobisch in The First Edition of the New Testament). William V. Harris in Ancient Literacy says about 10% of the population could read and write at a basic level (correct me if there's any new info). With literacy rates like that, if we had access to actual information about Christian leaders active in that time period, we could try to theorize more about the authors and their relations with those leaders. For example Hebrews 13:23 mentions Timothy. It's a bit of a strange name drop if seen as a literary device, since the author doesn't pretend to be anyone in particular. But if we had knowledge of Jewish-Christian leaders in Italy after the temple fell, it would make for even more interesting discussions about the author and his concerns.

Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature by Kim Haines-Eitzen goes into what we can learn from our ancient NT manuscripts:

The papyri of early Christian texts imply just such a private network: physical features such as handwriting, marginal notes, and collections of disparate and various texts in a single codex suggest that copies were made by and for individuals or, at the very least, for individual churches during the second and third centuries.

Just wonder what we could figure out if we had early second century manuscripts...

This was just a late night thought on my mind about how little we know of early Christianity and possibly its most important time period.

Long story short: What are the roots of the reading that Esau or Edom has some special, positive spiritual significance to God; or of an apocalyptic understanding that Esau will reclaim his birthright?

The long of it is I am reading a book about the poet William Blake's use of the biblical tradition of his time. There was an interesting passage on his understanding of the typology of Jacob and Esau. (Pared down from a longer passage, and with my own emphasis added):

…While the Edomites are generally an object of scorn among the writers of the Bible, Edom was also said to be renowned for its wise men (Obadiah 8, Jeremiah 49:7) and the Bible states that Edom was the home of God (Judges 5:4)…

Further ambiguity about the meaning of Edom could be derived from the blessing that Isaac confers upon Esau after learning that Jacob had robbed Esau of his birthright (Gen. 27:40) ... This could be interpreted as a prediction of the successful revolt of the Edomites against Solomon (1 Kings 11:14-22, 25) or of a future apocalyptic event…

This apocalyptic reading, as Kathleen Raine has pointed out, Blake borrowed from Swedenborg, who interprets Isaac’s blessing of Esau as the promised restoration to Edom of the birthright which Jacob has stolen from him... The dominion of Edom is Swedenborg’s ‘New Heaven’, the reign of the Divine Humanity... It is said to be ‘the return of Adam to Paradise’...

Thus Blake had exposure to an alternative tradition that saw Edom not as a symbol of the Antichrist, but as the very opposite.

• Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies, pg. 129-30

So there is this counter reading to the traditional majority consensus, but the book is dealing of course with William Blake and the 18th/19th century materials he was absorbing.

But did this minority tradition - that applies a positive significance/role to Esau or Edom - exist earlier? How did it come about?

From a novice's perspective, it does seem like there is some core tension in the Jacob and Esau narrative in Genesis.

Thank you in advance for any answers.

Considering the hypothesis of Markan priority, how might Matthew and Luke have gained access to the Gospel of Mark and to the Q source in composing their respective Gospels? Furthermore, before the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written, in what contexts and communities did the Gospel of Mark circulate, and is there historical evidence of its reception, transmission, and interpretation by first-century authors or Christian communities? How do scholars think the Q source circulated? Why does no one cite it?

Most English translations like the KJV, NIV, ESV, and NKJV use "the LORD" to render the Tetragrammaton. However, in Hebrew, the Tetragrammaton would be pronounced something like "Yahweh". Importantly "Yahweh" is a personal name, made clear in passages like Exodus 3:13-15 and 15:3.

He talks about sin taking advantage of the Law to entice him to break its commandments, he talks about sin living in him, and he speaks of the law of sin working in his body. He seems to personify sin, and it reminds me of Genesis 4:7. What does Paul understand sin to be in this context? Is he speaking about original sin or concupiscence?

Is there any reason at all to link the opponents of Ignatius who "abstain from eucharist and prayer, because they allow not that the eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ" (Smyrnaeans 6.2) to readers of the Didache?

But as touching the eucharistic thanksgiving give ye thanks thus.

First, as regards the cup: "We give Thee thanks, O our Father, for the holy vine of Thy son David, which Thou made known unto us through Thy Son Jesus; Thine is the glory for ever and ever."

Then as regards the broken bread: "We give Thee thanks, O our Father, for the life and knowledge which Thou didst make known unto us through Thy Son Jesus; Thine is the glory for ever and ever. As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and being gathered together became one, so may Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom; for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever and ever."

But let no one eat or drink of this eucharistic thanksgiving, but they that have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord hath said: "Give not that which is holy to the dogs."

Didache 9 is not polemicizing against the eucharist as the flesh of our savior, but James Tabor thinks it's important that it doesn't say anything about the eucharist being the body or blood of Jesus as it does in Paul and the gospels.

Notice there is no mention of the wine representing blood or the bread representing flesh. And yet this is a record of the early Christian Eucharist meal! This text reminds us very much of the descriptions of the sacred messianic meal in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here we have a messianic celebration of Jesus as the Davidic Messiah and the life and knowledge that he has brought to the community. Evidently this community of Jesus' followers knew nothing about the ceremony that Paul advocates. If Paul's practice had truly come from Jesus surely this text would have included it.

There is another important point in this regard. In Jewish tradition it is the cup of wine that is blessed first, then the bread. That is the order we find here in the Didache. But in Paul's account of the "Lord's Supper" he has Jesus bless the bread first, then the cup of wine -- just the reverse. It might seem an unimportant detail until one examines Luke's account of the words of Jesus at the meal. Although he basically follows the tradition from Paul, unlike Paul Luke reports first a cup of wine, then the bread, and then another cup of wine! The bread and the second cup of wine he interprets as the "body" and "blood" of Jesus. But with respect to the first cup-in the order one would expect from Jewish tradition-there is nothing said about it representing "blood." Rather Jesus says,"I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom comes" (Luke 22:18). This tradition of the first cup, found now only in Luke, is a leftover clue of what must have been the original tradition before the Pauline version was inserted, now confirmed by the Didache.

The Jesus Dynasty p. 205

Obviously, a lot of work would need to be done to get from Tabor's observation of the absence of body and blood in the prayer to a deliberate rejection of body and blood theology by its readers, and to connect them to communities supervised by Ignatius for them to be around to refuse to participate in the first place, and to connect them to everything else Ignatius says about his opponents, but has any of the work been done?

A few questions came to mind while I was hiking yesterday: 1. When the Israelites left Egypt, where did they go to the restroom? 2. How did they transport people with disabilities, if there were any? 3. Did they all walk in any formation, or were the lines organized strategically? 4. Did they bathe? These are the details I wonder on. The how, I know it happened but what were the specifics?

Apologists often argue that Jesus’ disciples were willing to suffer for their beliefs and Paul even changed from persecuting Christians to preaching Christianity. They argue that this is evidence that they really experienced something divine.

Could Jesus’ disciples have believed he was the Messiah and struggled to accept his death, leading them to believe he had risen from the dead?

And what about Paul? Since he wasn't originally a follower of Jesus, what made him convert and dedicate his life to preaching Christianity?

How do secular historians explain these events and the growth of Christianity when it was still a small movement?

I would like to ask what is the scholarly consensus or the most dominant view regarding whether the earliest disciples of jesus like peter and james worship jesus or not. And by worship i am not necessitating the idea that they thought that jesus is the one true god yhwh or anything related to what they thought jesus was ontologically but what i mean by worship is any sort of cultic religious devotion like prayer. I would ask a tangent question as well because muslims always claim that the earliest disciples were basically muslims who never prayed or worshipped or pray to jesus at all and they never believed jesus was crucfied or raised from the dead or that his death was any sort of attonement for sins. Is that muslim view of the disciples historically tenable or true?

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Hello Everyone,

I would like to clarify the common academic opinion or main hypotheses by scholars as to the reason for divergences in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew (1:1–17) and in Luke (3:23–38).

Concretely, I am most interested in the following points:

Do scholars generally agree on the major historical and textually based explanations for the two lists being so different from David through to Joseph?

From a literary and theological perspective, how do contemporary scholars understand the reason each author has presented a different genealogical structure (Matthew's 3x14 vs. Luke's from Adam on)?3) What are the key scholarly writings or commentaries that address this problem?

I am solely asking for historical-critical and text-focused analysis which is aligned with the rules of this subreddit.

Thank you!

Is it true that the this expectations of the future king from the line of David began after the throne and the davidic lineage was destroyed and that the biblical authors expected Zerubabbel to restore the throne and be the king from the line of david but he failed so the expectations were moved to the far future

A few days ago I made a post on an atheism reddit group just asking some questions about what happened to Jesus’ body after his crucifixion. I’ve become an agnostic since investigating the historical Jesus, and at this point I still have yet to lean towards either side, but I’m open to many possibilities. So given that, my post was entirely neutral, and I was only asking questions without making any assumptions(except the assumption that Jesus must have existed historically, which, who knows, maybe I’m wrong about that lol). 

I was surprised at the responses that my post received. Someone responded to my post accusing me of believing in the resurrection, which I don’t, and I never implied that I did in my post. Like bro am I not even allowed to just research the historical Jesus sceptically? But the comments that surprised me the most were the brief ones where people were just saying that Jesus never even existed. The supporting points for their claims were that the people who say that Jesus was at least real only say that because their salaries depend on it, or comparing Jesus to Moses, who scholars used to believe existed, and now they agree that he’s fictional, or that there were like 20 other messiah like characters all killed off by the Romans at that time. Those are some fair points, and I’m sure there’s a ton more to support the rationality for Mythicism. Out of the 19 comments that my post received, only 4 answered my questions in ways that implied that they at least believed Jesus existed, everyone else was a mythicist, and all responses were from sceptics. Of these comments, about 5 people made their point with a rude “bro ur an idiot for even researching the historical Jesus” type of tone. This tone doesn’t discredit the intellectual point they were trying to get across, but it made me wonder if people just use mythicism as a quick and easy way to opt out of actually analyzing the historical Jesus rationally? Now to be fair, prioritizing emotional reasoning over intellectual reasoning can work the other way too, that people defend their religious beliefs with base-level answers to questions without going any deeper for fear of losing their beliefs.

Anyways, I’m curious to learn more about Mythicism, so what are some great sources on the reasoning against Jesus’ existence? Are there any additional supporting points as to why Jesus might not have existed? And if you’re gonna reply, please don’t give me any of that irrational accusational bs, I’m only interested in intellectual ideas. Thanks in advance for your input!

A Christian YouTuber pulled up a document on archive.org claiming this

What scholarly resources are there concerning whether Luke and Acts were written by the same author, with the latter continuing the former, as well as a consensus (or lack thereof) among scholars?

In the taxation episode on the Gospel of Mark. The pharisees are trying to catch jesus up by asking him if tribute should be paid to caesar. jesus has them bring him a coin, "render unto caesar" etc.

the problem is that both the common and religious currency in ~30s CE was tyrian shekel, a tetradrachma silver coin imposed on the region by rome around the time of pompey magnus's conquest a century prior. jews were not taxed in golden denarii until, you guess it, 70 CE, when punishment was inflicted on them in the form the fiscus judaicus tax. that explicitly had to be paid in denarii, and was meant to fund the temple of jupiter in rome -- a doubly idolatrous insult to the recently defeated jews.

Is this an accurate analysis to determine that the Gospel of Mark was written around 70 CE?

If not, then what is a good point for dating the Gospel of Mark besides the Temple argument?

Hi all, just wondering what is the standard reference grammar for biblical Hebrew in academia? Not for learning/coursework but for referring to when assessing grammatical issues in the text. Thank you!

Since both feature a divine shepherd come to reveal a mystical revelation to a man named Hermes?

What historical-critical scholars says about the nature of early apostolic succession? setting aside the question of monepiscopacy and "elders=bishop in the bible" thing.

Two models usually said in modern times are:

1. Sacramental/mechanical model: succession is an unbroken chain of ordinations, with the laying on of hands conveying a power (to teach, to consecrate the Eucharist, etc.) that is necessary for a valid church. Commonly associated with Orthodox, Roman Catholics and some high-church protestants...
2. Appointment/doctrinal model: succession is a line of lawfully appointed leaders or teachers whose function is to guard the apostolic teaching, with ordination being proper order rather than the channel of a special power. Commonly associated with Reformed and low-church protestants.

QUESTIONS:

How did the early church understand apostolic succession, and how did that understanding evolve? Is there evidence of a sacramental view of ordination before the 3rd century? Did the earliest Christians see succession as being about doctrine or about the sacrament?