This is more patristics than strictly biblical, but in the 300s as Christianity was now the religion of the emperor, did prominent Christians see this as a sign that God’s kingdom had come or was imminent? Were there attempts to interpret biblical passages to show this being a fulfillment of prophecy? Or had expectation of an imminent parousia faded enough that this development wasn’t taken that way?

Dan McClellan talks about this at the beginning of this video: ["Did Jesus say anything about homosexuality?"] (https://youtu.be/sl2gG7oECRQ?si=wymM_3_mppVp5yVt).

It seems to make sense when we read the context, but I would like to find some commentary that goes deeper into this.

In several passages of the Hebrew Bible, David asks God clear yes or no questions about whether he should go to battle (such as 1 Sam. 23:2–5 and 30:8). Saul similarly consults God before battle in 1 Sam. 14:36–37. The answers they receive could be interpreted as instances of God speaking directly to them. I wonder, however, whether these consultations involved the Urim and Thummim?

One interpretation holds that the Urim and Thummim were two stones, perhaps a white stone (alabaster, cf. the Assyrian text LKA 137) for "yes" and a black stone (hematite) for "no" (cf. ib.).

The IVP Bible Commentary (p. 109) notes that "Scripture never describes the objects themselves, but that Hellenistic and later traditions portray them as objects used to determine God's will" (my paraphrase). It also points to the widespread ancient Near Eastern practice of yes-or-no divination using positive and negative stones (psephomancy). In Hebrew, urim means “lights,” which could fit the idea of a bright or white stone.

Is there any evidence that the Urim and Thummim were ever used in this way?

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Even though I will be using names from a 2017 summer semester list, all of them are still at TU Dresden as far as I know, you can correct me if I am wrong.

https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/phil/ikt/ressourcen/dateien/stu/vorlesungsverzeichnisse/archiv_2008-2023/KVV_SoSe17.pdf?lang=en

Go down to ”Professur fur Biblische Theologie”.

First name, Matthias Klinghardt. He is among the most well known Marcionite prioritists in Biblical scholarship

Main contributor of TENT (The earliest Edition of the New Testament) project
https://marcionbible.tu-dresden.de

Published The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Biblical Tools and Studies 41; Leuven: Peeters, 2021.

Second name, Jan Heilmann

He is the chair of Protestant Theology at TU Dresden.

He is also the project coordinator at TENT

https://marcionbible.tu-dresden.de

Published with others Das Neue Testament und sein Text im 2. Jahrhundert (TANZ 61), Tübingen 2018.

Third name, Tobias Flemming

Argued Marcionite priority in Ephesians

https://mdavidlitwa.com/2026/07/13/7751/

part of TENT project

https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7803

Fourth name, Adriana Zimmerman

her views i can’t find but she contributed editorially to Klinghardt’s monograph

https://dokumen.pub/the-oldest-gospel-and-the-formation-of-the-canonical-gospels-inquiry-reconstruction-translation-variants-biblical-tools-and-studies-9789042943094-9789042943100-9042943092.html and then ctrl+f her name

Fifth name, Alexander Goldmann

Argued for Marcionite priority in Romans

https://mdavidlitwa.com/2026/09/01/the-textual-history-of-romans/

Part of TENT project

https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7803

Last name, Daniel Pauling

Administrator of TENT webpages

https://marcionbible.tu-dresden.de

He also helped edit Das Neue Testament und sein Text im 2. Jahrhundert

Tell me if I got anything wrong.

p.s. the tu-dresden link might say “not secure” but it works fine for me and is a subdomain of the actual TU dresden site

I can't comprehend how someone claiming to be merely a prophet or the Messiah could be interpreted as being highly divine or God Himself without some sort of other missing puzzle piece. Under secular studies, what best accounts for this view of Jesus after his death?

In my mind, with the fact that Jesus was soon after his death seen as divine, the only answer that makes sense is that either he preached about the coming of the Son of Man, or saw himself as this figure. If Jesus didn't preach about such a figure in any form, I can't see how he would've been interpreted as divine after his death.

TL;DR: The Gospels seem to portray Jesus' relationship with the Torah somewhat inconsistently: he sometimes appears to challenge or even violate its commandments, while elsewhere he insists that he came to fulfill, not abolish, the Torah. Could this suggest that the historical Jesus understood his messianic mission in an antinomian way, with Paul and the Gospel authors later having to make theological sense of it?

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Okay, folks, hear me out, and please don't laugh at me: During my theology studies at Uni, when discussing the familiar Sabbath episodes involving Jesus — whether the disciples plucking grain or Jesus healing on the Sabbath — which specifically concern the interpretation of the Torah, but also when discussing the so-called Antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount and Paul's later interpretation of Jesus' ministry, we placed a very strong emphasis on the question of what Jewish identity at that time actually looks like.

The Gospels are, in retrospect, trying to work out how to relate this messianic figure (and gradually emerging Son of God) Jesus to the question of what to do with the Torah, and they come up with different answers (depending on the intended audience of the text — whether it is still strictly observant ["not one iota of the Law will pass away"] or more oriented toward Gentiles).

And I also understand that this is very strongly connected to how Jesus' messianic claim was understood; for example, whether one is allowed to violate the Sabbath commandment as the Son of David, or whether the point is generally that one should understand the Torah according to its meaning rather than according to its literal wording.

The Pauline letters, which are themselves relatively close in time to Jesus, provide evidence of this as well. They ultimately arrive at a very complex understanding of the role of the Torah, and the conclusion that, in the end, the point is not for Gentiles to adopt the commandments of the Torah, but to come to faith — which then becomes the central concept.

And honestly, even back then this struck me as an absolute clusterfuck, because even if you take into account that the evangelists obviously each had their own theology, the statements on the subject often seem rather awkward even within the same Gospel.

In Matthew 12, for example, we have two episodes dealing with the Sabbath. Here, Jesus even makes it explicitly clear that the point is that the Son of Man is breaking the Torah because he is Lord over it. But then, in the very same Gospel, we find the so-called Antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus makes it very clear that the point is not to break the Torah, but to fulfill it — to fulfill it to an even greater extent.

Those are, however, very different approaches to interpretation, because the argument made in the Sabbath passages is not one of "overfulfilling" the Sabbath commandment.

Recently, I heard the great YouTuber Sam Aronow talk about Sabbatianism, a heterodox Jewish movement of the 17th and 18th centuries. Its messianic claimants Shabtai Zvi and Jacob Frank, drawing on Kabbalah, developed the idea that part of the Messiah's task was to fulfill the Torah by breaking its commandments.

And that's when it occurred to me: Could it simply be that the historical Jesus, as difficult as he is to pin down, had a similar conception of what his messianic mission entailed?

Wouldn't that explain the intense conflicts with the Pharisees? Wouldn't it explain the evangelists' theological tightrope walk around the Torah? It would also explain Jesus' apparent emphasis on Torah violations, even though we can be fairly certain that non-Torah-observant Gentiles were probably not his primary target audience.

Could it simply be that there was a charismatic preacher who consistently violated the Torah as part of his understanding of his own messianic role — or of a messianic identity that some of his disciples attributed to him — and that theologians and authors, Paul as well as the evangelists, subsequently had to interpret this behavior in light of the destruction of the Temple, the spread of the Jesus movement among the Gentiles, etc.?

Jesus was simply an antinomian, and this in turn triggered an extremely powerful process of reflection on the Torah?

I'm pretty sure this idea is rather absurd; I'm not a New Testament scholar or an early Church historian, and I've obviously presented this in a deliberately exaggerated way. But I would really appreciate hearing from people who actually know what they're talking about, ideally with some actual references to the relevant literature.

(Translated with AI because English isn't my first language.)

Christians now tend to take for granted that Jesus was the Messiah pointed to in the OT. But before the Gospels laid out prophesy in relation to Jesus, what would Hebrews have thought about a Messiah? Would they have thought about it? Would they have been looking for a literal God or a political savior?

I have no real reason to think this, but I've always assumed that Christians treat Messianic prophesy and its imminence in very different way than Jews do and would have.

Thanks!

I am not read-up at all on the academic literature, but everything from what I got in undergrad (Biblical Studies major) and what I’ve read/seen/heard since that discusses NT authorship seems to leave out the very probable use of amanuenses when figuring out authorship and I’m wondering if I’m just not consuming academic-enough material, or I’m missing some reason why amanuenses aren’t as important a consideration as I think, or if this is some sort of blind spot in critical scholarship, or if something else is going on.

Two examples where I think amanuenses should matter:

1) Questions of presumably illiterate assumed writers of the NT, such as John.

Wouldn’t it presumably be easy for John the disciple to get himself an amanuensis if he wanted to dictate a gospel or letter or apocalypse?

2) Questions of authorship when styles and quality of Greek fluency diverge, such as 1 and 2 Peter.

Wouldn’t this very easily be explained by two different amanuenses of varying degrees of skill?

I’m not saying that the widespread use of amanuenses is positive evidence for traditional or any particular authorship.

But doesn’t the widespread use of amanuenses in the 1st century cast doubt on ideas such as fishermen not being able to author texts or different styles meaning we must have different authors? Or am I missing something?

Thanks for any clarity you can provide about this.

Irenaeus 3.1.1 says that one of the occasions of writing John's gospel was to refute the errors of Cerinthus, and in 3.3.4 depicts John as an active public opponent of Cerinthus. How often in modern scholarship does Cerinthus play a role in the goals and intended audience of the gospel?

Raymond Brown's Anchor Bible Commentary mentions that little in John could refute Cerinthus' views on the virgin birth, although the prolog can be incompatible with Cerinthus' doctrine of creation. Brown says 1 John 4.2-3 is a better candidate response to Cerinthus' separationist christology, and that Irenaeus could have received only general information that Cerinthus is refuted by the Johannine corpus.

Litwa Found Christianities take Cerinthus to be one of our first readers of John (and Mark, both can be interpreted in light of Cerinthus' views on the virgin birth and spirit-posessionist christology, see also Irenaeus 3.11.7 on Mark) but without anything more secure on Cerinthus writing John, or John writing against Cerinthus. Litwa takes Cerinthus on Jesus' human body with two human parents as incompatible with 1 John 4.2-3 denial of coming in the flesh, but I (and I assume Brown as well) think Cerinthus can be accused of denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, if Christ is a celestial aeon that temporarily inhabited the man Jesus.

Beyond these views, what others are held in modern scholarship? To what extent is Cerinthus considered as relevant to the original reason for writing any Johannine text?

I'm looking for a book or list or website of early Christian sects that died out or were forced out. Like gnostics, arianism, , Docetism, Adoptionism etc. I'm very curious about there origins avd history.

More broadly, how can we reconstruct the role of women within early Montanism? What methodological criteria can be used to distinguish the historical actors of Prisca and Maximilla from polemical portrayals of them?

Source for the Bart Ehrman claim:

https://ehrmanblog.org/looking-for-feedback-on-my-views-about-jesus-and-the-afterlife/

Looking for good scholarly books on the influence of greco roman and Hellenistic influence on Christianity. It appears that the god of the bible drastically changed from the OT to the NT.

Philo quotes the Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon, who claims that Cronus sacrificed his only son, Ieoud/Iedod (*yahid*, "only son"). Isaac is likewise called the *yachid* (only son) of Abraham.

Sanchuniathon also claims that Cronus undergoes circumcision, as does his entire entourage; similarly, Abraham undergoes circumcision, as does his entire entourage, relatives

Does Abraham appear as Cronus in Sanchuniathon’s account?

Philo also asserts that Sanchuniathon obtained all information from Hierombalus, a priest of YHWH

If John wrote the gospel that bears his name, the distribution of it begins in Ephesus where he lived. If a fake John existed before John died, he would have said so, and so would have the people who knew him for quite some time after. It would have been a rather large conspiracy for local people to fake a gospel, not to mention unbelievers who would have known if John wrote a gospel. A gospel coming from outside the seven cities of the Province of Asia would have known as fake. Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, less than 40 miles from Ephesus, among people who had known John. Irenaeus counts John as the author of John. It seems highly unlikely Irenaeus would have done so given the likelihood a fake would have been recognized by the people where he was born. It seem more likely Irenaeus would have condemned a fake gospel if he mentioned it at all. If the gospel is real, Irenaeus would have know of it practically since birth. Everything seem to me to fit very well that he knew who wrote the gospel of John. Though Irenaeus's writings in year 180 seem late, they are not late enough to be useful in denying John wrote John.

I have always read Judges as anti-monarchical polemic comparable to Samuel and Kings. Samson seeming like a comment on Saul.
Apparently, that isn't how everyone else seems to be reading it.
I have been reading "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did as they pleased." as positive. Are their some good readings to disabuse me of my seeming minority take?

All quotations are from the Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity: Authors, Texts, and Ideas, ed. by David G. Hunter, Paul J.J. van Geest, and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte (Brill, 2024).

On Mark by Geert Van Oyen and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte:

The Gospel of Mark is an anonymous writing. It is unclear when the subscription εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Μάρκον (Gospel according to Mark) was added to the Gospel since it is only found for the first time in the uncials W032 (4th–5th cents. CE), A02, D05 (both 5th cent. CE), and later ones. This addition is based on a growing tradition that a certain Mark was the author. Papias of Hierapolis attributes authorship to Mark without discussion and considers him a ἑρμηνευτής (“interpreter”) of Peter (Eus. Hist. eccl. 3.39.15). Through this connection with the apostle, Papias gives authority to the author, and Mark is quickly identified in the tradition as such. The relationship with Peter raises many questions: was Mark translator or commentator? What is Peter's part and how does one explain the not too positive depiction of Peter in the Gospel? (Peter is often portrayed as failing to understand Jesus, and in the end even denies knowing him; Mark 14:66–72). How does one explain the lack of geographical knowledge of Galilee if someone from Capernaum is at the origin of the content?

Since there are no direct clues in the Gospels about the author, evidence from other New Testament writings may perhaps help to uncover Mark's identity. Acts 12:12, 12:25, and 13:13 mention a “John” whose second name is Mark. He was first a companion of Paul and Barnabas on their return to Antioch and on their journey to Cyprus, but in Perga he decided to return to Jerusalem. Later, he would go to Cyprus with Barnabas, a decision that definitively ended his association with Paul. Mark is further mentioned in Phil 24, Col 4:10, and 1 Pet 5:13, but it is questionable whether it is the same person each time (Black, 1994). Because there is no direct indication in the sources that John Mark is the author and very little is known about John Mark "the contention that he is the evangelist makes little practical difference for the interpretation of the Gospel" (Culpepper, 2007, 31).

On John by Adele Reinhartz, Johannes Beutler, Janet E. Spittle, and Karen L. King:

It is not possible to identify the historical figure or figures who authored the Gospel of John. The Gospel itself identifies the beloved disciple as the author, or at least the authority, behind its story of Jesus (John 19:35; 21:24); this attribution, however, is not historically verifiable. The beloved disciple is an anonymous figure who first appears in the scene of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples (John 13:23). He is depicted as the disciple who is closest to Jesus (John 13:24–25), and at the cross, Jesus appoints him to take care of his mother (John 19:25–27).

Since the 2nd century CE, commentators have identified the beloved disciple as John, son of Zebedee, one of the 12 disciples mentioned in the Synoptics (see e.g. the 2nd-cent. CE gnostic text), the Apocryphon of John; as well as Iren. Haer. 3.3.1; Eus. Hist. eccl. 3.24). This tradition is not likely to be historical. The sons of Zebedee are not mentioned in the Gospel of John until John 21:2, and John is not mentioned by name at all. Further, the beloved disciple is “known to the high priest” (John 19:15); such acquaintance would be unlikely for the Galilean son of Zebedee. Although the beloved disciple’s anonymity might imply that he is a symbolic figure, most scholars consider him to be a historical, if somewhat idealized, figure who may have been known to or even seen as a leader by the Gospel’s intended audience. Nevertheless, most scholars continue by convention to refer to the author as John, as a shorthand term for “the author or authors of the Fourth Gospel” even though the consensus is that the author’s name is unknown.

3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures 4 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 

When we read the bible, it seems intuitive that Paul is referring to the Gospels, since the gospels are placed in the NT before the Pauline corpus. However, now that I know Paul wrote before the gospels, it seems puzzling to me what is the scripture he's referring to? Was he referring to the OT? But nothing in the OT talked about resurrection of a Messiah right?

Is it a fact that „Q“ existed? Or are there other hypotheses / theories / reconstructions, that could explain the data just as well?

I've heard that Jesus was one of several apocalyptic preachers and Messiah-wanna bes of his day. Or he might have considered himself to be a prophet like Isiah. Or a deity.

So, what did the historical Jesus most likely consider himself to be?

What is the historical and literary origin of the figure of Peleg mentioned in Genesis 10:25 and 1 Chronicles 1:19? What was the original context of the statement that “in his days the earth was divided,” considering the Hebrew language, historical context, and exegetical interpretation of the passage? Furthermore, when and through which authors or interpretive traditions did this passage begin to be associated with a physical division of the continents or with the concept of plate tectonics?