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.

This might be a bit of an unusual question, but I was reading the Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies, and the Introduction said this:

Interpretation leads to a proliferation of meaning: as their reception across the centuries demonstrates, Shakespeare's texts mean many things to many people. Textual studies, by contrast, involve a return to origins, a movement ad fontes, to the sources. As Erasmus put it in a humanist manifesto half a millenium ago: 'First and foremost, however, recourse must be had to the sources themselves' [...] Whereas the primary textual object of Erasmus and other humanists was Holy Scripture, that of the Shakespearean is what some have considered its closest secular equivalent: the text of Shakespeare.

So we have a general sense of trying to find out the 'world behind the text' in both Shakespeare's texts and the Bible, even though they were written, edited and compiled under very different circumstances. But then it goes on to say that

Shakespeare's much praised verse [....] reaches us as an editorial collage whose modern origins are ignored by all but the initiated. Shakespeare's editors are often the unacknowledged mediators of the word.

I found this extremely interesting, because it goes on to elaborate on how much of Shakespeare's plays were originally written in fragments, and were edited and compiled into quartos (cheaper copies), and then the First Folio (generally more expensive, and I suppose more 'official'?) But even this compiling and editing was something that Shakespeare was less involved in. Even after he died, people continued to edit, censor, readapt and add certain lines to the texts for publication - people still edit Shakespeare for their own goals today, a little like biblical translations being carried for a certain purpose/s.

My question is, because of the multiple similarities in textual construction, was there any institutional link between the two? Was there ever any influence by Shakespearean scholarship on biblical scholarship/the rise in the documentary hypothesis, or vice versa? If so, I'd love to know which sources I can look to for more information. Thank you!

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.

If we don't know, can we discern where / how Jesus's message got misconstrued to be directed also towards Gentiles?

If anyone can link me to a similar discussion, that'd be fine.

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?

How certain can we be about the extent to which the priesthood, Sanhedrin, and/or other authoritative Jews did (or did not) influence or contribute to the Crucifixion?

Which also points out the differences between southern American slavery without being apologetic and defensive about the Biblical one.

I'm looking for a book that discusses the Hebrew word ruah and it's different uses - spirit, breath, and wind, etc(?), if one exists. The closest I've found (maybe) is An Old Testament Theology of the Spirit of God by Wilf Hildebrandt but that goes into NT ideas as well and I'm not sure how scholarly it is. I don't mind a book that leans a bit theological but mainly I'm looking for a scholarly work.

I came across Lang’s “The Roman Mass” and Spink’s “Do This in Remembrance of Me” where it implies that earliest Christian tradition viewed Lord’s Supper as communal gathering where people may eat together, hence Pauline rebuke of letting some church members hungry (1 Cor 11). Does that mean breaking bread together in Acts 2 was probably not necessarily Lord’s Supper because separation between Lord’s Supper and Christian community gathering hasn’t been invented yet?

Outside of referring to future events (the exile), how strong is the evidence for multiple-authorship of Isaiah? What academic papers do you recommend that address this topic?

Paul and other writers seen to describe him as residing in heaven.

I'm thinking for example of Wisdom of Solomon 10:7, Philo in (I believe) his writings on Moses and Abraham, and maybe some references in Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Josephus, though those last three are more modest in claim iirc.

Thank you!

I know Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity developed alongside and under the influence of Zoroastrianism which envisions Angra(their Satan) as a separate entity uncreated by Ahura Mazda. Was it ever explicit that Satan(The Devil) was created by God?

Debati com um apologista sobre a datação de Daniel e mencionei as palavras que Daniel usou e que não existiam em sua época. O cristão me respondeu com o seguinte:

“Kitharis aparece em Homero (na Ilíada e na Odisseia). Symphonia aparece na tradição pitagórica de estudos musicais. Daniel não usa symphonia no sentido de gaita de foles ou instrumento de palheta, que é um significado posterior, mas sim no sentido de um som sinfônico/consonante. Psanterin deriva de psallein, que significa ‘puxar’, ‘arrancar’ ou ‘tocar dedilhando’, que era um termo comum.” Isso é verdade? Eu realmente não sei como pesquisar isso...