Thoughts on Antiquity

John Kloppenborg hypothesizes that Q was composed in three stages (see his Formation of Q or Excavating Q). Brackets indicate that I am unsure this is the first time he proposed such a change. Parentheses indicate Kloppenborg’s tentative conclusions. Letters represent blocks of Q material, when in quotes, a new block is added, […]

This is a comparison of the Burton L. Mack’s and John Dominic Crossan’s work on Q’s compositional history and the historical Jesus. See previous post for clarification.
Of Crossan’s 503 original complexes attributed to Jesus in early Christian writings, Mack declared that less than 10% of them are candidates for authenticity (Lost Gospel, 191). Mack […]

Scholars often make minor changes in opinion and are not explicit about it, which can be frustrating to those trying to understand their own position in relation to them. Moreover, scholars often appropriate other work and make minor changes that they are similarly quiet about. Below I have Burton L. Mack, J. Dominic […]

First, I want to thank James Crossley for my copy of Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century. In an excellent first entry of a handful BibleWorld volumes with his name attached (including, Jesus Beyond Nationalism & Judaism, Jewish Identities and the Gospel Tradition), Crossley sets a series […]

Bruce Malina and John Pilch’s Social-Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul contains one of the most interesting and radical proposals to the Ioudaios debate that I have seen. In their reading of Paul, the apostle consistently used “Israelite” as an implicit antecedent in every use of Ἕλληνές and Ἰουδαῖοι. Thus, they argue […]

Though there seems to have been a dearth of scholarly work on Marcion in the English- and German-speaking world from the time of WWII until the mid-1980s (and for obvious reasons), a large number of scholars who have sought to “re-assess” the Gospel of the Lord, traditionally attributed to Marcion himself. Matthias Klinghardt suggests […]

The panel discussion involved four scholars discussing and one moderating, representing the two extremes of the opinions on this controversial gospel. Birger Pearson and Dennis MacDonald (moderator) took the position that the Clementine epistle and the gospel were both forgeries by Morton Smith, whereas Gesine Robinson, John Dart and Marvin Meyer were of the […]

Following up with a short rejoinder to Michael Bird’s response to my post about the Cynic hypothesis, I will make a few brief comments.
First, the criticisms were not directly specifically at Dr. Bird, but it is safe to say that the opinion expressed in his original post is fairly representative of general, scholarly thinking about […]

The Cynic hypothesis is, in my opinion, one of the most unfairly attacked ideas in NT scholarship. For example, Michael Bird listed it among “the worst ideas to gain currency in NT scholarship,” (#3, cf. #11) and seems to be uniformly agreed upon in the comments section. While I certainly do not ascribe […]

R. Joseph Hoffmann has written up a response “to concerns about The Jesus Project,” focusing largely on the negative response in biblioblogdom. This is certainly warranted, given that almost universally negative comments about the project over the past few weeks. In short, the list of fellows was posted prematurely and at least some […]