Loading...I continue here with my posts that give brief bullet-point summaries of each book of the New Testament “At a Glance” along with questions for reflection to help think through some of the major issues each book presents.
Here I cover the first two books of the “General (or Catholic) Epistles,” Hebrews and James.
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What are the reasons scholars discount James, the brother of Jesus, as the author?
Concerning the book of Hebrews. I’ve heard or read comments that Apollos may be the author of Hebrews. Any foundation for this view?
I give an extended argument for the reasons in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, and a shorter version in my book Forged. One very strong one is that Aramaic-speaking peasants in Galilee could not write highly literate Greek. (The natural response is that he may have used a “secretary,” but in my books I show we have no reason to think *anyone* used secretaries to compose books in their name in antiquity)
On the question of “different kinds of Pauline Christianity”, did Paul himself sometimes preach different messages to Jewish and gentile Christians? For example, in Romans 2:13 he wrote that it is “doers of the law who will be justified”, but in Romans 3:20 he wrote that no one will be justified by deeds prescribed by the law. Or did he in 2:13 perhaps refer to the “royal law” mentioned in James 2:8 – “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”?
It seems that he was malleable, depending on circunmstances and audience; as he himself says, when he was with Jews he became like someone who was committed to the law, and when with gentiles as one not committed to the law (1 Corinthians 9:20-22). It’s also not clear how consistent he is when it comes to issues generally. 1 Cor. 8 indicates idols are not real (just wood and stone) and so eating meat offered to them is not a problem for those who worship only God, but in ch 10 he indicates they are actually demonic, forces of evil. Uh….
What is the historical evidence that long ancient books were written from oral traditions, rather than written accounts contemporary or past? Do we have any cases of an ancient author saying that a book was composed from an oral tradition? The reason I ask is because the five books of Moses state that they were written from other documents (e.g. as I recall the “book of the wars of Jehovah”) and modern theory has the JDEP four source theory for them. Matthew and Luke used mostly written sources, Q and Mark, and New Testament letters didn’t use any sources except the Hebrew bible. The works of Plato and Socrates are philosophical discourses which, like letters, come from their own philosophizing. Acts seems to use a number of sources (travel logs?) and the like, although Luke does admit to ” handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word”. The ancient Egyptian Pharoah’s wrote down their victorious battle accounts at the time they happened. If some type of Israeli exodus did occur, it seems to me that the laws of Moses would have been written down at the time, like travel logs.
A number of ancient sources talk about oral accounts that they have considered (The church father Papias, sticking with Christian documents, claims he *prefers* them to written sources). Plato’s dialogues claim to be based on oral traditions. Biographers often got their recounts from oral sources as they tell us; Thucycides explains that historians had to “make up” speeches that seemed appropirate for the occasion, and so in those caes I suppose there were no sources at all per se. Most of the Christian narrative material appears to have been based on both written and oral sources. But no, there’s no evidence of Moses’s laws being written down.
Thanks so much for the info; I felt there was evidence for oral stuff going into documents but was unsure to what extent that was true for very large documents like Luke and Acts. For me, the really interesting question is the Q material. It seems to me that the Q material, and the seven undisputed letters of Paul, are the most historically reliable stuff in the New Testament regarding the historical Jesus and the development of what could be called early Christianity. I’m wondering to what extent scholars agree with that.
Many do. But it depends on what we mean by “historically reliable” — that is, reliable for *what*?
Fwiw, I think that the incipits to James and Jude come from a time when the perpetual virginity of Mary was becoming a thing. It’s interesting that both James 1:1 and Jude 1:1 appropriate a traditional connection to Jesus as their brother but without explicitly saying so. Being the brother of Jesus should be their claim to fame, but both epistolary salutations sidestep that, probably so it doesn’t call into question Mary’s perpetual virginity. I have no reason to think the brief letter of Jude ever existed without the first verse, but there is good reason to conjecture the “letter” of James did so without its opening verse. And James has much anti-Pauline rhetoric, and until you mentioned it the other day, I had never noticed that Jude has some too. Romans 3:8 is truly intriguing.
Congrats on retirement! Enjoy those grandkids!
My concern with the plea of using a secretary is that in addition to not being able to write and compose, a person with James’ background also likely would not speak highly literate Greek. So, the secretary would be translating a common dialect into a sophisticated other language. That would make the text something I would say was not “written” by James. Is that a legitimate view?
Yup, that’d be right. In addition, we have no evidence of anyone “writing” a book by dictating in one language and having it put into writing via translation.
Here is a question I have been asking myself, in the form of a counterfactual hypothesis. If we imagine that by some quirk of history Judaism had not developed a diaspora across the Greco-Roman world in the final centuries before the common era; that it had much like it did, but remaining confined to its original heartland (Judea, Samaria, allowing for the Galilee so that Jesus could be Jewish). In such a scenario, would there have been any possibility of the Christian gospel spreading beyond that Jewish territory, taking root throughout the roman empire and ultimately come to dominate it?
I tend to think not. Even though Paul converted mostly Gentiles, even if the idea in Acts of him heading for the synagogues first is mostly fiction, those Gentiles would have to adopt the idea of an almighty God before accepting an apocalyptic message, to be comfortable with prophetic messages, scripture, sin, divine punishment and salvation. And when Christian doctrine defines itself in opposition to Judaism, as in Hebrews, one wonders why that would matter to pagans newly converted to a new Law-free cult, unless they had also been seriously influenced by the Judaic tradition.
Yes, it seems unlikely that followers of Jesus who were strictly a sect within Judaism in Israel would have converted the gentile world.
I have a question or suggestion for a topic for the blog or podcast, but it could be a little in the weeds. I recently spent some effort on Hebrews 1:6 where the writer seems to be citing Psalm 97:7 or perhaps more likely the Septuagint Deuteronomy 32:43 which seems itself to follow the older Hebrew in 4Q44 – 4QDeut^q of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I’d be interested in your take on what the New Testament writer was citing.
Not sure if I’ll be able to be of much help on the Scrolls, but the verse is an almost exact Greek quotation of the Septuagint Deut 32:43, the only change being the “sons” of God in the LXX is altered to “angels” of God (which is what sons of God probably means); and since the author of Hebrews otherwise uses the LXX, that seems to be his source.
In case you have access (I haven’t found it online anywhere), I’m told (ChatGPT) that the Deuteronomy in Codex Alexandrinus (and others?) have the “sons of God, worship” and “angels of God, strengthen” phrases switched so that the reading is exactly as Hebrews quotes it.
I haven’t checked, I’m afraid.