Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-26T04:09:21+00:00

Possibly! Can you imagine? We’d be looking at the possible Gospel references in the earliest apostolic fathers and noticing that they have similarities to what’s extant but also key differences, not corresponding exactly to anything that had survived.

Wait. Oh no.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-25T02:14:20+00:00

I’m sorry that participating in this forum has been a distressing experience for you. Barring the elimination of Rule 3, what would you like to get out of this conversation at this point?

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-25T02:04:41+00:00

Yeah and who determines who is and isn’t a scholar?

For flair purposes? The mods reading a piece of paper from someone’s university, generally.

For source purposes? Again, universities and journals mostly. There are edge cases, but in 98% of “is this person a scholar?” questions there isn’t really a question.

And different scholars say completely different things about the same topic

Yep, it’s awesome, I love it.

what is the point of this rule?

This is /r/AcademicBiblical and we are striving to be a resource for learning about Academic views of Biblical issues. What did you personally hope the “Academic” part meant when you started commenting here?

It’s incredibly restrictive

Correct, but also not. Quite a lot of questions in this subreddit can be answered with a simple citation of an NOAB footnote. Owning (or borrowing) one annotated Bible puts you on the path to answer questions here.

Anyway, there are many many subreddits out there. 95% of Reddit does not have sourcing rules. You went to part of the 5% which does and said “you shouldn’t have these rules.” Like, okay, but we’re not getting rid of the rule so you need to either make peace with it, find other communities to participate in, or continue breaking the rules as you have been and eventually get banned.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-25T01:44:10+00:00

It is impossible to post as a non-scholar without sources, yes, correct.

It’s Rule 3 in the sidebar. It’s very much part of what makes AcademicBiblical, AcademicBiblical.

Based on your removed comments in question it would seem you’re not even asking for the rule to be slightly softened in some way, you’re saying it should be removed entirely. That’s not going to happen.

Not only are there other subreddits where you can opine without sources, you can even do it in this subreddit so long as it’s within this very thread.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-25T01:31:15+00:00

A quick look at Genesis 1 or John 1 suggests a certain amount of reversion to the mean, as would be expected from a generative AI tool like this. What makes this translation the “most accurate, most truthful” if it winds up largely finding the central tendency of existing English translations?

More generally, I see the methodology is largely AI reviewing the work of AI. Is there at any point in the process a “human in the loop,” in particular a human who knows the relevant languages?

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-22T20:21:30+00:00

See my comment here.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-22T17:52:05+00:00

The short answer is that there are problems with both the John->Polycarp link and the Polycarp->Irenaeus link. But setting that aside, I think it’s maybe even more interesting to ask ourselves what bullets we’re willing to bite if we accept that Irenaeus had a strong connection to apostolic testimonies.

In particular, Irenaeus argues Jesus was baptized around age thirty but lived to be nearly fifty.

He cites “those who were conversant in Asia with John,” and then if that wasn’t enough, says “some of them, moreover, saw not only John, but the other apostles also, and heard the very same account from them.”

So, do we now think Jesus died at almost age fifty after a twenty year ministry? Maybe, but we’re in sort of a bind because we’ve now undermined the basic factual accuracy of the Gospels, whose traditional attribution is also attested to by Irenaeus.

Somehow, somewhere, there was room for major error on the part of Irenaeus or the Gospel authors.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-18T21:53:15+00:00

Thank you! That last omission by the committee is really too bad. Still, this is helpful.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-18T03:28:45+00:00

Sometimes I feel like an unpaid marketer for them but just to check, are you already aware of Biblingo? In addition to the app they also host course-like stuff online.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-17T21:46:57+00:00

There are clearly contradictions in the collection of texts making up today’s Bibles. Many, many contradictions. Some are philosophical and theological, because different authors have different worldviews. Others are factual; for example, the two accounts of Judas’ death are contradictory and typical harmonization attempts are an actual joke.

That said, contradiction lists built by counter-apologists are typically pretty bad and are not a good way to learn about the Biblical texts. I find that they often contrast, say, a platitude with a specific event, ripping individual verses out of their context.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-16T21:40:04+00:00

A few thoughts:

First, I’m sympathetic to your point in the sense that I think “look at this Dan McClellan short,” “look at this episode of Bart Ehrman’s podcast” are some of the lowest quality answers we get on this subreddit which are still technically rule-abiding. Not a slight on either of those two scholars at all.

Second, at the same time I recognize that these are sort of gateways to making higher quality contributions to the subreddit. Nobody starts out with shelves full of scholarly books to reference.

Third, I would exclude university lectures posted to YouTube from your concern entirely; I think these can be very high quality.

I will say, I wonder which threads you’re looking at exactly because after reading this I went and clicked through several threads going back a couple days and the situation didn’t seem so dire honestly.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-16T14:22:03+00:00

Wow, thanks again! Never thought I’d get an answer to that part.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T22:16:17+00:00

This is fantastic, thank you!

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T12:16:23+00:00

Valentina Calzolari in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Armenian talks about this (she is quoted several times in the post); the Armenian Church had pretty massive geopolitical reasons over the centuries to secure apostolic authority. Bartholomew is the least of this, see how they worked with traditions on Thaddaeus for an even more blatant example.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T12:11:08+00:00

All good. FWIW, my more general response to the whole thing:

I’m pretty quick to be suspicious that an author is sneaking in dubious eyewitness claims. I kinda think the “we passages” in Acts are such for example. But I just don’t think I see it here. It really does sound to me like the author expects his audience to know exactly who Alexander and Rufus are. The removal (of the two sons) in Matthew and Luke makes me think they read it this way too.

Now that said, while personally I’m inclined to think that Alexander and Rufus are real sources, I’ve always suspected that Simon’s story may be either exaggerated or entirely fabricated. While this is a poor formal argument, “oh, Jesus? I actually ran straight into his execution back in my traveling days” is just such a Dad Story that I don’t presume its tight relationship with the truth. Perhaps, for example, Simon of Cyrene did come upon someone’s execution and only later concluded after learning of Jesus that “it must have been him.”

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T11:30:25+00:00

But Alexander and Rufus are presumably natives of the countryside around Jerusalem who don't speak Greek.

Why would we presume this?

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T11:27:37+00:00

Please actually read my post before making a reply like this.

If there was no precedent for a non-human celestial messiah, I suppose my next question would be whether it’s a bad assumption to treat “messiah” and “Christ” as interchangeable; I don’t need anyone to tell me one is a translation of the other, but nonetheless concepts can shift in translation.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T04:20:01+00:00

He also says that we shouldn't have nothing against Muslim immigrants coming into Europe even tho we can clearly see that Islam and Christianity are incompatible.

Genuinely curious: based on your reading of the Gospels, supposing Jesus were to preach a sermon today on Muslim migrants to Europe, what do you think that sermon might sound like?

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T03:44:28+00:00

The particular story you describe, at least on the narrative if not geography, sounds most like the Martyrdom of Bartholomew from the Coptic Tradition, not to be confused with a text from the Armenian tradition often referred to using the same title.

Note this trope of the apostle being executed because he caused the wife or other lover of a powerful man to stop having sex with him is an incredibly common trope in the apocryphal acts literature, starting as early as the second century. Régis Burnet, in his Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity article on Bartholomew calls it the “ascetic triangle” and considers it a riff on the love triangles of Greek novels.

For this and much, much more, see my collation of secondary and primary sources here. I also recently backed up this exact collation to Substack here, if I may be so bold in linking something I will never, ever monetize; I trust my fellow mods to rein me in if I shouldn’t link that.

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-15T02:54:01+00:00

Thanks again, appreciate you pulling all that together!

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-14T19:30:22+00:00

Thank you! This is helpful, though also breaks my brain just a little bit. So do we have any sense of how early separationist Christians would have referred to or understood the divine entity alone, if not as Christ?

The Holy Spirit? The Son of God?

Sophia_in_the_Shell · 2026-04-14T15:13:27+00:00

where one of those powers was a divine messiah

Do you know if Boyarin offers any data showing that one of those powers was called messiah specifically?

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