Article Moses scholarship has long held that the name “Moses” is one of the irreducible elements of the Moses narrative and would be an essential link to the exodus tradition, if it indeed is derived from the Egyptian root mśy, “to be born”.In Manetho, Moses is identified with a rebellious Egyptian priest Osarseph as the…

Introduction 📜The four gospels of the New Testament are arranged in harmony in the Diatessaron, which was composed by Tatian, an early Christian writer and theologian, around 170 AD. It is the earliest known example of a gospel harmony and served as the standard gospel text for approximately 200 years in many churches in the…

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Was Polycarp a student of John, son of Zebedee?There was a tendency among the different sects to claim apostolic succession. Ehrman states:“Irenaeus… claimed that Papias was a companion of the disciple of Jesus, John the Son of Zebedee. But Eusebius, who actually read Papias’s book, claims that this is incorrect. Based on what Papias himself…

Mentioning Paul by name The author of 1 Clement mentions Paul twice by name: Paul among the apostles: Of citations and allusions:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Dating of 1 Clement 📜On the internal evidence for the dating of 1 Clement, Welborn writes (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 1, p. 1060):The epistle is customarily dated to the end of the reign of Domitian (95 or 96 C.E.). In the first sentence of the letter, the author explains that the Roman church has…

Primacy of Peter 📜Biblical scholars on this have it that he comes in for some harsh treatment in the synoptics, although this could reflect factional struggles after Peter.Maurice Casey argued, in Jesus of Nazareth:..Equally, however, some aspects of Jesus’ speech appear to be secondary. The first is its connection with ‘Peter’s confession’, as it is…

Even if Papias learned about the two writings he is referring to from the Apostle John, son of Zebedee—which is highly unlikely—his descriptions of Peter’s sermons and Matthew’s oracles are not at all like the gospels we have today. He says the following: Since Mark appears to be a narrative and the account is organized,…

Papias was a chiliast. His teacher evidently taught him chiliasm and was looking forward to the thousand year reign. He does NOT seem to know of John’s gospel. This is evident from the fact that no Church Father cites him as a source from whom the authorship of John can be determined; neither does he…