One of Paul’s four Hauptbriefe letters, Second Corinthians, is generally acknowledged to contain genuine Pauline correspondence. Werner Georg Kummel wants to see the letter as a whole written by Paul once (Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 287-293). There aren’t really any difficulties that have suggested to several commentators that 2 Corinthians has been compiled…

Jesus declares to the Jews: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” And why? Because, asserts Jesus, the Jews, like the devil, are murderers and liars. The historical Jesus did not actually utter these words. Rather, they were scripted for him by John’s author or authors as…

Many scholars have concluded that the Fourth Gospel has been composed in a series of stages. Raymond Brown, for example, developed an elaborate theory correlating different compositional layers with the different historical phases of the ‘Johannine community’ (See Brown 1979), a theory that to some scholars seems to push the evidence too far. Debates about…

Literary dependence of the Fourth Gospel on the Synoptic Gospels The hypothesis of the literary dependence of the Fourth Gospel on the Synoptic Gospels has recently become persuasive to a significant number of scholars. They point to evident similarities between numerous fragments of the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels. Moreover, they usually argue that…

From The Five Gospels (Funk, Hoover, 1993, Harper Collins): These sayings fail the the major criteria, as outlined by Dale Martin, used to determine if something was likely historical (https://youtu.be/d_dOhg-Fpu0?si=guAXsSrRg4LJtJRi): Ehrman in Jesus also claims that the historical Jesus likely viewed himself as the messiah in a future, temporal kingdom ushered in by God, but…

For any book of the Bible, but especially the New Testament, there are many conservative scholars whose audience is primarily devotional or pastoral and would prefer to understand the scriptures as discrete, synchronic works—each written by the person whose name appears in the title if at all possible, although that ship has long sailed for…

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” Dennis R. MacDonald offers a provocative explanation of those scandalous words of Christ from the Fourth Gospelan explanation that he argues would hardly have surprised some of the Gospel’s early readers. John sounds themes that would have instantly been…

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/harvard-theological-review/article/abs/was-martha-of-bethany-added-to-the-fourth-gospel-in-the-second-century/6CBD2C9576A583DD02987FE836C427B7 This study examines the text transmission of the figure of Martha of Bethany throughout the Fourth Gospel in over one hundred of our oldest extant Greek and Vetus Latina witnesses. The starting point for this study is instability around Martha in our most ancient witness of John 11–12, Papyrus 66. By looking at P66’s…

The internal evidence for Lazarus as the “beloved disciple” is so strong that even conservative New Testament scholar Ben Witherington supports this interpretation of the figure’s identity. In “Was Lazarus the Beloved Disciple?,” Witherington explains:It has been common in Johannine commentaries to suggest that the Beloved Disciple as a figure in the narrative does not…