Carl Knaack

@Carlcarlhanson @MichaelPBarber Early in terms of the modern revival of this view in the late 20th century.

@KnaackCarl @MichaelPBarber Early? Compared to the second century CE?

Some people have argued that "Cephas" in Galatians is not Peter. But, as Allison shows, this is a tough sell. Also, see John 1:42 where Peter is called "Cephas." Dale C. Allison, Jr., “Peter and Cephas: One and the Same,” JBL 111 (1993): 489–95.

Save the date! Next week, Thur. May 7, 5pm Germany time/11am US ET, Benedikt Brunner (Mainz), presents “The Heavenly Jerusalem in the Reformation Revelation Commentaries of Bullinger, Chytraeus, & Hoffman.” Join here! uni-regensburg.zoom-x.de/my/revrecnet.

This is a huge crisis that points to the degradation of the Ivy League and of elite education in the United States but also of higher learning more generally. The University has been reduced to vocational training and converted into trade schools. Nothing wrong with those things. But that's not what universities are for. And sort of silly to think universities are well suited for it. Universities are for the sake of the human being qua human and therefore for learning for its own sake. The liberal arts--where you learn things for their own sake--are the arts of liberty. And the idea that you can have liberty without them is pure hokum.

Huge discovery! A team has recovered 42 pages from one of the earliest New Testament manuscripts: Codex H (015) of the 6th century. The team used multispectral imaging to decipher the letter tracings of now lost pages impressed on remaining pages. gla.ac.uk/news/headline_…

"It's one of the many oddities of contemporary academic life that few humanities professors would deem themselves humanists. In fact, if queried about the humanistic tradition, most would have only the vaguest sense of what that term means." So what next? antigonejournal.com/2021/09/humani…

@Riddle1689 @MizJChristian Martin Luther literally thought the Gospel authors made mistakes. Reformers in 15th cent Spain used the cultural context of early Rabbinic Judaism to study Paul. Coptic scholars were doing textual criticism since at least the 14th cent. How we employ scholarship is what matters.

I'm asking we retrieve the same level of textual certainty claimed by the Protestant orthodox. Their ontological claims about the Bible (as authoritative, divine, inspired, preserved, autopistic, infallible) were not dependent on "an epistemological task." When you accept Bellarmine's view (as you have) that Scripture is corrupted and must be hypothetically reconstructed then Sola Scriptura collapses (as it has for modern evangelicals) and a human authority must take its place. For Bellarmine it was the magisterium of the RCC. For many deconstructed evangelicals it is the same. For others of them it is academy.

Got a message from a friend last week seeking counsel/resources for someone he knows, trained in an evangelical seminary, who is in the process of "swimming the Tiber." He cited this person's main question as: "Where do I go in Protestantism to bind myself to a normative authority?" There has been an incalculable cost to the damage done by the evangelical and confessional Protestant embrace of modern historical criticism (including modern textual criticism) and its undermining of confidence in the Scripture as the basis for authority (Sola Scriptura).

@DavidWilberBlog That Philo reference is a great citation too, thanks. I am considering writing a short public-facing article about the Jerusalem Gift as a Holy Day offering, and a friend encouraged me to do more 2TP-Judaism comparison. It is striking just how similar it is!

@KnaackCarl Yes! I totally agree. Paul's instructions in 1 Cor 16:1-4 look very similar to the Diaspora Jewish practice of collecting and transporting festival offerings to Jerusalem via a representative (cf. Philo, Spec. Laws 1.77-78).

Did Paul stop keeping the Sabbath and festivals after becoming a follower of Yeshua? Not according to the books of Acts and 1 Corinthians. There, we see that Paul remained Torah observant (Acts 21:24; cf. 24:14–17; 25:8; 28:17) and continued to keep the Sabbath and festivals (Acts 13:14, 44; 16:13; 17:2; 18:4; 20:6, 16; 27:9; 1 Cor. 16:8). As Justin Hardin writes: "Paul was not at all critical of the Jewish calendar, but even continues to orient his life around it" (Galatians and the Imperial Cult, p. 120).

@Optilous @DavidWilberBlog We have to remember the cultural context of the New Testament as informed by inter sectarian debates amongst Jewish communities in the 2nd Temple Period debating how to keep Torah.

@DavidWilberBlog Under the law of Christ means under the law of Moses? Mixing old and new wine.

@Optilous @DavidWilberBlog The old wine is our own carnal human nature. It is not contrasting separate laws, but rather ways of keeping the Biblical Law, one way that promotes our own carnality by our ego, the other that supports others in love (see Matthew 5:18-20).

Time for the Antigone Spring Books Give-away! 40+ books and pamphlets on offer worldwide. Just repost this message and follow us, and on Sunday 3 names will be drawn. 1st chooses 20 things, 2nd 12, 3rd gets the rest. We'll add details of the items over coming days. Good luck all!

I’ve visited a few Greek Orthodox Churches recently to feed my Instagram series on London churches. All of them declare they are part of the ‘Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain.’ I am familiar with Great Britain, but where does the ‘Thyateira’ come from?

@AdlerYonatan This is something I would like to develop more in the future. I think that the pluriformity of ‘Torah’ observances in the Second Temple Period and beyond is something that warrants continued study; various communities can negotiate their relationship to traditions differently.

@KnaackCarl I sympathize with this, but I'd want to see a more detailed (and convincing!) argument that a 2nd century Torah exegete would give to settle the tension in a way that would allow a functioning temple outside of Cis-Jordan.

Julius Wellhausen claimed that the Judean community at Elephantine was a “fossilized remnant of unreformed Judaism.” To his mind, most Judeans had adopted the Torah as authoritative law by the late 5th century BCE; since the Elephantine community had not done so, it represents an aberration. While I think Wellhausen was wrong about Elephantine, it seems to me that his idea of a “fossilized remnant” of Yahwism is quite useful for a different Judean community centered on a YHWH temple in Egypt: the one in Ptolemaic and Early Roman Leontopolis. Here too, we have a temple whose location contravened the cultic centralization of Deuteronomy. Its priests were rivals to the Hasmonean priestly dynasty, for whom the Torah served as a central rallying point. All of this suggests to me that the Leontopolis community reflects a late relic of Yahwism prior to the emergence of Torah-abiding Judaism.

@AdlerYonatan I agree, authors of that period didn’t think in terms of SC identical to modern scholars, but the textual tensions that have led to SC were still in the text. Exo 20:24 says בכל המקום, implying there could be multiple places. A textual tension like this could have been used.

I appreciate the direction you are taking this. But I would push back against the way you are framing this in terms of source criticism. Late-Hellenistic Jews would not have thought of the Pentateuch in this way. As far as I can tell, Deut 12 seems pretty clear. How would a 2nd century BCE Judean who accepts the Pentateuch (including Deut 12) as binding get around this? I am open to an imaginative interpretation here.

@AdlerYonatan I was fighting a bit up against the character limit on a topic like this. Overall the multivalent character of something like the Torah, made up of multiple sources, gives a wide range of possible interpretations amongst ancient communities

@KnaackCarl Interesting comment. Thank you for this! Can you try to expand on this, though? How do you think late-Hellenistic interpreters could have gotten Deuteronomy to mean something other than forbidding sacrificial worship outside of a "chosen" site located in Cis-Jordan?

@AdlerYonatan Thanks, I think it comes down to which commandments are prioritized, focusing on different strands of the texts can result in different practices. D only requires specific sacrifices at the one place, allowing a loophole through which the Covenant Code legislation could apply.

@AmericanTorah @JennMGreenberg @JoshuaBarzon It is isn’t the only way, autodidacts can be very well read. But college is still the best way to get an education because you are exposed to other viewpoints, forcing yourself to truly understand both your own positions and those of others.

@JennMGreenberg @JoshuaBarzon Do you really think going to college is the only way to get an education or a degree?

Forbidding your daughters from going to college is more akin to the Islamic Taliban than Christianity. What’s ironic is, a degree in something like math, language, history, or medicine would greatly benefit a homeschool mom, and these guys almost always insist on homeschooling.

@jmenicucci Interesting, what is PC1 representing here? Without the PC1 part of the plot the Apocrypha fits between the LXX and NA28 parts of the graph.

This is a PCA plot showing my application of Cosine Delta to the Greek NT, the LXX, and Apocrypha texts. The plot shows that stylistically, the NT is much closer to the OT than to any Apocryphal book surveyed. It also shows that the OT is more stylistically similar to itself than to Apocryphal texts. These Apocryphal texts are all extremely similar to each other and dissimilar to both the NT and the OT combined, suggesting they represent a clearly extra-Biblical stylistic tradition.