Michael Kok looked at Brooke Wescott's take on the Muratorian Fragment. Over at Intertextual Bible you will find an interesting piece comparing the Hebrew text of the book of Micah with that of the LXX. Mark Goodacre asks just how much we can trust the portrait of Paul we find in the Acts of the Apostles. CJ Cornthwaite talks about a Bible "errors" that are often subtle and are created by either our English translations, the hermeneutics we use to read them, or the shape and nature of the canon.

Bill T. Arnold, "Deuteronomy," in The SBL Study Bible, edited by Steven L. McKenzie, Kristin De Troyer, and F. Scott Spencer (HarperOne, 2023), 280-281. Deuteronomy combines nearly the entire deposit of Israel's faith traditions and reconfigures them as a message of one God (Yahweh), memorably crystallized in the Shema's creedal refrain, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone" (6.4).

John Nelson looks at the darkened sun in the account of Jesus's crucifixion and whether it was an eclipse. A little while back, Michael Kok began a series on the dating of the Muratorian Fragment. Mark Goodacre talks about "realized eschatology" and the influence of CH Dodd on Johannine studies. The team at Intertextual Bible posted a really interesting piece on the use of the book of Genesis in the book of Esther…

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode eighty of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:1b.”1 We are continuing our series on the book of Jonah, using the tools from our Amateur Toolbox.2 (As a reminder, if you’re interested in digging deeper, the script for each episode can be found at my website – amateurexegete.com – and they include endnotes that offer citations and further discussion.) In the last episode, covering the first half of Jonah 1:1, we noted that the opening of the book looks rather abrupt, as if we are joining the story as it's already underway.

Dan McClellan responds to "proof" that Jesus is God, especially in relationship to the Trinity. Brent Nongbri reviews The Gospel according to Hobby Lobby by Michael Blanding. Looks to be another interesting work covering the Green family. Robyn Walsh talks about publishing in antiquity. Mark Goodacre queries whether the beloved disciple was from Jerusalem. If you see Heather Thiessen on the street, …

Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 2:xlv-xlvi: Although David is clearly represented as a divinely elected king in , he is also seen quite strikingly in all his human weakness, in his relentlessness, and in his moral ambiguity - hardly a figure of royal propaganda. And in regard to the issue of historical causation, events here are the consequence of human actions - in the preponderance of these stories, there is nothing miraculous and no divine intervention.

"[H]e thought of Carol on the day her mother had taken all of them to Savin Rock. His friend Bobby had won some money from a three-card monte dealer that day and Carol had worn her blue bathing suit on the beach and sometimes she'd give Bobby that look, the one that said he was killing her and death was sweet.

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-nine of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Jonah 1:1a.”1 Perhaps you’ve seen a nursery painted with murals of stories from the Bible. On one wall stands a rosy-cheeked Noah, his wife by his side, and a boat full of elephants, bears, giraffes, and – if the nursery was painted by Young Earth Creationists – a few dinosaurs.

"Baby, they's justice and they's mercy. If you not sure what to do and you gotta choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don't hurt nearly like bad justice, and always remember, the Eye of God can see." - Allen Levi, Theo of Golden…

Steve Mason, "Was Josephus a Source for Luke-Acts?" in On Using Sources in Graeco-Roman, Jewish, and Early Christian Literature, edited by Joseph Verheyden, John S. Kloppenborg, Geert Roskam, and Stefan Schorn (Peeters, 2022), 231. To sum up this section: the several puzzles of Acts 21,38 – (1) that Luke would choose Latin sicarii for Judaean militants, (2) that he should locate them out in the desert rather than in the city, and (3) that he should place the Egyptian at their head – are not well solved by imagining another source that made such a combination.

"You need to stop clinging to the notion that there's only one right path. You'll waste half your time panicking you're not on it, and the rest backtracking to find it." - Joe Abercrombie, The Devils (Tor Publishing, 2025), "Reverses." What did Jesus look like? No idea, Robyn Walsh observes. And the Gospels' silence on the matter is, as she intimates, striking.

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-eight of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “A Feeding Miracle, Bethsaida, and Undesigned Coincidences.”1 In her 2017 book Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts,2 philosopher Lydia McGrew makes the argument that the reason Jesus asks Philip in John 6:6 where they can find bread to feed the five thousand is because, Luke’s version of the story tells us (Luke 9:11), the miracle happened at Bethsaida, the city the Johannine Evangelist reports was the town from which Philip hailed (John 1:44).

Mark Goodacre. The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John’s Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2025. Paperback. $29.99. Pp. 205. ISBN 9780802875136. That Matt. and Luke knew and made use of the Gospel of Mark is pretty much the consensus among New Testament scholars.1 But what about the Gospel of John? Did its author also utilize Mark?

We often hear of and talk about the "Gnostics." But how accurate and useful is the term? Robyn Walsh addresses this in a recent video.

Annalisa Phillips Wilson, "Those 'in the Lord' Are Free: 1 Corinthians 7 and a Stoic Paradox," JTS 76 (2025), 466-467. In verse 22, Paul says that the slave who has been called is the Lord’s freedman (ἀπελεύθερος), a statement that echoes the well-known paradox of the ‘free slave’. The notion of a sage who, through his virtue, maintained metaphorical freedom while legally enslaved arises in numerous texts, as seen below, and is especially associated with Stoic teaching.

Patrick J. Hartin, James, SP 14 (Liturgical Press, 2009), 80. Not only does James show himself to be heir to the traditions of Israelite wisdom, he is also heir to the way in which Jesus appropriated the Israelite wisdom traditions. Like Jesus, James shows a decided concern for and identification with the poor. Witherington identifies James as a "sage from below" (165).

Michael B. Hundley, "What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 1: The Divine Cast of Characters," ANE Today 13.7 (July 2025). Most assume that angels (literally messengers) are not gods, using the circular argument that they cannot be gods since there is only one god. However, monotheistic assumptions aside, there is no compelling reason to exclude angels from the god category and many reasons to include them.

Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 1:473. The brilliant centerpiece among these citations of archaic poetry is the oracles of Balaam (chapters 23 and 24), which follow the story of Balaam and his she-ass, tracing a cunning network of analogies to it. That story has often been characterized as a folktale, and there are no other instances of talking animals in the historical narratives of the Bible (the only other candidate, the serpent in the Garden story, belongs to the primeval and hence more mythological phase of biblical literature).

Gregory E. Sterling, "Secondary Prefaces and the Composition of Luke Acts," NTS 71 no. 2 (2025), 154-155. How long was the interval between Luke and Acts? We do not have any way to answer this with specificity – just as we cannot speak with confidence about the length of the gap between Philo’s De vita Moysis 1 and 2. It is clear that the author did some additional research as the shift of the time of the ascension makes clear.

YouTube video by Bible and Theology Matters

Rogier Boogaard and Arjan van den Os, "The Angel Strikes: The Sennacherib Narrative in 2 Kings 18-19 as a Background to Herod's Death in Acts 12:20-23, NovT 68 (2026), 45-46. The nature of Herod’s offense is specified at the end of Acts 12:23: “he had not given glory to God” (οὐκ ἔδωκεν τὴν δόξαν τῷ θεῷ). This statement is puzzling at first, because it was the crowd who engaged in idolatrous worship, not Herod.

Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 276. The fate of John and Mark was a form of institutional domestication that had already begun when Matthew and Luke wrote to correct Mark. Jesus was not an incomprehensible mystery even if there is a proper sense of mystery and God's secrets are on the horizon.

A. Andrew Das, "Israel's Scriptures in Galatians," in Israel's Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New, edited by Matthias Henze and David Lincicum (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 395-396. Galatians 3:16 quotes exactly what the Scripture "says" (λέγει) in Gen 13:15 LXX as Paul returns to the topic of the plural "sons" of Abraham raised in Gal 3:6-7.

Angela Roskop Erisman, "Numbers," in The SBL Study Bible, edited by Steven L. McKenzie, Kristin De Troyer, and F. Scott Spencer (HarperOne, 2023), 221. Reading the book of Numbers can be a frustrating experience. The early Christian theologian Origen famously encouraged those who come to Scripture's table to "reject it and spit it out" in favor of more palatable fare, such as the book of Genesis, perhaps.

Warren Throckmorton. The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History. Broadleaf Books, 2026. Hardcover. $32.99. Pp. ix + 319. ISBN 979-8-8898-3582-0. Introduction In The Christian Past That Wasn’t, retired psychology professor and avid armchair historian Warren Throckmorton gives us a blow-by-blow survey and dismantling of key pseudohistorical arguments advanced by contemporary Christian nationalists. Riveting, accessible, and topical, this book is a gotta-read for anyone interested in the church-state front of the culture wars generally, and the rightwing evangelical distortion and weaponization of U.S.

Paula Fredriksen. Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. Princeton University Press, 2024. Hardcover. $29.95. Pp. 288. ISBN 9780691157696. When I took my first church history class sometime around 2002 at Pensacola Christian College,1 the textbook was written from a dispensationalist perspective wherein the framework for studying Christian history was to be found in Jesus’s letters to the seven churches in Rev.

Peter H. Davids, The Epistle of James, NIGTC (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1982), 57. James is concerned about the testing of faith in situations of economic deprivation. He sees the test made critical by the presence of the evil impulse, the temper within, who answers to the devil without. The setting is the dualistic conflict of Christ and the world/devil.

Jaime Clark Soles, "Israel's Scriptures in John," in Israel's Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New, edited by Matthias Henze and David Lincicum (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023), 300. Woman Wisdom is powerfully alluded to in John. Read the prologue (John 1:1-18) alongside Prov 8:22-31; Sir 24:1-9; and Prov 1:20-33, and John casts Jesus in the mould of Woman Wisdom.

Nicholas J. Moore, "Jude and the Watchers in the Early Church," NovT 68 (2026), 92-93. While 2 Peter offers less explicit engagement with Enochic traditions than does Jude, the wording of 2 Pet 2:4 is striking in establishing a further link with the Watchers tradition. The expression “when the angels sinned” (a genitive absolute, ἀγγέλων ἁμαρτησάντων) is generic and underdetermined, certainly by comparison with Jude, but the location and means of their detention is more specific than in Jude.

Steve A. Wiggins, "First, Kings" (4.1.26), steveawiggins.com. Accessed 4.7.26. Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed. Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem). Alas, poor Uriah. The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.

Note: This will be the final Roundup until September. Between the kids' summer break, vacation, and everything else under the (blazing hot) sun, I don't think I'll have much time to put it together until school starts back in a few months. So, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, have a great summer. For those of you below the equator, good luck!

Kevin M. Levin, "What We Owe the Past" (3.18.26), kevinmlevin.substack.com. Accessed 4.1.26. Future generations will almost certainly look back at us with bewilderment and grief. Perhaps it will be our treatment of animals, raised and slaughtered by the billion in conditions of documented suffering, which we know about and mostly prefer not to think about. Perhaps it will be climate change, not the fact of it, but the years we spent debating it while the window to act narrowed.

"When we use AI to flesh out ideas, we lose the most important part of the writing process: thinking." - Eve Fairbanks, "The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI," The Atlantic (5.29.26). Dan McClellan looks at "mind-blowing Bible facts" that are not mind-blowing and not facts. Robyn Walsh discusses why so many Christian mss come from Egypt.

Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014), 427. To attempt to explain the world today through the categories of the common religious consciousness is to live in a kind of moral chaos. It is to inhabit a house of fractured mirrors, where submission to inscrutable authorities counts as freedom, where that which is good for the health of the individual and the collective is called evil, and where all are expected to bear the lifelong burden of pretending to believe one thing while doing another.

Norman Franklin, "The Story of Naboth's Vineyard and the Ancient Winery in Jezreel" (5.13.17), thetorah.com. Accessed 3.4.26. Evidence from Assyrian texts show that at the same time that Naboth is pictured as tending his grapes (Omride period), Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria is described as having provided 10,000 wineskins at an inaugural party at his new palace in Calah, where he wined and dined 70,000 guests. 

"Temperament is destiny...." - Jeffrey Goldberg, "The Pete Hegseth Exception" (3.9.26), theatlantic.com. Accessed 4.2.26. I am currently reading through the Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters and have really enjoyed it. So, I was happy to hear that it is finalist for a Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction. How exciting! Jodi Magness looks back at her career for…

Stephen Young, "Donald Trump's Violent Mentality is Quite Literally Biblical" (2.23.26), religiondispatches.org. Accessed 2.24.26. The Bible gets even darker in its norms for warfare. Deuteronomy’s law code tolerates one exception to the genocide of the conquered: if the vanquished are from a city outside of the promised land, then the women and children can be spared … for enslaving!

"Those you argue against always shape your argument." - Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 8. Over on Facebook, Constantine Campbell linked to a volume he's been working on as editor, namely The Greek New Testament Study Bible. I regularly use my Reader's Greek New Testament and so I'm eager to see what this edition has to offer.

James F. McGrath, The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too (Eerdmans, 2023), 66-67. Once again we have to ask whether Matthew missed the original context […