Footnote Famous

When was the New Testament actually published? Not written — published. Manuscript scholar David Trobisch, one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, argues it appeared as a single, carefully edited four-volume book in the second half of the 2nd century, about 150 years after Jesus.
We talk about why there was never a council that "picked" the books, how a dispute over the date of Easter left its mark on the four gospels, how to hear the editor's voice in the text, why Marcion's gospel may have come before Luke, and who might have edited the New Testament: Polycarp of Smyrna, or Irenaeus.

Watch This Interview Live📚 David's book — On the Origin of Christian Scripture

🎯 CHAPTERS
00:00 The myth of how we got the New Testament
03:45 Start with the manuscripts
06:24 Why some books survive: conflict
09:51 The Easter dispute & four gospels as compromise
13:03 Dating the New Testament to 160–200 AD
14:45 One book, four volumes
21:02 Story vs. history: the trap in NT scholarship
26:28 "There was never a council"
29:24 What other collections teach us
31:04 A hundred 2nd-century books about Jesus
40:45 Hearing the editor's voice in John
48:52 Matthew the tax collector: building credibility
54:23 Miraculous discoveries & provenance stories
56:29 Acts dates itself: literature vs. document
58:47 Marcion's gospel came first
1:05:19 What the editors added
1:13:19 Who edited the New Testament?
1:16:30 The Carpus clue in 2 Timothy
1:19:12 Polycarp or Irenaeus?
1:20:30 Rethinking the synoptic problem
1:26:40 Read your New Testament looking for the editor

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Watch this on YouTube - https://youtu.be/txVqkdQyv-E
What is sin, where does it come from, and how does God fix it? Early Christians gave very different answers, and each answer produced a different Christianity. Historian Paula Fredriksen joins me to walk through her book Sin: The Early History of an Idea, from John the Baptist and Paul through Valentinus, Marcion, Justin Martyr, Origen, and finally Augustine, whose vision of original sin came to dominate the West.We cover:- Why Paul saw Sin, Flesh, and Death as cosmic powers, not moral metaphors- The New Perspective (and the newer "Paul within Judaism" perspective)- How ancient cosmology determined what "salvation" could even mean- Valentinus's myth of Sophia and the accidental origin of matter- Marcion's God of love vs. the God of the Jews, and Justin Martyr's opposite move- Origen's breathtaking system, in which God saves everyone (even the stars)- How Augustine invented original sin and turned God into a late Roman judgeThis conversation wraps up our summer book club on Sin. Thanks to everyone who read along!━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 👉 Get the Armchair Bible Scholar Emails 👉 https://www.cjcornthwaite.com/armchair-bible-scholar Community - https://www.cjcornthwaite.com/community Substack - https://substack.com/@cjcornthwaite 📱 FOLLOW FOR MORE - YouTube: @cjcornthwaite - Instagram: @cjcornthwaite- Website: cjcornthwaite.com- Email: cjcornthwaite@proton.me🎙️ FOOTNOTE FAMOUS (MY PODCAST)Conversations with the world’s top scholars of the Bible and Christian origins. 🔗https://www.footnotefamous.com/

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What is an apocalypse, really — and why do we keep reducing it to "the end of the world"? In this episode, I sit down with John J. Collins, one of the foremost scholars of ancient Judaism and Christian origins, to discuss his newest book, Apocalypticism as a Worldview in Ancient Judaism.
Collins — who literally helped write the modern definition of "apocalypse" as a genre back in the 1970s — walks us through what fifty years of scholarship (and the full publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls) have revealed about this strange, vivid literature. We talk about Daniel's statue of four kingdoms and the idea of "total history," the myth of the Watchers as an allegory for cultural upheaval, the Persian roots of Jewish dualism, the puzzle of the Son of Man in the Similitudes of Enoch, and why the "end" in apocalyptic thought is never really the end — it's always the doorway to something else: resurrection, judgment, a new creation, life with the angels.
Along the way, we get into trauma and apocalyptic literature, the messy boundary between early Judaism and Christianity, and how geopolitical pressure from Persia, Greece, and Rome shaped the way these texts imagined history and the cosmos.
Whether you know Daniel and Enoch inside and out or you're just apocalypse-curious, this is a rich, wide-ranging conversation about one of the most influential and misunderstood genres in the ancient world.

John J. Collins - Apocalypticism as a Worldview

00:00:00 – Introduction & welcome
00:01:01 – What is an apocalypse? Defining the term
00:02:14 – Building the genre definition: the 1970s SBL project
00:06:39 – How the Dead Sea Scrolls changed the field
00:07:24 – Ongoing debates: does "apocalypticism" even exist as a category?
00:07:42 – Genre in action: the case of Fourth Ezra
00:09:11 – Daniel's statue and the idea of "total history"
00:15:52 – A Persian parallel: the Zoroastrian Bahman Yasht
00:17:47 – Prophecy after the fact (Daniel 11 and vaticinium ex eventu)
00:20:06 – The end isn't the end: resurrection and the afterlife as innovation
00:22:58 – Mythic frameworks: the combat myth (Baal, Yam, and Daniel 7)
00:30:05 – The Watchers as allegory for cultural disruption
00:33:04 – Dualism, Zoroastrian influence, and the Dead Sea Scrolls
00:36:32 – The Visions of Amram and the Melchizedek/Melchiresha figures
00:38:20 – Ascending to heaven: the evolving picture of the afterlife
00:41:51 – Millenarianism and the restoration of Israel
00:43:22 – The Similitudes of Enoch, the Son of Man, and Christian transmission
00:52:06 – Q&A: Was "apocalypse" a category ancient readers recognized?
00:54:47 – Q&A: Reading Daniel through a trauma-informed lens
00:57:12 – Q&A: Thoughts on Michael Heiser's divine council/watcher work
00:59:37 – Q&A: "The time is fulfilled" — Mark, Daniel, and apocalyptic timelines
01:02:31 – The Jewish–Christian "parting of the ways" reconsidered
01:05:31 – Geopolitical fault lines: Persia, Greece, Rome, and apocalyptic literature
01:09:03 – Closing thoughts

Over the first season of Footnote Famous I interviewed 22 Bible scholars, and I read every one of their books cover to cover before we spoke. Some of what I heard confirmed things I already suspected. Five ideas genuinely changed how I read the New Testament — and I haven't been able to stop thinking about them since.In this season one roundup I walk through all five: why the "gospel communities" every seminary teaches may be an invention of 19th-century German Romanticism; why the Christmas story might originally have been about John the Baptist; why the Paul we read could be third-hand at best; why Luke looks like he was reading Josephus; and why "faith" didn't originally mean what Augustine made it mean.Featuring conversations with Dr. Robin Faith Walsh, Dr. James McGrath, Dr. Markus Vinzent, Dr. Steve Mason, and Dr. Teresa Morgan.Full interviews:Ep. 2 — Robin Faith Walsh Ep. 3 — James McGrathEp. 5 — Markus VinzentEp. 10 — Steve MasonEp. 18 — Teresa MorganBooks mentioned (Sponsored Links):- Robin Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature 👉 - James McGrath, John of History, Baptist of Faith (and the popular version, Christmaker) - Markus Vinzent, Resetting the Origins of Christianity and Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity - Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament - Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith - Paula Fredriksen, Ancient Christianities — not on the list, but everyone should read itQuestions this episode answers:Where did the idea of "gospel communities" come from?Was the nativity story originally about John the Baptist?Have Paul's letters been edited?Did Luke use Josephus as a source?What did the Greek word pistis actually mean?A reconstructed Baptist infancy
👉 Get the Armchair Bible Scholar Emails 👉 https://www.cjcornthwaite.com/armchair-bible-scholar Community - https://www.cjcornthwaite.com/community Substack - https://substack.com/@cjcornthwaite 📱 FOLLOW FOR MORE - YouTube: @cjcornthwaite - Instagram: @cjcornthwaite- Website: cjcornthwaite.com- Email: cjcornthwaite@proton.me

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Did the author of Luke's Gospel actually know the geography of first-century Palestine? In this interview, biblical scholar John Kloppenborg — my own PhD supervisor at the University of Toronto — breaks down the evidence that Luke's geography is full of errors, and explains what those mistakes reveal about Luke's sources. Kloppenborg identifies three levels of geographic knowledge in ancient texts: place names, relational knowledge (how places connect), and deep local knowledge. Using this framework, he shows that Luke has genuine local knowledge of sailing routes in the Aegean, only relational knowledge of the Levantine coast, and almost no accurate knowledge of the interior of Galilee and Judea — where Jesus's own ministry supposedly took place.We look at specific geographical mistakes in Luke's Gospel: Nazareth called a "polis" (city) when it was a village of a few hundred people, the feeding of the 5,000 near Bethsaida, and the confused travel narrative in Luke 9–19 where Jesus seems to be in two places at once. Kloppenborg argues this points to Luke using an ancient map — possibly a predecessor of the Tabula Peutingeriana — to reconstruct a journey through territory he had never visited.
Tabula Peutingeriana Interactive Map 🔗PDF of John's Chapter - “Luke’s Geography: Knowledge, Ignorance, Sources, and Spatial Conception.”
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