Women's participation in early church was countercultural but distinctly Christian

Mike discusses the contrast with Jewish and Greco-Roman culture.

Philo uses akatakalupto coupled with kephale to refer to cloth coverings

Mike provides first-century textual evidence for cloth covering meaning.

Spiritual resurrection theory refuted by the meaning of the word 'resurrection' in first-century Jewish context — N.T. Wright's scholarship

Systematic refutation of the spiritual resurrection theory, citing N.T. Wright's work on Jewish meaning of resurrection

Calling Apollonius a 'son of God' in a pagan Greco-Roman sense (some divine energy or lower-case god quality) is fundamentally different from Jesus being declared Son of God in the Jewish context, where it meant equality with God (John 5). The New Testament is a Jewish document, not a pagan one, and conflating Jewish and pagan divine-sonship language muddies the comparison.

Unlikely origin of the disciples' belief in the deity of Jesus — fifth argument

McLatchie introduces the argument that the disciples' belief in Jesus's deity is historically inexplicable without the resurrection, given the Jewish context.

Objection: Jesus's deity borrowed from pagan deities — and response

Addressing the popular online claim that the deity of Jesus was borrowed from pagan mythologies.

First-century Christians were pious, Torah-observant Jews who debated minutiae of Jewish law — making wholesale borrowing from pagan myths implausible

Cultural argument against the pagan parallels theory

Audience Q on mimesis: pagan parallels fail for the same reasons, plus early Christians were Torah-observant Jews who would not borrow from pagan myths

Audience question about mimesis / pagan parallel arguments

John 3:5 "born of water and the Spirit": Mike defers to Michael Heiser's podcast work placing this in its Jewish context

Question from Jesse Crocus about whether "born of water" in John 3:5 refers to water baptism, physical birth, or something else