In his influential work, Kyrios Christos, Wilhelm Bousset confessed that he had vacillated and was still vacillating on the question of whether the creation of the title υἱòς θɛo⋯ (“Son of God”) as an epithet for Jesus ought to be attributed to the earliest community of his followers in Palestine. He tentatively took the position that the oldest community of followers of Jesus described him as the παῖς θɛo⋯ (“Servant of God”) in a messianic interpretation of the servant-poems of Second Isaiah. This epithet, he thought, was in considerable tension with the notion of Jesus as the Son of God, making it unlikely that both epithets originated in the same context. He argued that the statement of the divine voice in the scenes of baptism and transfiguration, “You are my Son,” is a tradition that circulated in the earliest community but that this address is a far cry from the title “Son of God.” He was thus inclined to conclude that this title originated “on Greek ground, in the Greek language.” He argued that the confession of Jesus as the Son of God by the Gentile centurion in Mark 15:39 cannot be understood as a recognition of Jesus as the Jewish messiah. Rather, “Son of God” was the formula chosen by the evangelist to express the identity of Jesus Christ for the faith of the Gentile Christian community.

In the eye of a protracted political storm, the rabbinic sages of the first centuries of the common era preserved and nurtured their Jewish heritage. This was not a univocal heritage, but one of significant diversity. Although these rabbis were fully aware of the divisiveness that had plagued Jewish religious attitudes over the centuries, they turned debate and dissent into their very trademark. Whether in matters legal, ethical, or theological, differing and even contradictory opinions were the norm. A natural result of this rabbinic posture is that the entire rabbinic corpus is anthological. We do not possess individual works of the rabbis, great as they might have been. We have instead catenae or collections of statements. Sometimes they represent real conversations between sages, but other times they reflect an editorial juxtaposition of opposing views. These characteristics of rabbinic literature create a formidable challenge for those who wish to treat rabbinic thought systematically.

In a letter to Paula, in which he includes a list of Origen's Pauline commentaries, Jerome refers to a commentary on Philemon. There is no extant Greek manuscript tradition of this commentary by Origen. There are also no Greek fragments attributed to Origen in the catena commentary on Philemon edited by Cramer from the eleventh-century codex Parisinus Coislin 204. The Codex von der Goltz, which has provided helpful information on some of Origen's other Pauline commentaries, has only two brief, marginal references to Origen on the textual reading of Philemon at verses 10 and 12. The only known portion of Origen's commentary on Philemon that has been preserved is a fragment of his comments on Philemon 5 in Rufinus's Latin translation of In Apologeticum S. Pamphili.

Historians of ancient Christianity derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that Athanasius of Alexandria, the fervent architect of Nicene Christianity, should also be the first known ecclesiastical authority to “list precisely the twenty-seven books that eventually formed the generally accepted canon of the New Testament.” This intersection of canon and creed abets the notion that Christianity matured and solidified in the latter half of the fourth century; henceforth heresy and extracanonical reading would together constitute evidence of theological backsliding, or, worse, deliberate and malicious distortion of an agreed-upon truth. If Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth century is frustratingly vague on what is and is not “canonical,” his reticence from within a period of dogmatic flux is understandable. In contrast, Athanasius toward the century's end is reassuringly firm, scripturally and doctrinally. From Easter of 367 onward, according to such a narrative, heresy and apocrypha would become coterminous, and a messy chapter of Christian history could be closed.

In three places in the extant works of Justin Martyr, Justin quotes the Shema (Deut 6:4–5) in a variant form found in no known Jewish witness to this common Jewish liturgical prayer. In place of the familiar tripartite formula “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength,” Justin preserves the bipartite formula “with all your heart and with all your strength” (⋯ξ ὃλης τ⋯ς καρíας σου καì ⋯ξ ὃλης τ⋯ς ἰσχύος σου). William L. Petersen, in several publications, has suggested that Justin may preserve “the oldest recoverable version of the Shema, a version which deviates from that found in either the present Hebrew Bible (MT or LXX) or the New Testament.” Since Justin's variant form of the Shema occurs in three places in his own works as well as a few other early Christian sources, the bipartite formula cannot simply be a mistake but must preserve an authentic alternate tradition. But is it the “earliest recoverable version” as Petersen suggests? This assertion is problematic on two counts.