First: Messianism.
- The assumption that there was an essential concept of what a messiah was and that could be found in a range of biblical texts even when those texts did not mention "messiah". (Matthew Novenson, Christ Among the Messiahs, is one who challenges this assumption; William Scott Green is another but he challenges the assumption from a starting point that stands opposed to Novenson's.)
- The assumption that messianism was of significant interest to Second Temple Judean sectarians, and that messianic interests were a significant motivation among various social or sectarian groups, including those in the couple of decades preceding the Jewish War, and that the Jewish War itself was in large part the result of messianic hopes. (Steve Mason disputes the grounds for that last assumption in his latest book on the Jewish War. Other scholars have pointed out the tendency to see messiahs where texts do not mention them at all and where other factors more simply explain the data.)
Second: The Schafer factor.
- I see this time round that Peter Schafer has a strong standing in some discussions. Nothing wrong with that but as with all scholars we should always try to be aware of their personal interests and biases, especially when their work is grounded in multiple inferences. Is Jesus, and rabbinic interest in the Christian Jesus, really so prevalent throughout rabbinic literature as Schafer suggests? Schafer does sometimes get caught expressing appeals for deeper Christian-Jewish dialogue today and that's certainly a very good thing, but obviously there are risks in such an interest for historical research. Who are Schafer's reviewers and what are they saying?
Third: Oral tradition.
- The assumption that the evangelists drew upon oral traditions for their sources is so prevalent that it is easy to not recognize that it is only an assumption and not a fact. The fact is that a whole branch of biblical scholarship has been demonstrating that we do not need oral tradition to explain the contents of the gospels. Oral tradition biblical scholars have drawn upon specialist oral historians to find explanations for the gospel material but it has been demonstrated that several times biblical scholars misuse their research, sometimes quoting it out of context, sometimes quoting passages in a way that directly contradict the central arguments of those oral historian researchers. The oral tradition hypothesis originated from a circular assumption that the gospel narratives were historically based. That the grounds for assuming that they were historically based was that it was believed those events had been relayed through oral tradition was forgotten, and the circularity of the hypothesis has been missed.