A year or so ago I became interested in a conjecture concerning a particular Biblical text and its relationship to Jewish eschatology in the 1C. I asked about it here and in /r/AcademicBiblical at the time, but the issue wasn't familiar to anyone. As I have some time on my hands, I'd like to do a literature search to find out whether the idea has occurred to anyone else and perhaps been solved, but I have very little idea where to start. It's unlikely that I will be able to go beyond a literature search as I have no Hebrew and very little Koine.

I'm not currently affiliated with a university - I'm not sure, but I might be able to get reading rights at Oxford as I did a DPhil there about 25 years back. That was in archaeometry - I'm not a trained historian.

To explain the conjecture: the New Testament contains the anonymous Letter to the Hebrews, which appears to be written by someone very familiar with Jewish beliefs. Heb 7:11-28 compares Jesus to a fairly obscure Old Testament character called Melchizedek, priest king of Salem (which was later Jerusalem), who met Abraham. Melchizedek is referred to as a priest who is unique, not descended from Aaron.

Later Jewish texts apparently identify Melchizedek as Seth, third son of Adam. However I am more interested in a tradition in the Talmud relating to eschatology: the Four Craftsmen. These were four figures occurring in a vision in the book of Zechariah: Elijah (Elijah had not died, but was taken up to heaven alive, hence was available for future use); the Messiach ben David; the Messiach ben Joseph (there are two messiahs in this schema, although the second is expected to only come if required, and the MbJ is associated with rebuilding the Temple); and the Righteous Priest. These four are in some sense associated with the eschaton.

I'm not directly interested in 1C or current Jewish thinking on these characters, but on how they would have been interpreted by very early Christians. Wikipedia mentions that at one time at least some versions of the Talmud identified the Righteous Priest with Melchizedek. So the first question is: would this association be made by the writer of Hebrews, and is that what he/she is talking about? (BTW, "she" is not purely for political correctness - there is a theory that Hebrews was written by Priscilla, an early female church leader).

Following on from that, we might have the following correspondence in the NT:

• Elijah => John the Baptist - the NT does suggest this link explicitly.
• Messiach ben David => Jesus - this is the main messiah, so this is not contentious.
• Righteous Priest => Melchizedek => Jesus - by way of the argument in Hebrews.
• Messiach ben Joseph => ?Jesus

The last is a second conjecture, which only makes sense if the first is established. The MbJ is associated with rebuilding the temple, and Jesus is recorded as saying "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again." (John 2:19). This is clearly intended to refer to the resurrection, but still, it does refer to rebuilding the temple.

So the overall idea is that 1C thinking about the nature of Jesus and John the Baptist was related to the Jewish eschatological idea of the Four Craftsmen, and collapsed the four characters down on to the two characters in the gospels.

Now to be clear - I'm not trying to convince anyone of the truth of this, I'm just looking for some pointers as to how I would investigate further, particularly a literature search. It may well be a wild goose chase, since I suspect that little if any literature will have survived. The Mishnah (the earliest part of the Talmud) was not written down at this stage, and I suspect that both Christian and Jewish literature will have suffered censorship and bias if anything was recorded in the first place. Still, I don't get many original ideas, and I'd like to see what I can do with this one.