In Jesus the Magician I argued that the earliest pagan reports of persecutions of Christians—those in Suetonius, Tacitus, and Pliny the younger—indicate that the persecutors believed the Christians were practicing magic. Here I want to explain their belief by reviewing the eariest evidence for Christian congregational practices and indicating how these practices would have been understood by the ancient Christians' neighbors. This does not imply that there were not other grounds for the persecutors' belief. Magic seems to have figured in the charges for which Jesus was condemned; it certainly was prominent in the propaganda against his cult that was spread by rival Jewish groups. Such propaganda doubtless shaped the expectations with which many outsiders viewed early Christianity, and people are apt to see what they expect to see. Nevertheless, Pliny's famous letter shows that Roman authorities sometimes tried to get beyond rumor to the facts. Accordingly we should ask what the facts would have looked like to men of the Greco-Roman world in the late first and early second centuries, a world in which magic was practiced on all levels of society and almost universally believed to be effective. As “the facts” we may take, with some reservations, the evidence about Christian congregations to be found in Paul's relatively unquestioned letters—Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, or Philippians, and Philemon.

Jewish-Christians readily interpreted the life, ministry and sacrificial death of Jesus in agreement with accepted Jewish concepts: the trinity, the apostolic christology of the Messiah, meritorious suffering in behalf of all Israel, reconciliation of Israel to God through the death of the Messiah, refusal to participate in active rebellion against Rome, and willingness to dispute with other religious sects about many points. The fall of Jerusalem taught them to adjust their worship practices according to Jewish traditions which deemed the temple unnecessary, but they continued to mourn for it and hope for its restoration. Daily and weekly private and congregational worship attempted to fulfil needs formerly met by the function of priests in the temple. Baptism became still more important than before, assuming more responsibility for cleansing from sins, but it did not make circumcision unnecessary. There continued to be scripture reading and exhortation in congregational worship services. Some of them observed the same calendar of feasts as the majority of Jews and also the Jewish Sabbath, but they adhered to the Lord's Day and perhaps some of them even concurred with Gentile-Christians in their Christian adjustments to the old agricultural calendar. Jewish-Christians of the second century were in closer agreement with the theology of the NT and Jews of their day than they would have been with Catholic Christians who lived a few centuries later.

Paul's own behaviour is not as open to scrutiny as that of some of his congregations. Comparisons are possible, with limited success, between the reports of his actions in Acts and what he himself says in his letters. Certain kinds of behaviour can be guessed at through a careful analysis of his letters. Rarely, however, do we have in his letters a passage that is as pregnant with implications – particularly for an understanding of his behaviour – as I Corinthians 9. 19–23. The purpose of what follows is to explore an inconsistency between what Paul says about his own behaviour in that passage and what he says with regard to Peter's behaviour in Galatians 2. 11–14. Attention will be focused on ethics, apostolic accommodation, and the relation between Paul and Peter as primitive Christian missionaries.

The story of the translation of the Bible into Greek was widely known in early Christian literature. Epiphanius utilized various sources in his form of the story, which is given in On Weights and Measures, including the Epistle of Aristeas, as well as others. On Weights and Measures is known in three forms today, Greek, Syriac, and a recently identified Georgian version. Up to the discovery of the Georgian, the Syriac was considered to be the most original, while the Greek MSS were thought to present a mutilated text. The newly discovered Georgian version contains certain traditions which have been claimed to be extremely ancient. These are found, in particular, in the epistles of Ptolemy to the elders of Jerusalem.

Dietary laws, as well as problems in regard to their observance, are prevalent in religious groups even today and were fairly common in antiquity. Outsiders and insiders as well often wondered what the point of the laws was, and in three significant communities—Pythagoreans, Jews, and Christians—the regulations were interpreted, or interpreted away, with the help of philosophical or even historical analysis.

In the year in which we commemorate the centennial of both the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society of Biblical Literature, it may be appropriate in the pages of the Harvard Theological Review to offer an appreciation of one of Harvard's own faculty, the only American scholar who was a leading theoretician in both the fields of biblical theology and biblical archaeology, the late G. E. Wright.

Critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible a hundred years ago held a much lower estimation of the role of law in the religion of ancient Israel and of the value of biblical law than do scholars today. Julius Wellhausen, for example, whose work was the most influential of the nineteeth century, maintained that in its creative period, Israel had no law, but only “usage and tradition” which “were looked on to a large extent as the institution of the Deity.” Thus, the prophets, whom Wellhausen stressed, did not preach out of any legal tradition in his view, but rather “out of the spirit which judges all things and itself is judged of no man.” In their canonical shape, however, the materials ancient Israel bequeathed us are so strongly nomistic that even Wellhausen could not deny that at a certain point law became central, displacing the spirit. That point marks the transition from Israelite religion to something new called “Judaism,” which is distinguished by the idea of a written Torah. Judaism, in Wellhausen's theory, represents the senility of Israel, for “a body of traditional practice should only be written down when it is threatening to die out, and … a book should be, as it were, the ghost of a life which is closed.” This transition from usage to codified law reflects a fundamental change in the nature of the relationship of God and Israel, a change from a purely natural relationship to one of covenant.

A quick glance through the commentaries and translations will show that most scholars see no serious textual problems in Isa 28:12. Laberge has suggested that “he said,” be corrected to “I kept saying,” and everyone notes the extra aleph at the end of “they were (not) willing …,” but otherwise the text appears to be universally regarded as sound. The present writer does not share that optimism, however. Perhaps the following stichometric arrangement of the verse will convey the difficulty he perceives:

First published in 1934, Walter Bauer's Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum warned against simply equating the words “orthodoxy” and “heresy” with the notions of majority and minority and with the process of deviation from correct belief to wrong belief. Bauer sought to show that in the first two Christian centuries orthodoxy and heresy did not stand in relation to one another as primary and secondary. He tried to prove that in many regions what came to be known in the ecclesiastical tradition as “heresy” was in fact the original manifestation of Christianity. For example, according to Bauer, the major figures in earliest Christianity at Edessa were the “heretics” Marcion, Bar Daisan, and Mani. In Egypt a gnostic form of Christianity appears to have been dominant before A.D. 200, and in Asia Minor “orthodox” leaders such as Ignatius and Polycarp waged only moderately successful battles against gnosticism and judaizing Christianity.

Interpretation of the OT is a many-faceted thing in gnostic literature. The old view that Gnosticism implies a rejection of the OT has had to be considerably modified in the light of new discoveries. The Nag Hammadi texts have shown that the Gnostics made far more use of the OT than could have been expected on the basis of older premises. R. McL. Wilson, in a recent article, has pointed out that no less than seventeen OT books are quoted in the gnostic writings collected in Werner Foerster's anthology. To be sure, Genesis—especially the first chapters—is by far the most-quoted OT book. And it is obvious that the use made by the Gnostics of Genesis and other OT writings is hardly conventional, to say the least. Even so, it is of no use to scholarship simply to be satisfied with calling attention to the “perversity” of gnostic OT interpretation. For it is important to observe the manifold ways in which the OT is utilized in gnostic, especially Christian gnostic, texts. One can then attain a proper understanding of the role of biblical interpretation in the development of Gnosticism, as well as early Christian theology in general.

An important component in the recent discussion of the Second Gospel has been a continuing fascination with the Markan passion narrative. John Donahue has summarized the research under three headings, which represent recurring questions that scholars have put to the text. (1) What roles did the Scriptures and their motifs play in the formation and growth of the Markan passion narrative? (2) Did Mark make use of an extant passion narrative, and if so, what did it look like? (3) To what extent and in what ways does the Markan passion narrative reflect Mark's own theological and literary interests?

At least from the time of the influential analysis of B. Duhm in 1899, a scholarly consensus has developed which judges Psalm 89 to be a composite of poems of widely different date. Often cited is the view of H. Gunkel: to an old hymn (vv 29–52) a lament (vv 39–52) has been appended. The hymn was joined to the lament by interposing vv 20–38 and at the same time vv 4–5 were inserted. Articles in recent years have challenged the prevalent view of original disunity. J. M. Ward in 1961 showed that arguments based on metric considerations are not conclusive and that logic, vocabulary links throughout the whole poem, and poetic structure all argue that the psalm was a single poem from the that logic, vocabulary links throughout the whole poem, and poetic structure all argue that the psalm was a single poem from the beginning. In 1972 J.-B. Dumortier showed convincingly on purely literary grounds that at least two of the sections commonly thought to be diverse, the so-called royal poem of vv 2−5+20−38 and the cosmic hymn of vv 6–19, were in fact originally one.

With a view to shedding more light on the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews' attitude to the Old Testament this article seeks to investigate the modifications which he makes to the text of his quotations from the Old Testament. Many such investigations have been undertaken in the past, but they have been hampered by the incomplete state of Septuagintal research. They failed to take into account the multiplicity of Septuagintal manuscripts at the time of the writing of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As a result the text of the Old Testament quotations in Hebrews was usually compared with that of only two or three of the very well known codices (especially Codex Alexandrinus and Vaticanus) and the many divergences in Hebrews from these codices were attributed to the hand of the author of Hebrews.

‘With this limited area, and although surrounded by such powerful foreign nations, the two Galilees have always resisted any hostile invasion, for the inhabitants are from infancy inured to war, and have at all times been numerous; never did the men lack courage or the country men’ (War 3:41 f.). It is surprising how this general characterization of the Galileans by Josephus has so often found its way into modern writings about Galilee without any detailed study of the Vita, the one work of his where the Galileans occur more frequently than in all the others together.

One of the most controverted questions in the study of the Epistle to the Hebrews is the nature of the eschatological perspective which it represents, and a focal point of the debate about this issue is the passage on the “rest” which awaits the addressees (4:1–11). The two ends of the spectrum of recent interpretation are represented by Theissen on the one hand, who sees Hebrews here as developing a “Gnostic” tradition paralleled by materials in Philo, and by Buchanan and Hofius on the other, who see Hebrews as working wholly within the framework of Jewish apocalyptic expectations. Parallels adduced by these interpreters are, to one degree or another, illuminating, but the concentration on these parallels may obscure the dynamics of Hebrews' argument, which should serve as the fundamental criterion by which to assess the work's eschatology. This brief paper will attempt to illuminate those dynamics.