II Corinthians xii. 1–1O gives us a glimpse into the life of Paul the visionary and the resurgence of interest in transcendental experiences has brought new attention to Paul's experience of the third heaven. Research into drug-induced experiences sheds no greater light on Paul's account but, as might be expected, relating the episode to ‘charismatic’ experiences has proved more fruitful.

Daß basileia tou theou ‘der beherrschende Begriff der Verkündigung Jesu’ ist, darin sind sich die Neutestamentler einig. Einig auch darin, daß der Ausdruck nicht ein ‘Reich’ oder beherrschtes Gebiet meine, sondern vielmehr ‘Königsherrschaft’ als Abstraktum im Sinne von unbeschränkter herrscherlicher Machtausübung, ‘weder ein räumlicher noch ein statischer, vielmehr ein dynamischer Begriff’. Strittig bleibt das Maß von Gegenwärtigkeit einerseits, Zukünftigkeit andererseits, das Jesus mit der göttlichen basileia verbindet; eine Strittigkeit, die weitreichende Folgen für die Theologie der Gegenwart überhaupt hat, hangt doch für viele Theologen an der Klärung ebensosehr die Bestimmung der Rolle der Kirche in Zeit und Heilsgeschichte wie die Begründung für Prinzipien der Staatsethik und vieles andere.

The reasonably clear picture of the Pharisees at the time of Jesus which we thought we had is now looking decidedly unclear. J. Bowker's work questions whether the Pharisees were the predecessors of the Rabbis, and J. Neusner's massive researches have shown how precarious are statements about the Pharisees before A.d. 70 when once critical techniques long used in Gospel criticism are employed on Rabbinic sources. It therefore seems appropriate to examine afresh the NT picture of the Pharisees, and in practice this means the Gospel picture, for elsewhere they are named once only, in Phil. iii. 5. I shall hope to show that this picture is strange and by no means uniform. We may conveniently attack the problem through Luke-Acts, partly because of the time-span involved, and partly because of the often noticed fact that Luke is rather less hostile to the Pharisees than the other evangelists are.

It is now over twenty years since Alejandro Dez Macho announced his discovery of a complete text of the Palestinian Targum contained in the Codex Neofiti I of the Vatican Library. Even before the first volume of the editio princeps was published, the importance of Neofiti 1(N) and its marginal and interlinear glosses (Ngl) was apparent not only to specialists in the Aramaic language, Old Testament studies, and Jewish Literature of the Second Temple, Mishnaic and Talmudic times, but also to New Testament scholars. A particular feature of N which was bound to attract attention sooner or later is its frequent use of the formula Memra (utterance, word) of ahweh in the first chapter of Genesis in place of the Ἐlohim of the Massoretic Text, a feature encountered otherwise only in the Fragmentary Targum (FT). As we shall see presently, the exact significance of the term Memra was once a matter for keen scholarly debate, some asserting that it represented an entity separate from God, an intermediary between God and the created order, others roundly denying that it was any such thing, and regarding it only as a reverent means of avoiding pronunciation of the Holy and Ineffable Name. For reasons shortly to be described it was the latter opinion which finally prevailed and which is now generally accepted as established fact; but in the days before the scholarly debate on Memra was concluded it had been quite common for New Testament scholars to argue that, as an hypostasis and intermediary between God and the world, Memra had formed either the single antecedent, or one of the antecedents, to the Logos of the prologue of St John's Gospel. The presence of Memra in the text of N to Gen. i, and its frequent appearance in the Ngl, has led to renewed scholarly interest in the relationship of Memra to St John's Logos, so much so that A. Dez Macho, McNamara, and Domingo Muoz are all prepared to consider Memra a key concept in any discussion of St John's prologue. With the results of previous scholarship in mind, and in the light of new evidence, it would appear that the time is now right for a critical evaluation of these recent claims.

Philosophical hermeneutics concerns itself with the philosophical concepts a theologian uses to express the content of revelation. This paper is an exercise in the philosophical hermeneutics of Karl Rahner. It will focus on one particular aspect of his philosophical background, namely those elements which he shares with the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. This exercise is designed to be conceptual in nature, rather than historical. The question of how much of Rahner's thought is directly influenced by his reading and study of Hegel is probably not answerable with certainty and, at any rate, is not as interesting as the conceptual question of how these two thinkers took recourse to very similar ideas in order to solve some common problems.

One of the thorniest questions in New Testament scholarship is the date of the composition of John's Apocalypse. Majority opinion now assigns that exotic book to the last decade of the first century A.D., ὸ , as Irenaeus says. But there are numerous problems with this date, and it is the contention of this study that the most natural date, the date indicated by the book itself and confirmed by outside sources, especially by the Roman historians of the early second century Tacitus, Suetonius and Plutarch is the period immediately following Nero's death in June of 68, that calamitous time known as the Year of the Four Emperors.

Der Begriff Ethik des Neuen Testaments bezeichnet nicht im philosophischen Sinn ein ethisches System als abstrahierende Reflexion ber Sittlichkeit, sondern den sachbezogenen, also nicht nur begrifflichen Zusam-menhang von ethischen uerungen und Vorstellungen, wie dieser aus den Schriften des Neuen Testaments zu erheben ist. Ethik des Neuen Testaments ist demnach eine systematisierende Darstellung, welche die situations-gebundenen ethischen Aussagen des Neuen Testaments zur Grundlage hat und an diese (als an die Ethik des N.T. im engeren Sinn) gewiesen bleibt.

In a 1963 article in the Journal of Religion, Langdon Gilkey examined the troubled condition of the doctrine of providence and concluded that it had become “the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology.” He attributed its demise to the violent eruptions of evil in our century, the unfortunate link between the doctrine and now defunct theories of natural theology, as well as the pervasive Arminianism and naturalism of contemporary thought. Current neglect of the concept was all the more striking, he reflected, because of its integral relationship to nearly all the theological systems of the preceding century.