Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette lived in Germany and Switzerland from 1780 to 1849. He belonged to a family that had emigrated from the Netherlands to Germany in 1559, and several of his ancestors including his father had been Lutheran ministers in the Duchy of Weimar. After six years of study in Jena, he taught theology in Jena, Heidelberg, Berlin, and eventually in Basel from 1822 to his death in 1849.

Much of the study of the New Testament in the recent decades of the present century has emphasized that we encounter in scripture, not so much a record of the data on which opinion about Jesus and belief in him are grounded, as the forms which these traditions and affirmations have assumed in their use, transmission and development within the early church. From the first impact of the form-critical method, this emphasis has been made more and more until its validity has been acknowledged even in many quarters where at first it might have been vociferously rejected.

Daß Jesus überraschende Antworten gab, wird in alien vier Evangelien berichtet. Vor allem die sogenannten Apophthegmata der synoptischen Evangelien geben das zu erkennen: Jesus nimmt Stellung zu Positionen seiner Hörer, indem er zurückfragt, die Fragen seiner Umwelt als falsch gestellt kennzeichnet oder die Fragenden durch seine Antwort ‘ent-täuscht’. So befreit er sie aus einer verkehrten Frageposition.

My primary purpose in handling this topic is to investigate the question of Paul's indebtedness to Hellenistic traditions and above all to the theology of the mystery religions. Not that I think it likely that he was directly influenced by the latter; it seems to me that A. D. Nock's arguments from the vocabulary of the New Testament, and particularly from that of the Pauline homologoumena, are too cogent for that. Rather the question must be one of the indebtedness of Paul to this milieu via Hellenistic Judaism or his more Hellenized predecessors in the Christian faith or both. And for investigating this problem Romans 6 is of prime importance, being one of the principal strands of evidence for some that the Christian beliefs of some predecessors of Paul were characterized by ‘Hellenistic enthusiasm’, beliefs which Paul then countered in this chapter. For it is widely held that Paul here corrects an enthusiastic view of an already realized resurrection, usually regarded as derived, at least indirectly, from the sacramental theology of the mysteries. Others, however, play down the clash, arguing that Paul simply assimilates such traditions, from whatever source, into his own theology; others, as we shall see, go further still and squeeze out the traces of traditional material from this chapter almost to vanishing point.

It is a curious fact that very often the official and administrative language of foreign rulers, even where they were seen as oppressors, keeps being used by their former subjects for a long period after these rulers themselves have gone, however unwelcome their rule otherwise may have been. In our own time and age we have witnessed, for instance, how English until 1980 has been India's second official language after Hindi, in accordance with the Official Language Act of 1963, how English was chosen as the official language of the state of Ghana, rather than one of the fifty languages and dialects spoken there, how French was maintained in the same function in Togo, Benin, Cameroon and several other countries, and Portuguese stayed in use in Angola after the factual repatriation of the former colonizers. And all this happens for obvious reasons.

Die Verse Apg. 6.1–7 ‘gehören zu den wichtigsten Texten für die Geschichte des Urchristenturns, sind … aber auch von erheblichen Schwierigkeiten belastet’. So urteilte jüngst W. Schneemelcher in seinem Buch über ‘Das Urchristentum’ – mit gutem Grund, wie wir sehen werden.

One conclusion concerning Joseph and Aseneth on which recent scholarly studies are in agreement is that the literary model for this fascinating work is the hellenistic romance. In both European and American analyses that assumption is evident. But since the intention of a romance has not been agreed upon - either by literary historians in general or by biblical scholars assessing the aims of the writer of Joseph and Aseneth – the import of this judgment about the literary paradigm for our work varies widely. Burchard assumes ‘that Joseph and Aseneth was composed for Jews, both born and naturalized, including perhaps those “god-fearing” sympathizers who thought and lived Jewish, but never crossed the line formally and were seldom pressed to do so. The document reminds not only the Jews of the privileges they always enjoyed, but the converts of what they, or their forefathers, gained by crossing over to Judaism.’ This position is adopted in opposition to the notion that the work was a missionary tract, aimed at enticing non-Jews to convert.