During the first and second centuries of the Common Era the Christ cult spread from rural Palestine to the large cities of the Empire. This article draws insights from social network theory and from epidemiology, arguing that the Christ cult was not a simple contagion, spread by simple contact, but a ‘complex contagion’ that required persuasion, especially because adherence to the Christ cult entailed potential social costs and demanded high signalling costs.

Scholarly interpretations of the descent and description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22 have tended to evaluate the city against biblical and extra-canonical descriptions of the Jerusalem Temple, apocalyptic accounts of heaven and ancient utopian literature in general. While some have noted the ways in which the New Jerusalem parallels the description of Babylon elsewhere in the Apocalypse, no one has yet considered the ways in which the New Jerusalem mimics, mirrors and adapts the excesses of elite Roman architecture and decor. The argument of this article is that when viewed against the backdrop of literary and archaeological evidence for upper-class living space, the luxury of the New Jerusalem is domesticated and functions to democratise access to wealth in the coming epoch. The ways in which Revelation's New Jerusalem rehearses the conventions of morally problematic displays of luxury can partially explain later patristic discomfort with literalist readings of this passage.

In History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, Martyn argued that John 9.22 concerns the formal expulsion from the synagogue of Jews who were confessing Jesus as the Messiah of Jewish expectation. Johannine scholars following Martyn have often claimed that a ‘high’ Christology must have provided the catalyst for this trauma, not the ‘low’ Christology posited by Martyn. For Martyn, however, a ‘high’ Christology was a subsequent development, leading to a second trauma, that of execution for blasphemously claiming that Jesus was somehow equal to God. Accepting Martyn's argument on 9.22 with respect to this issue, and leaving aside the debate about the relevance of the Birkat ha-Minim, this article seeks to determine why local synagogue authorities, evidently represented in John's narrative by the Pharisees, would have found the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah so offensive that they formulated a decree to expel fellow Jews espousing this new messianic faith. Analysis of John 5, 7 and 9 demonstrates that the Pharisees in the Johannine setting found this confession offensive because they regarded the behaviour of Johannine disciples on the Sabbath as thoroughly inconsistent with their own understanding of the Sabbath commandment and as significantly hindering their desire to play an authoritative role in determining what counted as acceptable behaviour on the Sabbath and what did not. In short, the specific catalyst for expelling Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah from the synagogue was their Sabbath observance, which the Pharisees in the Johannine setting came to regard as an unacceptable deviation from their own developing views on the matter in the period after 70 ce.

This article argues that the current predominant interpretation of the use of Psalm 16 in the speech in Acts 2, namely the ‘proof’ from prophecy explanation, as well as the few other models which have been advanced, are unconvincing on narratival grounds. Instead, it suggests that the Psalm is primarily quoted as a rationale to explain why Jesus rose from the dead and death could not detain him – namely because of his righteousness. The article concludes by submitting that this reading sheds important new light on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus as a divine necessity in the early kerygma in Acts.

This article compares a discursive analysis of 2 Thess 2 and Giorgio Agamben's use of the same passage in his political philosophy (in at least three of his books). On the one hand, 2 Thess 2 is a complex and detailed eschatological scenario, but ultimately elliptical – with a self-referential enunciative device centred on a ‘super blank’, the κατέχον/κατέχων, which it is preferable not to identify. On the other hand, despite some shortcuts, Agamben aligns with the main intuitions of 2 Thess 2, which finally returns the reader to his/her own present where a conflict is played out between, on one front, the Messiah and his community, and, on the other front, the anti-messiah and his anti-messianic community. According to Agamben, the κατέχον/κατέχων is a negative figure, the legal facade that prevents unmasking the anomie of current political systems and delays the establishment of a messianic community beyond the law.

That Jesus carried the horizontal bar of the cross, also named patibulum, is often assumed, and argued by John Granger Cook. Gunnar Samuelsson disagrees, however, and argued that we grope in the dark about the exact nature of the σταυρός that Jesus carried. Both major crucifixion scholars refer in their argumentation to Latin sources in which a patibulum is carried. But these sources have not been thoroughly assessed on their own. In this article the eight Latin sources mentioned in support of the ancient practice are analysed. It is argued that only four of these sources should be counted as referring to ‘traditional’ cross-bearing practices.

This article explores the literary relationship between the Matthean tradition and the Ascension of Isaiah, a second-century pseudepigraphon detailing Isaiah's visions of the ‘Beloved’ and his polemical (and fatal) engagement with the ‘false prophet’ Belkira. While the lexical affiliation between these texts has been a point of interest, the discussion has oscillated between types of sources utilised, whether gospel material mutually shared with Matthew or Matthew itself. Though this paper details lexical contact, it pushes beyond philological similarity and posits narrative imitations as well as shared polemical strategies. The result is that Isaiah is more readily seen as a figure fashioned after the Matthean Jesus, and the ‘martyred prophet’ motif that ripples throughout the Gospel of Matthew as appropriated and narrativised by the Ascension of Isaiah for a second-century conflict over prophetic practices.