What really happened at Jesus' baptism? We can be quite sure that Jesus was baptized by John, if only because his baptism caused such problems for the later church, the foremost among them being the clash between the developing idea of Jesus' sinlessness and the historical memory of his participation in John's ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1.4). The subordination to John implicit in the baptism, moreover, conflicts with a general tendency in the Gospels to subordinate John to Jesus. The fact of the baptism itself, therefore, is a bedrock historical datum.

The problem raised by the use of food offered in sacrifice to idols, remote though it is from modern western Christianity, played a large part in Christian thought in and for some time after the New Testament period. The evidence for this statement, so far as the New Testament is concerned, is, briefly, as follows.

This study's point of departure is the important article of H. D. Betz, ‘The literary composition and function of Paul's letter to the Galatians’, published in this journal in 1975. In that article the author suggests a new approach to the letter to the Galatians, by using the generative rules of Graeco-Roman rhetoric to analyse the structure of the letter. A rigorous examination leads him to the conclusion that the form of the various parts and the order in which they are arranged completely conform to the classical rules of rhetoric for a judicial speech (genus iudiciale). Paul is under accusation by opponents. The Galatians play the role of judges. The letter contains a speech in which Paul, following all the rules of the art, defends himself before the jury.

Saint Paul a été plusieurs fois accusé de manquer de bienveillance à l'endroit du monde féminin. On lui a reproché d'avoir en ce domaine une mentalité plus juive que chrétienne, de regarder la femme comme un être qui serait par nature inférieur à l'homme et de faire d'elle simplement ‘l'image d'une image’, c'est-à-dire l'image de l'homme, qui seul serait l'image directe de Dieu, alors que selon le premier chapitre de la Genèse, l'homme et la femme sont créés ensemble comme une unique image de Dieu. On lui a encore reproché de se montrer infidèle à cet égard à l'esprit du Christ des Évangiles qui a tant fait pour mettre en évidence la dignité de la femme et dont les gestes de délicatesse et de bonté à son endroit ne se comptent pas. Par ailleurs on ne saurait contester ce fait: au cours de l'histoire de l'Église, quelques textes pauliniens ont été maintes fois exploités à l'encontre du monde féminin et ont fait conclure à une infériorité congénitale de la femme par rapport à l'homme.

This critical note explains the most likely origin of the dislocated text at the end of 1 Corinthians 14 in the Greek twelfth century AD minuscule 88.1 There are four distinctive features of this passage in ms. 88.

1) Cor 14.36 follows immediately after 14.33.

2) Cor 14.34–5 follows 14.40.

3) Cor 14.34—5 is a distinct unit separated from v. 40 by a double slash on the base line in the space normally occupied by letters. The words on each side of this double slash are much farther apart than any other adjacent words on this page, so the original scribe must have inserted the double slash before writing w. 34–5. (See line 15 of the enlarged photograph, p. 158.) The end of v. 35 coincides with the end of a line. (See line 22 of the enlarged photograph.) Nothing follows on this line after its closing punctuation dot,2 even though each of the remaining three lines on this page extends one or two more letters beyond this dot. The next line, which begins chapter 15, is the only line on this page to be indented.3

4) There is a corresponding but smaller double slash above the last letter of 14.33.4 (See line 6 of the enlarged photograph.) It is placed at a sharper angle than the double slash before vv. 34–5 to help it fit between the lines of text. Another larger double slash, at the same level as the Greek letters on the last line of v. 33, is in the right margin where it is easy to see.

This article examines the textual arguments offered for and against the reading Jesus Barabbas in Matthew 27.16–17. While siding with the position that the longer reading, Jesus Barabbas, stood in the original text of Matthew's Gospel, this article argues against the tendency of scholars to deduce from the longer reading that a historical figure called ‘Jesus’ with the patronymic ‘Barabbas’ was released by Pilate, and that this man's name was suppressed by Christian tradition out of reverence for the name Jesus.

The study of NT Christology will be renewed if it recovers its proper subject-matter - christology - and its proper scope, the New Testament.

The scholarly literature shows that what is called NT christology is, by and large, really the history of christological materials and motifs in early Christianity, and their ancestry. This massive preoccupation with history has, to be sure, produced impressive results. In fact, today it is difficult to imagine a study of NT christology which is not influenced by this historical analysis of early Christian conceptions of Christ and their antecedents. Nevertheless, the time is at hand to take up again what was set aside - an explicitly theological approach to NT christology, one which will be in-formed by the history of ideas but which will deliberately pursue christology as a theological discipline. It is doubtful whether the study of NT christology can be renewed in any other way. This essay intends to illumine and substantiate this claim by considering briefly the nature of christology, then by reviewing the turn to history and its consequences for the study of NT christology, and finally by sketching elements of an alternative.

Die These, die hier erörtert werden soll, lautet: Die Versuchungsgeschichte Matt. 4. 1–11 stammt nicht aus der Redenquelle Q, sondern ist eine eigene Schöpfung des Evangelisten. Sie ist angeregt durch die Versuchungsge-schichte des Markus (1. 12 f.) und konzipiert als ein schriftgelehrtes Streitgespräch in Auseinandersetzung mit dem Judentum. Grundlage sind die Versuchungen Israels auf seinem Wüstenzug.

In this article I shall argue for two points: first, that Col 1. 15–20 exhibits, without the deletion of any of its parts, a clear structure which can, in some meaningful senses, be called ‘poetic’; second, that the passage, read as a poem in the way I shall suggest, exhibits a characteristically Pauline form of what we may call Christological monotheism. This will point on to some further suggestions regarding the place of the passage within Colossians as a whole.

Paul's boasting is often considered to be problematic. This paper explores Pauline boasting from the perspective of Plutarch's views on self-praise. Outlining what kinds of self-praise were and were not acceptable to someone like Plutarch, the paper analyses and positions Paul's boasting in Phil 3 in this context, concluding that, however offensive it may be to modern ears, this boasting was probably less so to the ears of his contemporaries.

In recent years there appeared to have developed a general consensus of opinion in the English-speaking world about the use of the term ‘Son of man’ in the Synoptic Gospels which may be summed up as follows: Jesus adopted the title ‘Son of man’ from Daniel vii, where it signifies one who was destined to receive kingship from God, and used it with reference to himself in three types of saying, namely group A with reference to his present activity in his earthly ministry; group B with reference to his suffering, death and resurrection; and group C with reference to his future coming, exaltation and function at the last judgement. Genuine sayings of Jesus are to be found in each of these three categories, and together they give us a picture of Jesus as One destined for triumph and sovereignty but achieving this destiny by the path of humiliation, rejection and suffering which was prophesied for the Servant of Yahweh. It is often held that Jesus' use of the title may have had a certain ‘collective’ nuance; just as in Daniel vii it indicated a representative or symbol of the saints of the Most High, so in the Gospels it may refer to the people of God whose head Jesus conceived himself to be.

For the last 150 years the Gospel of Marcion has been considered to be an abbreviated edition of the canonical Luke. This article renews the reverse hypothesis of Marcion's priority to Luke, Luke therefore being a revised and enlarged edition of Marcion. The arguments include a critique of the traditional view, based primarily on its failure to verify Marcion's alleged editorial concept on the basis of his text, and to solve the problem what Marcion would have done with Acts. On the other hand, the beginning of Luke (esp. 1.1–4; 4.16–30) suggests that the differences between both editions are best understood as Lukan additions to Marcion rather than Marcionite abbreviations of Luke. This Lukan, anti-Marcionite revision is very close to the Four-Gospel-collection and first created the unity of Luke–Acts.

The various questions which are raised by the opening chapters of I Corinthians have been extensively examined in recent years. Among the problems is that of Paul's reference to ‘the rulers of this age’ in relation to wisdom. It is with this phrase in its context that the present paper is concerned. Why did Paul insert it here? To whom does he refer? What does the mention of the archons contribute to the argument of these opening chapters of the letter?

Die Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte gehört zu denjenigen Disziplinen der Altertumswissenschaft, die im 20. Jh. die größten Fortschritte gemacht haben; man braucht nur auf die Entwicklung der Epigraphik und der eng mit ihr verbundenen Prosopographie oder auf die beiden monumentalen Monographien von Rostovtzeff hinzuweisen, die dafür ein deutliches Zeugnis ablegen. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, daß sich auch die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft seit etwa 20 Jahren intensiver sozialgeschichtlichen Fragen, speziell dem Problem der sozialen Schichtung der frühen christlichen Gemeinden, widmet.

Wie auch immer man die Einzelergebnisse ihrer Forschungen zu apokryphen Evangelien beurteilen mag: Aus dem mit den Arbeiten J. D. Crossans und H. Kösters eingeleiteten Paradigmenwechsel in der Beurteilung apokrypher Literatur folgt fast zwangsläufig die Notwendigkeit einer Problematisierung des Kanonverhältnisses ‘neutestamentlicher Apokryphen’. Daraus ergibt sich u.a. die Forderung apokryphe Evangelien zunächst einmal unter Ausblendung von Fragen ihres literarischen Verhältnisses zu Texten des NTs auch an sich als theologische Literatur ernst zu nehmen. Die folgende Untersuchung versteht sich als Beispiel eines derartigen Zugangs. Die genaue Untersuchung der häufig pauschal beurteilten Rolle der ‘Juden’ im Petrusevangelium erweist diese als bei weitem differenzierter gezeichnet, als meistens angenommen wird.

Recent investigation in Paul finds itself in a process of change asking whether there is a centre in Pauline theology and whether the logic of his thought is consistent. The article tries to establish the inner structure of Pauline logic from which the concrete application in different situations has to be distinguished: transformation and participation are the categories which control generally the logic of Pauline thinking. God has transferred the crucified Jesus of Nazareth into a new being/existence, in which the believers and baptised people completely partake by the gift of the Spirit already in the present time. The forensic declarations of justification in Galatians and Romans are rooted similarly in the conception of transformation and participation. These declarations are based on a conception of righteousness which is embedded in baptism.

In seinem Artikel versucht der Autor zu zeigen, daß die Theologie des Lukas eine Rom-kritische Pointe hat. Während die Heidenmission auf der ersten Missionsreise des Paulus theologisch legitimiert wird und die Unabhängigkeit dieser Heidenmission von der Synagoge auf der zweiten Missionsreise, wird mit dem Bericht von der Romreise des Paulus die politische Relevanz dieser Universalisierung der Christusverkündigung deutlich: Im gesamten Prozeßgeschehen vor römischen Behörden und schließlich in Rom selbst bezeugt Paulus, daß der Christus auch Kyrios ist. Die Verkündigung der Basileia Gottes betrifft das Imperium Romanum und relativiert dessen Herrschaftsanspruch. Das zu verkündigen muß (δει) Paulus nach Rom.