The Letter to the Hebrews develops a theological topography in which conventional biblical goods are desanctified by means of christological reorientation. The ‘land of promise’ (11.9), the promised rest, the sanctuary of the first covenant, Mount Sinai, are left behind in the shadows of earth whereas all light is shed upon their counterparts in God's heavenly realm, which turns out to be the faithful's true fatherland. This theocentric transformation is ascribable to the author's radical interpretation of επαγγελια: any earthbound hope will look vague because with Christ's ‘new and living way’ (10.20) promise has come to be bright.

Rudolf Bultmann in his magnum opus, Theology of the New Testament, tends to dismiss the Epistle to the Hebrews as ‘allegorical’,1 ‘legalistic’,2 exemplaristic',3 and ‘sacramentalistic’.4 This is overly negative. The Book of Hebrews may be a unique contribution to New Testament thought, and may possess its own peculiar logic and expression; nevertheless, it is a decidedly Christian document.5

This essay examines the contention that Joseph of Arimathaea buried Jesus—in light of what one can know from Greco-Roman culture about the disposal of the bodies of crucified individuals. A survey of the statutes governing the burial of criminals and governing the prosecution of those accused of seditious activity indicates that provincial officials had a choice when confronted with the need to dispose of the bodies of the condemned. Greco-Roman texts show that in certain cases the bodies of the crucified were left to decompose in place. In other cases, the crucified bodies were buried.

The account of Vespasian's use of spittle to heal a blind man at Alexandria has long been noted as a parallel to the use of spittle in Mark's healing of the Blind Man of Bethsaida, but little has been made of the temporal proximity of these two stories. Vespasian's healings formed part of the wider Flavian propaganda campaign to legitimate the new claimant to the imperial throne; to many Jewish ears this propaganda would have sounded like a usurpation of traditional messianic hopes. This article argues that Mark introduced spittle into his story of the Blind Man of Bethsaida to create an allusion to the Vespasian story as part of a wider concern to contrast the messiahship of Jesus with such Roman imperial ‘messianism’.

It is usually assumed that Matthew did not know Luke, nor Luke Matthew. The non-Marcan (‘Q’-) materials common to Matthew and Luke, then, ultimately go back to a common source or sources, oral or written, much of which anyway had reached a fixed Greek form. Attempts have been made to split up the source of the Q-materials into two documents, into one-sheet ‘tracts’, and into individual floating sayings.

The New Testament discipline is a rather odd bird within the university. The object of our research is small, a book we can have in our pocket. And the learned work with this book has been carried out for a long time: acute theologians have studied it for almost two millennia and critical scholars for two centuries; there is hardly any counterpart. The secondary literature is as the grains of sand on the sea-shore.

1.1. Keine menschliche Gemeinschaft kommt ohne ein Ethos aus, das denen, die ihr angehören, ‘mit dem Anspruch von Verbindlich-keit gegeniübertritt’.2 Dies hat seinen Grund darin, daß es aller-erst das gemeinsame Ethos ist, in dem sich die Identität einer Gemeinschaft objektiviert und in dem sie lebensweltlich – nämlich als soziale Identität – wahrnehmbar wird. In diesem Sinne stiftet ein Ethos soziale Kohäsion, denn es bestätigt den einzelnen die Zugehörigkeit zur überindividuellen Gemeinschaft. Mit W. Kluxen kann man darum sagen, daβ die ‘Sozialität’ einer Gemeinschaft ‘im Handeln verwirklicht wird’.3 Dies impliziert, daβ ein Ethos niemals um seiner selbst willen existiert, sondern immer Ver-weisfunktion hat: Es weist über sich selbst hinaus, denn ihm kommt die wichtige Aufgabe zu, die gemeinsame überindividuelle Identität unverwechselbar zu repräsentieren. – Dies gilt selbst-verständlich auch für christliche Gemeinschaften, und darum möchte ich im folgenden danach fragen, wie sich diese Korrelation in den paulinischen Gemeinden und bei Paulus selbst darstellt.4

It is widely recognized not only that Luke was a literary artist but that his literary methods involved specifically Hellenistic approaches and techniques. The primary purpose of this article is to indicate that the enigmatic relationship of part of Luke's text (7. 11–17, the raising of the widow's son) to part of the LXX text (1 Kgs 17. 17–24, Elijah's raising of the widow's son) is a literary relationship, a relationship which is the result of a sophisticated and coherent process of dramatization and christianization. The article is also intended to suggest briefly that this literary relationship is to be understood, in considerable part, in light of the Hellenistic literary practice known as imitatio, and that the practice of imitatio may be an important clue in detecting and unravelling other areas of Luke's sources.

The purpose of this paper1 is to survey most of the lines along which, in recent years, attempts have been made to establish a relationship between the addressees of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Essene movement in general or the Qumran community in particular, and to suggest what, in fact, these attempts amount to.

The person of Simon encountered in Acts 8 has been a controversial figure ever since the rise of historical criticism. The range of opinions in the history of research varies from denying his existence to regarding him as the instigator of the gnostic movement that threatened the nascent early church in the second century. These contradictory results reflect the particular difficulty of the Simon question, which consists not least in the span of time that lies between the two oldest sources (Acts and Justin). Furthermore, an orderly report of Simon's gnostic teaching is encountered first in Irenaeus. In modern research, Simon Magus has been treated more or less as a test case for the larger question about gnostic backgrounds of the NT or about the existence of a first century Gnosis. With conscious or unconscious reference to this first century Gnosis, the majority of investigators (especially of German origin) has affirmed the existence of a first-century Gnostic Simon, and has neglected the above mentioned chronological problem. Only recently has the following judgement begun to gain dominance: ‘All attempts so far made have failed to bridge the gap between the Simon of Acts and the Simon of the heresiologists.’ This statement points to the lack of Simon's companion Helen (= ἔννοια) in Acts 8 and to the fact that the expression ‘great power (of God)’ (Acts 8. 10b) is not gnostic as such.

The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the character of Paul's appropriation of the ideal of ‘equality’ (ἰσότηϛ) in 2 Cor 8.13–15 by exploring the meaning of the term in each of the contexts in the Greek world in which thinking about ‘equality’ developed: friendship, politics, and the cosmos. The essay traces a consistent tendency in Paul to reverse the ancient logic of inverse proportion as the means for achieving ‘equality’. The essay highlights the novelty of Paul's attempt to create an economic structure—partnership in the collection—the goal of which was to achieve ‘equality’ between persons of different social classes through redistributive exchange.

The nearly three decades since the publication of E. P. Sanders's work on Paul and Judaism have witnessed a spate of new proposals for reading Gal 3.10, one of the most difficult and contested passages in Paul's letters. For some, the ‘traditional’ interpretation is still preferred, though the ‘exile/restoration’ reading has gained some momentum recently. The following article will critique both of these readings, proposing a new interpretation of this passage, one that regards Paul as citing Deut 27.26 in continuity with its meaning in its narrative setting and that finds an interpretive grid in the logic he unfolds in Gal 2.15–21.

This article seeks a fresh answer to the difficult question of the meaning of the phrase τα στοιχεια του κοσμου in Gal 4.3. The answer is sought by paying close attention to (1) the argumentative context of Paul's use of the phrase in the letter (he posits some sort of equivalence between the veneration of τα στοιχεια του κοσμου and the observance of the Law; he does so for contextually relevant theological and rhetorical reasons), and (2) the cultural-historical context of the addressees, the Gentile believers in Galatia (τα στοιχεια are ‘the gods’ they once venerated; this veneration involved calendrical observances).

1 Timothy defines the ekklēsia as the οἶκος θεοῦ. This has led to the conclusion that the Pastoral Epistles regard the ekklēsia as an enlarged oikos, where the roles of the officials and the norms regulating the behaviour of its members reproduce the relationships of the patriarchal household. However, οἶκος θεοῦ is not a household properly speaking. Ekklēsia is a term with political connotations, and thus the community acquires a public dimension. In addition, oikos is used metaphorically, for a larger community. In this, the definition reflects the ancient custom of describing larger communities (the cosmos, the polis, or an association) through the metaphor of the oikos. The ekklēsia is therefore a public, quasi-cosmic space, whose laws and structures receive divine legitimation.

1 Corinthians 11. 2–16, because of the social concerns of much contemporary exegesis and theology, has provided a rich vein from which to quarry materials for current feminist agendas. However, exegetes have tended to neglect the ‘male issue’ in this text and the Corinthian context underlying it. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the most plausible matrix of the practices addressed by Paul in 1 Cor 11. 4 when he refers to . Numerous exegetical issues and ancient social practices relevant to a full study of 1 Cor 11. 2–16 do not fall within the purview of this narrow investigation. Questions such as the origin and character of Paul's views of women as well as their apparel, and the question of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish customs concerning the veiling of women in their domestic and street apparel will not be broached here.

Pauline Anthropology has long been seen as the key to the quest for the human being in New Testament theology. But there are other concepts in ancient Roman and early Jewish religious-philosophical thinking that deserve our attention in this regard. Exegetical analyses of James 1.2–18 and 3.13–18 point to a view of the human being that traces the ability to do what is good back to God's working within and his bestowal of wisdom. Surveys of ethical passages in the Wisdom of Solomon and Epictetus indicate that the origin of ethical decisions can be understood in psychological as well as religious terms. In the light of such anthropological discourses the Pauline argument about the human being in Romans 5–8 can be seen from a new perspective.