This article interacts with Peter J. Gurry's recent estimate of the total textual variants in the Greek New Testament (NTS 62 (2016)) by (i) employing a different (and complementary) method using data from the Editio Critica Maior and (ii) producing an estimate that is narrowly confined to the ‘key’ manuscript witnesses for Acts and the Catholic Letters (a mix of majuscules and minuscules, both Byzantine and non-Byzantine). The results prove more useful for framing the development and distribution of textual variants in this group of key witnesses.

In 1954 the first issue of New Testament Studies (NTS) was released under the auspices of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS), which was founded on 16 September 1938 in Birmingham. The journal aimed to interlink (European) NT scholarship and to ensure its quality and standards by the society's members. Why did it take so long to release the journal, even though the Dutch NT scholar Johannes de Zwaan (1883–1957), who initially came up with the idea, intended the publication of an international quarterly right from the beginning? In 1953 he was not considered for election to the Editorial Board and therefore decided to publish another New Testament journal whose first issue appeared in 1956: Novum Testamentum. De Zwaan's correspondence with some of SNTS's first members and other so far unknown sources can elucidate these circumstances.

This article challenges the argument of John Moles that Luke's preface (1.1–4) resembles a Greek decree more than any other type of writing. Although Moles is not the first to recognise the supposed decree-like features in Luke's preface, he goes further by arguing that the preface is intentionally structured like a decree for the author's rhetorical aim. In this article, I demonstrate that Moles’ argument goes too far and that Luke's preface simply displays features conventional to prefaces of historiographical writing – despite common structural patterns of preface writing and decree formulae – and is not layered with additional rhetorical meaning.

Unter der Leitfrage ‘Was überzeugt und gewinnt die Hörer?’ werden die (1) Authentizität des Redners sowie die Techniken der (2) Visualisierung, der (3) Einwirkung auf die Affekte und des Raumlassens für (4) Kreativität des Hörers behandelt. Mit paulinischem Material lassen sich Quintilians Erkenntnisse zu diesen vier Themen exemplifizieren. Sodann kommen der Prozess der (5) Kreativität des Autors/Redners sowie das (6) Gedächtnis in den Blick.

According to the general consensus of expert opinion the Gospel of Mark was composed sometime between the years A.D. 65–75. But most authorities find that they cannot leave this decade as just a convenient round figure; for it contains the cimacteric year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman armies. Accordingly, they endeavour to define the date of the Gospel's composition more precisely in relation to this event. Those who elect for a pre-70 date usually give as their reason for so doing that fact, as they see it, that the Gospel contains no explicit reference to this signal event. Such a conclusion is rarely felt to need a detailed justification, it being apparently assumed that mention of the fact is reason enough; it has possibly been thought also that no vital issue turns upon establishing precisely a pre-70 date.

Among the New Testament Gospels, Matthew most emphatically stresses the continued presence of Jesus throughout his ministry and with his disciples after Easter. This is despite sensitivity to the challenge of the cross and experiences of absence or deprivation. Structurally, the Gospel develops this affirmation in relation to the narrative of Jesus’ birth and incarnation, to his ministry, to the governance of the Christian community in its apostolic mission to Israel and the nations. Matthew never quite articulates how this continued presence actually works, whether in spatial or sacramental or pneumatological terms. And yet the emphatic correlation of ‘Jesus’ and ‘Emmanuel’ confirms that each is constituted by the other: being ‘God with us’ (Matt 1.23) means precisely to ‘save his people’ (1.21), and vice versa.

In a previous issue of NTS, Richard Bauckham suggests that Acta Thomae 146 contains a lost parable of Jesus about a vine. The second section of the article comprises a study of Odes of Solomon 38. 16–18 (17–19), in which Bauckham proposes to find certain traces of the same parable. In this short note, I shall be concerned principally with this section of Bauckham's article.

The Miracle of the Bread is recorded in each of the four gospels, but in both Mark and Matthew there are two separate accounts. These two accounts of the same miracle have attracted great interest. Up to the present day, the theory that these accounts are records of two different events has been held by many. On the other hand, since the end of the nineteenth century another theory that they are two traditions of the same miracle is also being upheld. The basis for the latter theory is the fact that the two parallel groups of pericopae in Mark 6. 31–8. 26 seem to derive from two groups of traditions, and that in the second miracle of the bread, although it is right after the first one, the disciples are at a loss just the same as at the time of the previous miracle.

The question of development in Paul's eschatology has long been debated. It is held, on the one hand, that his doctrine of the end underwent a gradual transformation: Paul's earlier works express belief in the imminent eschaton, and construe the future in terms of apocalyptic notions of the resurrection; his later writings are sensitive to the delay of the parousia and describe life after death in the language of Hellenistic anthropology. On the other hand, it is argued that Paul's eschatology has not undergone major modification: Paul never abandoned his conviction that the end was at hand nor his essentially Jewish understanding of the resurrection.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, so far as may be done in brief compass, the New Testament echoes and allusions in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip discovered at Nag Hammadi.1 These echoes and allusions are fairly numerous, although not always easy to detect. In some cases, indeed, what appears to one scholar a clear and unmistakable echo may to another seem quite insignificant. To take but two examples, when we read ‘Then the slaves will be free, and the captives delivered’ (133. 28–9 Labib), are we to think of Luke iv. 18? Or Rom. vii. 23? Or of Eph. iv. 8? Does a contrast of slave and son, with a reference to inheritance in the context, of necessity indicate a knowledge of Gal. iv. 7? As it happens, there is other evidence for the author's knowledge of three at least of these four books, and possibly for the fourth.