From F. Chr. Baur and onwards, New Testament scholarship has laid strong emphasis on the difference between the Paul of the letters and the Paul of Acts. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this approach. The real Paul, the Paul of the letters, claims to be an apostle. In Acts he is depicted as subordinate to the Twelve, for whom the title apostle is reserved. In Galatians and Romans Paul takes up a strongly polemical attitude to the Jewish torah and to circumcision. The Paul of Acts circumcizes Timothy (16. 3). And he declares his solidarity with the law, the prophets and the people of Israel (23. 6; 24. 14 f.; 26. 6, 23; 28. 21). In his epistles Paul strongly emphasizes the significance of the death of Christ. He proclaims its atoning effect for all mankind (Rom 3. 24 ff.; 5. 6 ff. 1 Cor 1. 18 ff.; 15. 3; 2 Cor 5. 18 ff.; Gal 3. 13). The author of Acts seems to regard the suffering and death of Jesus, the servant of God, almost as a test, which he had to undergo before ‘entering upon his glory’. To be sure, the death of Christ is also by Luke described as the act through which he won the church for himself (20. 28). And the missionary message in Acts contains the statement that he died according to the Scriptures (3. 18; 13. 27–29). It is, nevertheless, obvious that the death of Christ does not receive the same comprehensive interpretation in Acts as in the Pauline epistles.

Handschriftliche Varianten im Text der synoptischen Evangelien gelten oft als Marksteine einer manchmal sehr verewickelten Auslegungsgeschichte. In dieser Hinsicht bieten die ersten drei Bitten des Vaterunsers ein besonders lehrreiches, aber auch besonders schwieriges Problem. Zwar spielt die Textkritik für die lukanische Fassung dieser drei Bitten bei Matthäus (vi. 9f.) praktisch keine Rolle; für die lukanische Fassung des Vaterunsers dagegen (xi. 2) sind Zahl und Inhalt der drei ersten Bitten von den Textzeugen her nichts weniger als einheitlich überliefert.

The character of Paul's conversion as it appeared to the convert is clear from his references in his letters. He experienced a sudden conversion which was effected, or at least accompanied, by a vision of the risen Christ, or, as he might have preferred to say, by an encounter with Jesus, alive, exalted and glorified. He had no doubt that the initiative was God's initiative. ‘God revealed His Son in my case’: in view of this phrase in Gal. i. 16, Goguel would take the earlier reference in v. 12, where Paul claims to have been taught his gospel ‘through the revelation of Jesus Christ’ as meaning that Jesus Christ was the object of the revelation.

Ces réflexions, qui furent d'abord proposées lors de la séance de clôture du Meeting de Ia S.N.T.S. à Aarhus (1960), ne prétendent pas explorer en détail les relations entre les écrits de Qumrân et le N.T., ce. qui serait une tâche immense, ni méme dresser le bilan des recherches entreprises et de leurs résultats actuels, ce qui engagerait des analyses et une bibliographic considérables.

The kiss is defined as the placing of the lips upon another's lips, another person or another thing as a mark of homage or affection. It is a common phenomenon in many religions, generally directed towards inanimate objects.Early Christian sources confine their descriptions and prescriptions of the kiss to a public greeting between two people. Its practice within the community raises two questions: where did it originate? and what function did it serve beyond strengthening the ties of affection that exist in the fellowship? The fact that the command to kiss appears four times in Paul and once in 1 Peter makes it necessary to ask why something as spontaneous as a kiss would need to be commanded. Finally we inquire into the specific meaning of the adjective ‘holy’ (Paul) or ‘love’ (Peter) when attached to the word kiss.

Some recent writing both on the gospels and on some of the Pauline epistles has shown a certain tendency to work with presuppositions in which a circularity in reasoning can be detected. On the basis of arguments (of varying power to convince) making use of a selection of passages in the work concerned, the work itself – the gospel or epistle as it now stands in the Canon – has been made the subject of hypotheses about the situation which evoked its composition, and about resultant polemical or other intentions determining the nature of the work as a whole. All individual passages within this larger whole then tend to be pressed into service so as to provide further evidence in support of these hypotheses. This trend in recent exegesis is illustrated by some interpretations of II Corinthians iii published during the last decade. Theories about the identity and doctrines of Paul's opponents in Corinth having been arrived at on the basis of evidence found elsewhere in the epistle, the difficult third chapter has been found to shed corroborative or even additional light on both. It is perhaps fair to say that these studies, from Georgi's influential treatment of this chapter onwards, indicate great ingenuity on the part of their authors (as well as claiming an even greater ingenuity for Paul himself, and attributing remarkable exegetical sensitivity to his readers in Corinth), but leave one with the impression that the wrong questions have been asked of the text.

This study of Romans 9–11 focuses on three prominent questions that Paul asks in relation to God's faithfulness to Israel: 1) Is God unjust in reference to his election?; 2) Why does God find fault, for who has resisted his will? and 3) Has God rejected his people? The article examines Paul's answers to these questions in light of an intertextual study related to the catchwords the apostle develops from the ancient Jewish sources that he echoes.

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.

Paul seems neither to know anything about rhetoric nor to appreciate it. On the one hand he calls himself an ‘amateur in speech’ (2 Cor 11.6). On the other hand he rejects rhetoric as part of the wisdom of the world (1 Cor 1–4). Such statements could, however, be a rhetorical strategy, which belongs to dissimulatio artis (‘concealment of (rhetorical) art’). Thus, while Paul seems to dissociate himself from rhetoric, he might in some way declare himself for rhetoric. This article gives a survey of the realisation of dissimulatio and of its functions in pagan literature of antiquity and deals with the question whether this rhetorical means is to be found in Paul's letters.

Despite this renewed attention, scholars have avoided situating their analyses of this pericope within the major debates about Papias' work. The question of whether Papias employed the methods of Greek rhetoric sits as the most relevant issue for this discussion. Though many scholars champion rhetorical readings of Papias, detractors contend that they overstate his ostensibly technical vocabulary (e.g., τάξις, συντάσσω, χρεία, διάλεκτος, ἑρμηνευτής in Frag. 2). They generally construe these as Papias' colloquial or historical characterizations of Gospel narratives. Whether and how Papias testifies to source-critical concerns for Synoptic studies—such as the Sayings Gospel Q, a proto-Matthew, and the oral transmission of Jesus' life—depends on their interpretation. Opposition primarily disputes the meaning of individual words in the context Papias provides them, so that his rhetorical forms and flourishes remain relatively unscathed from criticism. Papias' death of Judas has never figured into this discussion, but it nonetheless points in favor of a rhetorical backdrop.

1 Cor 14.34–5 appears to silence women in church. Philip Payne's recent paper attempts to add to the evidence that Paul did not write these verses. He claims that codex Vaticanus has an obelos at the start of 1 Cor 14.34 (as well as a distigme), indicating added text. However, the bar in Vaticanus at 1 Cor 14.34 is indistinguishable from paragraphoi and Payne's case that it is an obelos is based on systematic measurement errors.

It is commonly thought that the apocryphal Letter to the Laodiceans was composed by an author who was little more than an editor, piecing together phrases from Pauline texts in a mediocre fashion. Not only does the text seem devoid of conceptual rigour and theological merit, but it is also thought to lack a coherent structure. This essay proposes that, to the contrary of most estimates, the Letter to the Laodiceans exhibits a discernible structural coherence from which a rhetorical strategy is evident.