Die synoptischen Evangelien führen übereinstimmend die im Gottesdienst der Gemeinde gefeierten Sakramente von Taufe und Abendmahl darauf zurück, daß diese durch Jesus selbst gestiftet und von ihm eingesetzt worden seien. Die Jünger sollen nach dem Befehl des Auferstandenen die Menschen, die sich auf ihre Predigt hin bekehren, taufen. Und die Gemeinde soll die Mahlgemeinschaft mit ihrem Herrn auch nach seinem Tode unter dem Genuß von Brot und Wein fortsetzen. Zum Gedächtnis Jesu wird das Sakrament des Abendmahls von den Seinen gefeiert. Und in der Taufe handelt der erhöhte Kyrios, indem neue Glieder in die eschatologische Heilsgemeinde aufgenommen werden.

In my The Death of the Messiah, preparatory to examining the Gospel accounts of the trial/interrogation of Jesus by the chief priest(s) and San-hedrin, I surveyed the extra-Gospel evidence for authoritative Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus, derived from Jewish, Christian, and pagan sources. From the Jewish evidence I discussed two items: the witness of Josephus (Ant. 18.3.3; #63–t) and a baraita from TalBab Sanhedrin 43a which I quoted from the London Soncino translation (Nezikin volume 3.281):

On the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practised sorcery and enticed Israel to apostacy. Anyone who can say anything in his favour, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favour he was hanged on the eve of Passover.

The apostle Paul has been viewed by many as a cosmopolitan thinker who called Christ-followers to embrace the ideal of a single humanity living in harmony with a divinely ordered cosmos. A close comparison of Paul's apocalyptic theology with various interpretations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ over the centuries, however, shows few points of agreement. Paul was fundamentally a Jewish sectarian whose vision for a better world embraced only Christ-followers and involved the cataclysmic end of the present world order. Those who accepted and lived by this vision were effectively relegated to the same marginal position in civic life as the local Jewish community.

In popular culture, the Pauline texts referring to ‘peace’ are illustrated by serene and tranquil scenes. I shall argue that to Paul's first readers, ‘peace’ evoked rather different images – military victories, arrests of criminals and the unloading of corn. I argue this because of how εἰρήνη is normally used in documentary papyri, that is personal letters, administrative documents and other non-literary written material. I explain my method and then present the papyrological evidence, including references to the various ‘peace-officials’. I argue that εἰρήνη meant something like ‘good order’. I use this insight to interpret Rom 5.1 and Phil 4.7.

In an infamous passage in his Letter to the Galatians (2.11–14), Paul called out Peter as a ‘hypocrite’. This passage, especially when read in light of Paul's own appeal to himself as ‘all things to all people’ in 1 Cor 9.19–23, was to cause deep trouble for later Christian interpreters, who sought to defend their movement against charges from outsiders that it had a cracked and unstable foundation in dual ‘hypocrites’. This essay will introduce this ‘pagan’ critique and the cultural force it had, and the various solutions to the inherited dilemma from their scriptures that were offered by patristic authors (Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine). In light of this context, we turn to a sustained analysis of an untranslated homily by John Chrysostom, hom. in Gal 2.11 (In faciem ei restiti), which addresses not just the hypocrisy of Peter and Paul, but also the sticky problem of the hypocrisy of the Christian who reads this text approvingly as Paul's ‘in your face’ to Peter. Chrysostom does this by engaging in a convoluted pretence of his own.

Bittgebete gehören zu den besonderen Ausdrucksformen religiöser Überzeugungen. Schon in der Antike lassen sich Beziehungen zwischen Bitten, die an Menschen adressiert sind, und Bitten, die an Gott bzw. Götter gerichtet werden, ausmachen, Für einen Vergleich mit Ermutigungen zum Bittgebet im Matthäusevangelium werden Beispiele aus den Epigrammen Martials vorgestellt. Der Bittsteller, der bei Martial vor allem materielle Güter anstrebt, scheut sich beim Bitten nicht, den Kaiser mit Jupiter zu parallelisieren. Doch prägt ihn die Unsicherheit, ob die ausgesprochenen Bitten Gewährung finden. Von ‘Erhörungsgewißheit’, wie sie für die verglichenen Texte im Matthäusevangelium kennzeichnend ist, kann nicht gesprochen werden. In den Epigrammen Martials wird vor allem um die Steigerung persönlicher Lebensqualität gebeten. Demgegenüber begegnen bei Matthäus Gemeinschaftsbitten, die nicht nur persönliche Interessen im Auge haben. Nicht die bloße materielle Existenzsicherung oder persönliche Bedürfnisbefriedigung ist hier das Thema, sondern die Herrschaft Gottes.