Mark vi. I–6a is a story told with a fullness of vivid detail, and it is devoid of any edificatory ending. These two facts give the ‘impression of uninventable authenticity’, The result has been—and it is one that is still with us—that in the history of research interpreters have been all too prone to look at it only from the perspective of its historical value. In Mark vi. I–6a we seem to find ourselves ‘on the soil of the best tradition’, just because there is a series of concrete individual points which are indeed very likely to give confidence in their historical credibility. In v. 3 ‘personal details are given, which can have no other origin than old Galilean tradition’. Verse 5a and v. 6a draw features of such human truth into the picture of Jesus that the reader must be convinced of their authenticity.4 But—granted all these points— what is won for the historical facts from our pericope? Well, there are mentioned the origin and profession of Jesus, the names of his mother and of four of his brothers, the existence of sisters and the fact of an unsuccessful visit to his native town. This is really quite a lot.

The story of the Transfiguration has received some attention in the past few decades, and the significance of Elijah and Moses has not been neglected. But their prominence in the Marcan narrative has not always been sufficiently recognized, and where it has been recognized it does not seem to have been correctly evaluated.

Recently renewed attempts have been made to argue that resemblances between I Peter and Gospels indicate authorship of the epistle by the Apostle Peter. We shall attempt to re-assess the evidence both from the point of view of authorship and in relation to the state in which the gospel tradition existed at the time of its use by the author of I Peter. Since many of those who argue for Petrine authorship of the epistle take a conservative view of the transmission of the gospel tradition, we shall try to allow for this angle, though not necessarily adhering to it.

The topic of my paper is particularly suitable for a Presidential Address to our Society, because so many of you have contributed, in no inconsiderable way, to the elucidation of its problems. What I shall try to do is simply to bring together some of the results of your work and then to build upon them. We have, in our common research, reached a point where it makes sense to look back on what we have discovered and to put up some signposts to mark our future course. When I say so, it is not merely an act of politeness; it is rather the expression of my appreciation of so many contributions from you without which my understanding of the first Gospel would not have been possible.

The following essay is an attempt to examine the manner in which the writer of the Epistle of James uses the concept of Wisdom; and to study the suggestion that the way in which he uses it is more or less interchangeable with that in which other writers of the New Testament use the concept of the Holy Spirit.

One of the most fruitful aspects of recent study of the Fourth Gospel has been the recovery of traditional sayings of Jesus embedded in Johannine discourses. They are often the starting point of the whole argument. The classic example of this is the Parable of the Apprenticed Son in John v. 19 f. This was isolated as a parable from earlier tradition by both C.H. Dodd and P. Gächter, working independently of each other. In this case it is easy to see how the entire exposition of the work of Jesus as the Son of man, with which the Son and the Slave in viii. 35 has a similar relation to the discourse in which it is enclosed, even though this may not be so obvious at first sight. These and other examples of parables in John have been conveniently collected in the popular work of A. M. Hunter, According to John (1968), pp. 78–89.

The agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (as we usually describe it in English, in typically eclectic fashion, for the agony comes from Luke, the garden from John, and Gethsemane from Mark and Matthew) holds an important place within the Passion narrative. But what is that place? There are strong grounds for holding that the original Passion narrative which lies behind the Marcan and Matthean records began with the arrest of Jesus; the same is probably true of Luke, and very possibly of the Fourth Gospel also. The Gethsemane scene stands outside, or on the fringe of, such primitive Passion narratives, and in certain respects does not accord well with them; it may well be, as Bultmann,2 Kuhn3 and others have supposed, that it was adopted into the Passion narrative at a fairly late stage and inserted between the story of the Last Supper (itself not an integral part of the primitive Passion narrative) and the arrest, If this be so, we must ask to what extent, and in what way, the introduction of the Gethsemane scene into the Passion story and the handling of it within that context reflect the theologies of the evangelists of their immediate predecessors.

‘Do you not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that not all the nation perish?…he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather the scattered children of God into one’.

Es ist zur Zeit eine liebgewordene Gewohnheit, auf die drückende Last des noch ungelösten johnneischen Rätsels hinzuweisen. Kein anderer als Ernst Käsemann hat dieses jüngst erneut zum Ausdruck gebracht; freilich nicht ohne zugleich seines Rätsels Lösung zu umreißen. Daß sein viel beachteter Diskussionsbeitrag vor allem Rudolf Bultmann mit seiner Deutung des Johannesevangeliums zum Gesprächspartner wählt, ist die einzing angemessene Entscheidung. Dabei läßt sich die Antwort des gegen seinen Lehrer rebellierenden Schülers in ihrer Gegensätzlichkeit zum Wort des Meisters kaum extremer denken. Solche Antithetik ist für den Exegeten allemal ein Stachel, der zu erneuter Textinterpretation reizt. Dabei gilt es festzuhalten, daß dieser Gegensatz neben dem historisch-exegetischen auch seinen theologiegeschichtlichen Aspekt besitzt: Bultmann interpretiert mit Hilfe der durch die Existentialanalyse bereitgestellten Begrifflichkeit und zu einem nicht unwesentlichen Teil auch unter Rückgriff auf die Paradoxchristologie Sören Kierkegaards. Käsemann hingegen greift auf die alte liberale Johannes-Interpretation zurück, wenn er den johanneischen Christus als über die Erde schreitenden Gott darstellt. Der Aufweis theologiegeschichtlicher Bedingtheit sollte dem Exegeten stets ein Achtungszeichen sein. Doch ist über die Angemessenheit der herangezogenen Interpretationshilfen damit noch nichtentschieden. Allerdings müssen die Denkmodelle im Blick auf den auszulegenden Text ihre Bewährungsprobe bestehen. Diese Kritik soll an einem entscheidenden Punkt johanneischer Theologie vorgeführt werden, nämalich an dem Verhältnis von Wunder und Christologie.

This study proposes a re-examination of the teaching of Jesus about showing love toward enemies, with a view to recovering if possible its historical background and original setting. As a first step to such recovery it appears necessary to consider numerous issues raised by form-critics and others regarding the present framework of the two compilations of sayings in which this teaching is preserved, namely the Matthean ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and its shorter Lukan counterpart, the ‘Sermon on the Plain’.

In giving their appraisal of the host of then unexamined minuscule codices of the Greek New Testament, Westcott and Hort wrote these intriguing words: ‘Valuable texts may lie hidden among them; many of them are doubtless sprinkled with relics of valuable texts now destroyed.’. 1 Beside this supposition should be set a well-attested fact, that ‘the Precedence of manuscripts depends, not on their age, but on their Pedigree’. 2 These two statements kept on recurring to the writer's mind as she concentrated on a group of six minuscule codices in the area of the Catholic Epistles: MSS 69, 1243, 1319, 1424, 1739, and 1874. 3 The Leicester Codex, MS 69, has long been known to Preserve an ancient lineage even though it was actually copied in the fifteenth century. Might not others of this group, less well known, also Perpetuate a rich heritage? It is the opinion of this writer that one of them does.4

Since the advent of Hans Conzelmann's book The Theology of St Luke it has become a byword of New Testament studies that Luke is a man with a theological axe to grind. He is pictured as one who has systematically manipulated and recast his sources down to the smallest detail, in order to squeeze them into his over-all theological framework. Before this, Luke was thought of as a sort of homely old Hellenist; doctor, author, friend of Paul, he was seen as a man of wide sympathies but of no great theological depth—hence the traditional reference to his interest in women, Gentiles and the poor and outcast.

This article is concerned to demonstrate the possibility that two texts in I Corinthians (xii. 3 and xvi. 22) were at a very early date misunderstood by a copyist unfamiliar with a formula which St Paul was using, and which he changed, perhaps unconsciously and certainly without tendentiousness, to the nearest lettering which would be known to him.

A number of recent works have attempted to deal with the theological thought of the evangelist Matthew using the method of ‘Redaktionsgeschichte’. But as yet Hans Conzelmann's Matthew has not appeared. Certainly the joint work of G. Bornkamm, G. Barth and H. J. Held, the works of R. Hummel, G. Strecker, K. Stendahl, W. Trilling and others have contributed considerably to this field of study. But at the present time there is no agreement among scholars on the fundamental problem of what is the essential concern of Matthean theology. It is true that the Law of Moses and accordingly the problem of the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies is one of the most important problems for Matthew, and that the present state of the church and the expectation of the eschaton, especially of the last judgement, are also elements indispensable for understanding the thoughts of the evangelist. But the fundamental problem is how to discover the basis of Matthew's theology, by means of which the interpreter can understand these individual elements as organically combined.

The present study continues and completes my retroversions of the Gothic Commentary on St John, which appeared in N.T.S. VIII, 43–56 (leaves I–IV), ibid. x, 368–73 (leaf VI), ibid. x, 499–504 (leaf VIII); see also Ibid IX, 39–55 (‘Notes on the Gothic Bible’).