Why did Paul skip Alexandria? Why is there a blank spot on his missionary map? What prompted him to make plans to travel west rather than south? The lack of scholarly interest in this question is almost as conspicuous as the lack of sources for earliest Christianity in Alexandria. This article surveys and categorises the rather random hypotheses offered in scholarship. They relate to Paul's self-understanding as a missionary, to his theological raison d’être, to religious and cultural aspects, and to political circumstances. The most plausible answer concerns early Christian mission strategy: Paul skipped Alexandria because it was a Jewish city and as such part of the Jewish-Christian mission.

This article deals with how to conceive of sin in Romans 5–8. Currently there are two main views concerning the understanding of sin in these chapters. The apocalyptic school describes sin as a power extrinsic to the person. The moral philosophical interpretation, by contrast, contends that sin is a representation of action or the passions. While these schools are usually opposed to each other, this article proposes that the major concerns of the apocalyptic school – to understand sin as a reality that is universally determinative, that precedes human action and exceeds human strength, and from which only God can deliver humanity – are compatible with the interpretation of sin as action in some passages and as the passions in others. There may therefore be space for further collaboration between two views that are often opposed.

Investigation into the origins of the rare compound δίψυχος and cognate forms has been dominated by intertextual methodologies. With a sole focus upon issues of literary dependency, previous scholarship has attempted to trace the neologism to a specific text or author. Such an approach is misguided, given the inherent methodological difficulties of establishing the direction of borrowing between texts of uncertain dates, as well as the tenuous historical record for the attestation of the lexeme. Moving away from intertextuality, in this article it is suggested that recent advances in the study of lexical formation, including translational compounding and prototype lexical semantics, present themselves as a more productive avenue of enquiry.

Since other evidence strongly suggests that the omission of Matt 16:2b–3 is the result of multiple emergence, this variant unit serves as a helpful case study to evaluate the usefulness of pre-genealogical coherence for detecting multiple emergence of a reading, an important premise of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). This article adapts the Wasserman–Gurry method of assessing pre-genealogical coherence in the Synoptic Gospels (for which full collation of the relevant witnesses is presently lacking) in several ways to approximate more closely the approach used in the CBGM. It also attempts to refine the data generated by the Parallel Pericopes: Manuscript Clusters tool of the INTF at certain points. The study confirms that the assessment of pre-genealogical coherence is useful in detecting multiple emergence, coincidental agreement and contamination even based on the limited data in the Parallel Pericopes volume of the Editio Critica Maior.

The scholarly trope that ancient Jews commonly referred to gentiles as ‘dogs’ has coloured exegesis of Phil 3.2 for centuries. This view gave rise to the interpretation that when Paul calls his opponents ‘dogs’, he is ironically inverting the epithet and using it to identify them as Jews. The present article provides a critical assessment of this interpretation and evaluates the data that has been used to justify this claim. I then provide a new interpretation of how Paul is employing the term ‘dog’ in Phil 3.2. On the basis of its broader usage in the Greek-speaking world and the context related to circumcision in Phil 3.2, I propose that Paul is using ‘dog’ as a vulgar, phallic epithet for his opponents.

This article calls attention to an unpublished account of the 1954 General Meeting of SNTS in Marburg, written by C. K. Barrett. The interesting part of Barrett's account is its picture of Rudolf Bultmann who, after the evening sessions, with a group of colleagues withdrew to a pavement café at the Marktplatz and sat there ‘at the head in undisputed preeminence’.

Scholars often argue that Hebrews uses Psalm 40 in Heb 10.5–10 to emphasise obedience, either stressing Christ's lived obedience on earth or suggesting that obedience replaces sacrifice. However, Hebrews does not use Psalm 40 to highlight obedience but to identify another sacrificial offering. Christ's offering is the cultic offering that pleases God and achieves God's salvific will. While God did not take pleasure in Levitical sacrifices, he did command them and promise that they would achieve certain effects. The first covenant sacrifices achieved atonement and forgiveness because they were shadows that anticipated and participated in Christ's offering.

This article argues that the Wisdom of Solomon complicates Martinus C. de Boer's typology of two ‘tracks’ of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology (‘forensic apocalyptic eschatology’ and ‘cosmological apocalyptic eschatology’). Wisdom, which entails both ‘forensic’ depictions of an eschatological courtroom (5.1–14) and ‘cosmological’ depictions of cosmic war (5.15–23), offers a cosmology fundamentally incompatible with the cosmology presumed in de Boer's ‘cosmological apocalyptic eschatology’. Instead of envisioning eschatological justice as the result of a divine invasion, Wisdom envisions it as the result of divine pervasion. That is, cosmological eschatology in Wisdom entails a fully functioning, divinely pervaded cosmos operating as it was intended to operate. Wisdom innovates within Jewish apocalyptic tradition by employing the mythological idiom of apocalypticism to defend the philosophical claim that the cosmos is just and facilitates life for those who are likewise just.

For many years, scholars have noted striking similarities between the account of Paul's visit to Athens in Acts and ancient accounts of the trial of Socrates. There have been at least five distinct proposals about the significance of these similarities, but each has substantial shortcomings. In this article, I argue that Luke's purpose is to place Paul's Areopagus speech in dialogue with the thought of Socrates as it is represented in traditions about his trial, especially Plato's Euthyphro and Apology.

A recent NTS article by B. Massey gives a highly critical appraisal of the work of R. H. Lightfoot, questioning Lightfoot's academic integrity and claiming that he borrowed much of his work from others without proper attribution. A study of Lightfoot's writings suggests however that Lightfoot did clearly acknowledge his debt to others and that he did not try to claim the ideas of others as his own. Further, his standing within English-speaking scholarship, as one who publicised the work of German form critics and who anticipated in a significant way the work of later redaction criticism, can remain intact and his work is still valuable today.

This article demonstrates that Paul's use of Ps 68.10b OG in Rom 15.3 makes sense of the psalm's context, fits with the parenetic rhetoric of Paul's argument in 14.1–15.6 and necessitates Paul's justification in 15.4 of his use of Scripture. Citing Ps 68.10b because the δυνατοί (15.1) face actual reproaches for accommodating to the ἀδύνατοι's convictions, Paul grounds the call to bear these reproaches in emulating Christ's devotion to God, not his vicarious suffering. The focus on allegiance to God orients the δυνατοί towards the one who can then enable them to counter-culturally endure shame with fellow members of God's household.

This article publishes for the first time a Sahidic parchment leaf containing portions of Gal 1.4–9. Its main interest lies in the omission of the possessive in Gal 1.4d, which reads ‘God the Father’ as opposed to the mainstream ‘God our Father’. Two possible explanations are proposed: scribal error or translational assimilation, involving the more complex question of the relationship between the Coptic and Greek versions. Beyond the biblical textual criticism, this article also adds to the study of miniature codices.

The ‘Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar über das Neue Testament’, formerly called ‘The Meyer’, was established more than 180 year ago. As the KEK is the oldest commentary series in German (and not only in German) still existing today, it is an important subject of research and the analysis of the development of the series reveals many significant insights in the history of New Testament scholarship in the last two centuries. Last but not least, recent investigations shed light on the relations between the German and the English-speaking scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.