Die Talio ist keineswegs nur in der Heiligen Schrift der Juden und Christen belegt,2 sondern findet sich in vielen Kulturräumen der Antike. Auf das Abendland bezogen sind hier vor allem Griechen-land3 und das Römische Reich zu nennen, in denen die Talio breit bezeugt ist, aber auch die Ägypter, Altbabylonier, Perser und Germanen haben sie gekannt.4 Im Iran kann sich noch heute ein Mörder durch die Zahlung des sog. Blutgeldes an die Angehörigen des Opfers (arab. diyah, pers. dieh) Strafmilderung oder in be-stimmten Fällen sogar Straffreiheit ‘erkaufen’, obwohl im Islam normalerweise Mord grundsätzlich durch den Tod des Mörders gesühnt wird.5 An dieser Regelung ist der Charakter der Talio als Milderung (gegenüber der Ausübung der unbeschränkten Rache) noch erkennbar.6

In his excellent study of crucifixion, Martin Hengel has documented the harsh reality of the penalty in antiquity and has shown that it was seldom portrayed in detail or in an idealized manner. These facts are important and should be kept constantly in mind. They make all the more pressing the question why a detailed narrative of Jesus' death was composed and lead us to look closely at the way the story is told. An ancient opponent of Christianity, Celsus, provides an interesting illustration of both the cultural situation and the literary question. On the one hand, he expressed the general view that crucifixion was the most ignominious and shameful type of death. On the other hand, he made charges that were based, not so much on the disgrace of death by crucifixion as such, but on the way the story is told, on the character of Jesus as revealed by the narrative. As is well known, in part of his work entitled On the True Doctrine, he employed the device of a fictitious Jewish interlocutor. Alluding to the scene in Gethsemane, this critic challenged the teaching that Jesus was a god or the son of the most high God because he hid and tried to escape when the Jews decided that he was worthy of death. Further, this so-called god was betrayed by his own disciples, a criticism that applies to several scenes of the passion narrative. Returning to the Gethsemane story, the interlocutor attacks the theory that Jesus foreknew and intended his sufferings on the basis of his portrayal as mourning and lamenting and praying that this cup might pass from him.

Der Göttinger Naturwissenschaftler und Schriftsteller Georg Christoph Lichtenberg bemerkte selbstkritisch: ‘Wer nichts als Chemie versteht, versteht auch die nicht recht.’1 Der Nationalökonom Walter Eucken soil dieses Wort auf die Wirtschaftswissen-schaften übertragen haben. Müβten wir im Blick auf unsere Disziplin nicht erst recht formulieren: Ein Neutestamentler, der nur etwas vom Neuen Testament versteht, kann dieses gar nicht richtig verstehen? Ist doch der Gegenstand der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft – zumindest wenn wir äβerlich gesehen von der Bezeichnung ausgehen – in der Gestalt des Nestle-Aland 26. A. nur ein einziges griechisches Buch im Kleinformat von jetzt 680 Seiten, der alte Nestle 25. A. hatte gar nur 657 aufgrund seines kleineren textkritischen Apparats. Nach Morgenthaler2 umfaβt es 137490 Worte. Allein dieses Manuskript hat 14514. Unter den theologischen wie den geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, die mit eigenen Lehrstühlen versehen an den Universitäten gelehrt werden, hat das Fach ‘Neues Testament’ gewiβ den am starksten begrenzten Gegenstand. Man vergleiche nur die Nachbardisziplin, die Kirchengeschichte: Der ganze Migne mit 378, die Weimarana mit 100 und das Corpus Reformatorum mit 101 Bänden, dazu zahllose andere Quellen, stehen diesem einen, kleinen Buch gegenüber.

Heracleon's commentary on the Fourth Gospel has always intrigued Patristic scholars concerned with the history of exegesis.1 Rarely has it evoked equal interest among textual critics concerned with the history of the NT text. In part this is due to the unfortunate bifurcation of the disciplines, a breach that has begun to mend only in recent years.2 Perhaps in greater part it is due to the nature of the materials. Heracleon's work is preserved almost exclusively in the citations of Origen, who wrote his own exposition, in some measure, as a rebuttal. Origen never completed his commentary on John; of the thirty-two volumes that he did produce, we have just nine. In these we find scattered quotations drawn from the work of his predecessor, cited primarily in order to be refuted. In all, there are not quite fifty such quotations, ranging from two or three lines of Greek text in the standard edition up to several dozen.3

In The Oral and Written Gospel, Werner Kelber argues that the first written gospel was an attempt to supersede oral tradition by the creation of a literary ‘counterform’. It aimed to discredit ‘oral authorities’ (identified as the disciples and family of Jesus and Christian prophets). Similarly, the paucity of sayings in Mark indicates a suspicion of the sayings genre, which is taken to be the oral genre par excellence. The sayings represent the living voice of the living Lord. The substitution of a written gospel would silence that voice as an ongoing phenomenon by relegating it to the dead past. The passion narrative is essentially the creation of Mark, and with its emphasis on the death and post-resurrectional silence of Jesus, creates a new Christology in opposition to the ‘oral Christology’ of the sayings, which never refer to the death of Jesus. The net effect of the written gospel was to inaugurate a theology (or ‘hermeneutic’) of death and absence in contradiction to the principle of presence that informed the oral tradition.

The title of this paper sets its own agenda when considered in the form of a syllogism. What is the relationship between circumcision and women, what between circumcision and salvation? Merely to raise the question in this form is to indicate the ambiguity which might surround any answer, at least within the sort of debate with which NT scholarship is familiar. The immediately obvious solution would be to object that the question, together with the presuppositions and concerns which apparently inspire it, is born of a modern consciousness inappropriate to the critical study of the past: that it is an imposition on the text.1 However, we may for the moment postpone the hermeneutical questions such an objection should provoke: the title is inspired not by the modern agenda of ‘women's rights’ or feminism but by that of the second century.

In his excellent study of crucifixion, Martin Hengel has documented the harsh reality of the penalty in antiquity and has shown that it was seldom portrayed in detail or in an idealized manner. These facts are important and should be kept constantly in mind. They make all the more pressing the question why a detailed narrative of Jesus' death was composed and lead us to look closely at the way the story is told. An ancient opponent of Christianity, Celsus, provides an interesting illustration of both the cultural situation and the literary question. On the one hand, he expressed the general view that crucifixion was the most ignominious and shameful type of death. On the other hand, he made charges that were based, not so much on the disgrace of death by crucifixion as such, but on the way the story is told, on the character of Jesus as revealed by the narrative. As is well known, in part of his work entitled On the True Doctrine, he employed the device of a fictitious Jewish interlocutor. Alluding to the scene in Gethsemane, this critic challenged the teaching that Jesus was a god or the son of the most high God because he hid and tried to escape when the Jews decided that he was worthy of death. Further, this so-called god was betrayed by his own disciples, a criticism that applies to several scenes of the passion narrative. Returning to the Gethsemane story, the interlocutor attacks the theory that Jesus foreknew and intended his sufferings on the basis of his portrayal as mourning and lamenting and praying that this cup might pass from him.

Since the publication of Paul Schubert's article, ‘The Structure and Significance of Luke 24’, considerable attention has been paid to what Schubert called Luke's ‘proof-from-prophecy theology’ and what others have identified as the pattern of prophecy/promise and fulfilment. Whatever term is used, it is generally agreed that Luke–Acts presents Jesus' life and the beginning of the church as the fulfilment of God's design for salvation as announced through his prophets. Yet most discussions of this aspect of Luke's theology have focused on Luke's interest in showing that Jesus and the earliest Christians fulfilled OT prophecy, while less attention has been paid to the predictions made in the narrative itself.Even less attention has been paid to the relationship between the fulfilment of OT prophecy and the fulfilment of these narrative predictions. This study will show how the narrative predictions in Luke–Acts contribute to Luke's theology of fulfilment and discuss the ways in which these predictions interface with Luke's emphasis on the fulfilment of OT prophecy.

Seit mehr als 40 Jahren ist das lukanische Werk ein ‘Sturmzentrum’ der Neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft. An den Wind-maschinen standen vornehmlich deutsche Neutestamentler – ich nenne nur E. Käsemann, Ph. Vielhauer und H. Conzelmann –, die ihre Lukaskritik aus innertheologischen Beweggriinden – theologia crucis versus theologia gloriae, existentiale Interpretation versus Heilsgeschichte – vorbrachten. Um die Stillung der Stürme haben sich u.a. O. Bauernfeind, W. G. Kümmel, E. Schweizer, U. Wilckens, W. C. von Unnik verdient gemacht. Schien damit die Zeit für ruhige Detailarbeit gekommen, so brauten sich neue Stürme über Lukas zusammen, diesmal in der Neuen Welt. Diese neue Lukaskritik zentriert sich um das Thema meines Referates, und die Beweggründe sind in der Betroffenheit über den Holocaust und seine möglichen Wurzeln im Neuen Testament zu finden, S. Sandmel, R. Maddox, J. T. Sanders und H. Räisänen sind prominente Vertreter dieser neuen Lukaskritik.

The expression ⋯ νἱ⋯σ το⋯ ⋯νθρώπον, found primarily in the Gospels on the lips of Jesus, has been the object of a centuries-long investigation that has sought to determine its meaning and origin. Patristic and medieval authors understood the phrase as a title of Jesus meaning ‘the Son of the human’, with ‘the human’ referring to either Mary or Adam. With the renewal of learning in the Renaissance and Reformation, interpreters began to examine the phrase in light of its Semitic background, tracing it to Hebrew ben adam or Aramaic bar enasha. A host of new interpretations arose. While most scholars continued to view the expression as some sort of title, others saw it as a nontitular idiom. Three possible idiomatic senses of the expression were investigated: the circumlocutional sense (‘this man’ = ‘I’), the generic sense (‘man’ in general), and the indefinite sense (‘a man’, someone). These nontitular interpretations, part of the debate since 1557, have become more prominent in the last 25 years and form an important feature of the current discussion.

An interesting literary feature within many of the narratives of the Gospels and Acts relates to the way in which certain names – ‘Simon’, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, ‘son of Jonah’ and ‘son of John’ – are used distinctively in conversation or direct speech. These names differ in nature and narrative function, but as a group they share two characteristics. First, in the majority of cases where they appear nothing in the narrative context demands the choice of the particular name in question, nor is it easy to attribute a theological motive for its presence. Secondly, while these names sound natural on the lips of the characters in the narratives, they are seldom employed when the narrator speaks with his own voice, and seem not to have been in common use among those a step or two removed from the time or place portrayed in the narrative. Their use, then, appears to reflect a concern to portray details realistically. This article seeks to examine this feature more closely, and then to consider how an observable attention to realistic detail might contribute to our understanding of the origin of the material in which it occurs.

It is one of the more surprising facts of academic life that no one has as yet attempted a detailed literary analysis of John 11.1–44. This narrative text, perhaps more than any other in the New Testament, calls out for sustained aesthetic appreciation. In many ways, John's story of the raising of Lazarus represents the pinnacle of the New Testament literature. It is a tale artfully structured, with colourful characters, timeless appeal, a sense of progression and suspense, subtle use of focus and no little sense of drama. Yet, even in the context of the well-documented paradigm shift from historical to text-immanent approaches to the Gospels, I know of no article or book which has exposed this story to a synchronic and aesthetic interpretation. This article is therefore a long overdue contribution to Fourth Gospel research. In it, I shall be examining John 11.1–44 from the following, recognizably literary, angles: context, genre, form, plot, narrator and point of view, structure, characterization, themes, implicit commentary, and reader response. My hope is that this article helps readers not only to appreciate the riches of John's storytelling, but also demonstrates in accessible terms how to approach the New Testament narrative literature.

The Johannine text about the decision of the High Priests and the Pharisees to have Jesus killed has so far attracted mainly historical and text-historical interest. Authors enquire about the relation of the text to its synoptic parallels – as Mark 14.1–2 par. – or about some pre-Johannine source lying behind our textual unit. The gathering of the High Priests and Pharisees, their reasoning, and the answer of Caiaphas are mainly attributed to pre-Johannine material, the reflection of the evangelist at the end to John himself or even a post-Johannine hand. The reason for this kind of literary criticism can be found in the idea of a death of Jesus for the ‘scattered children of God’ which seems to be alien to the earlier synoptic or synoptic-like material. The limitation to investigations of this kind leads to the inconvenience that the ‘making’ of the Johannine text as such does not come into focus. It seems to me that the final text merits our first attention, prior to any source or tradition theories. So I shall begin my short paper with a synchronic investigation into our text, followed by a diachronic approach.

Substantial reasons for rethinking the function of Rom 1.18–32 have emerged in recent studies. The traditional interpretation which continues to be widely accepted asserts that 1.18–32 is one piece of a larger section, 1.18–3.20, which, as a whole, establishes the sinfulness of all humankind. Having shown that to be the case with both Gentiles and Jews, Paul then turns in 3.21 to set forth the solution to that problem. One consequence of this interpretation has been the tendency to isolate 1.18–32 from what follows. The claim of Otto Michel that Rom 1.18–32 is ‘ein Beispiel der Missions-predigt des Pls’ not only illustrates this tendency but is of special interest for the thesis of this presentation.

Paul's problems with the law are notorious today; they were problematic in his own day too. Less notorious is Paul's view of nature. The two concepts come together in a unique passage in the Pauline corpus, one which seems to indicate that Paul knows of people, Gentiles no less, who do the law – though it is not certain what law – by nature. This contradicts much of what Paul says about Jewish inability to do the Mosaic law. I would like to argue, however, that Paul perceives this ability to do the law by nature as practically impossible. The basis for this argument is not a desire to save Paul from possible contradiction, but Stoic claims about the wise man, the only person capable of following the law of nature.

The expression ⋯ νἱ⋯σ το⋯ ⋯νθρώπον, found primarily in the Gospels on the lips of Jesus, has been the object of a centuries-long investigation that has sought to determine its meaning and origin. Patristic and medieval authors understood the phrase as a title of Jesus meaning ‘the Son of the human’, with ‘the human’ referring to either Mary or Adam. With the renewal of learning in the Renaissance and Reformation, interpreters began to examine the phrase in light of its Semitic background, tracing it to Hebrew ben adam or Aramaic bar enasha. A host of new interpretations arose. While most scholars continued to view the expression as some sort of title, others saw it as a nontitular idiom. Three possible idiomatic senses of the expression were investigated: the circumlocutional sense (‘this man’ = ‘I’), the generic sense (‘man’ in general), and the indefinite sense (‘a man’, someone). These nontitular interpretations, part of the debate since 1557, have become more prominent in the last 25 years and form an important feature of the current discussion.

A salient feature of the so-called cult-didache in Matt 6.1–18 is its concern for typically Jewish forms of piety. Almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are discussed in a way which to many commentators suggests an inner-Jewish debate. The provenance of the section would be a reform movement within Judaism with few distinctive Christian emphases. In contrast to this line of interpretation, it will be argued that the traditional cultic section as well as its redaction and incorporation into the Sermon on the Mount belong in a community which had broken its ties with Judaism decisively on a practical level. The community still adhered to the religious symbols of Judaism, but these symbols were filled with new meanings and were designed to legitimate what was basically a rather different symbolic world.

While for many the mention of Romans 7 calls immediately to mind the problem of the identity of the ἐγώ in w. 7–25, one could argue that Paul's marriage analogy at the outset of the chapter, though receiving less scholarly attention, has proved to be equally perplexing for interpreters of Romans. Stephen Westerholm indicates the complexity of this passage in his comment that Paul's picture ‘is not the most perspicuous in the literature’, while John A. T. Robinson speaks for many in asserting that the details of the analogy are ‘the more difficult the more you inspect them’.p

Proposals urging that 1 Corinthians is a composite of two or more letters have not won wide support. Those who reject such proposals argue that the letter's abrupt shifts in subject matter can be readily accounted for by deeming them Paul's seriatim response to a diverse range of issues and problems made known to him through a combination of oral reports (1.11; 5.1; 11.18; 15.12) and a letter from the Corinthians (7.1). While 2 Corinthians is widely regarded as a composite of several letters, 1 Corinthians by contrast is not.

We are in a better position to write a theology of Paul than the theology of anyone else for the first hundred years of Christianity. In contrast, though a theology of Jesus would be the more fascinating, we have nothing first-hand from Jesus which can provide such a secure starting point. The theologies of the Evangelists are almost equally problematic, since their focus on the ministry and teaching of Jesus makes their own theology that much more allusive. Moreover, in two at least of the four cases we have only one document to use; we can speak with some confidence of the theology of that document, but the theology of its anonymous author remains tantalisingly intangible. So too with the other NT letters: either we have only one letter from a particular pen, or the author is unknown, or the letter is too short for us to get much of a handle on its theology, or all three; a theology of 1 Peter is never going to have the depth and breadth of a theology of Paul. Within the first century of Christianity the closest parallel is Ignatius, where, arguably, there are as many genuine letters; but even so we are talking about seven letters written over a very short period, all but one to a relatively small area, in similar circumstances and on a limited range of themes.