Jesus rebukes Peter at Caesarea Philippi by calling him ‘Satan’. The redactor of Matthew adds to this: ‘You are a stumbling block for me!’ This article argues that this editorial addition reflects a tendency in Jewish sources (1) to use the image of ‘stumbling’ to talk of sin, and (2) to identify the diabolic figure (e.g. Satan, Belial, Evil Inclination) as the cause of ‘stumbling’, earning it the title ‘stumbling block’. This tendency has its origins in the Hebrew Bible, is clearly expressed in the literature of the Qumran community, and is further developed in rabbinic sources.

P.Ryl.iii.457, a papyrus fragment of the gospel of John known to New Testament scholars as P52, is regularly publicised as the earliest extant Christian manuscript and forms a central part of the Rylands collection. Yet the date generally assigned to the fragment (‘about 125 ad’) is based entirely on palaeography, or analysis of handwriting, which cannot provide such a precise date. The present article introduces new details about the acquisition of P52, engages the most recent scholarship on the date of the fragment and argues that the range of possible palaeographic dates for P52 extends into the third century.

During the first and second centuries of the Common Era the Christ cult spread from rural Palestine to the large cities of the Empire. This article draws insights from social network theory and from epidemiology, arguing that the Christ cult was not a simple contagion, spread by simple contact, but a ‘complex contagion’ that required persuasion, especially because adherence to the Christ cult entailed potential social costs and demanded high signalling costs.

It is a fact: we are ‘the unforeseen readers’ of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, which moreover was written ‘more for the ear than the eye’. The present article follows the epistle through from beginning to end, taking account of those things that our academic habits sometimes make us forget. Attention is directed, among other things, towards the manner in which the apostle – conscious of his lack of authority over some of his audience – is seized from the outset of the epistle by the need to convince the Corinthian community that they must be true to themselves, following the call of the God who has ultimately chosen to make himself known by Christ crucified. For each of the themes addressed by Paul throughout the epistle a range of impressions, questions or hypotheses are noted.

In 1954 the first issue of New Testament Studies (NTS) was released under the auspices of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS), which was founded on 16 September 1938 in Birmingham. The journal aimed to interlink (European) NT scholarship and to ensure its quality and standards by the society's members. Why did it take so long to release the journal, even though the Dutch NT scholar Johannes de Zwaan (1883–1957), who initially came up with the idea, intended the publication of an international quarterly right from the beginning? In 1953 he was not considered for election to the Editorial Board and therefore decided to publish another New Testament journal whose first issue appeared in 1956: Novum Testamentum. De Zwaan's correspondence with some of SNTS's first members and other so far unknown sources can elucidate these circumstances.

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.

1 Cor 15.28 is often regarded as problematic for ‘divine Christology’ in Paul, because the Son's final submission to the Father is held to tell against his ontological equality with the Father. The current article argues that this conclusion involves a category mistake. The ‘grammar’ of Paul's Christology requires that we distinguish between what Paul says of and on the basis of Christ's divinity, and what Paul says of and on the basis of Christ's humanity, a strategy sometimes called ‘partitive exegesis’. The article evaluates recent solutions to this problem, warrants partitive exegesis from within 1 Corinthians, and offers a partitive reading of 1 Cor 15.28: the Son submits to the Father as the final act of an office he holds as a human, in order to perfect the human vocation of vicegerency over creation.

Scholarly interpretations of the descent and description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22 have tended to evaluate the city against biblical and extra-canonical descriptions of the Jerusalem Temple, apocalyptic accounts of heaven and ancient utopian literature in general. While some have noted the ways in which the New Jerusalem parallels the description of Babylon elsewhere in the Apocalypse, no one has yet considered the ways in which the New Jerusalem mimics, mirrors and adapts the excesses of elite Roman architecture and decor. The argument of this article is that when viewed against the backdrop of literary and archaeological evidence for upper-class living space, the luxury of the New Jerusalem is domesticated and functions to democratise access to wealth in the coming epoch. The ways in which Revelation's New Jerusalem rehearses the conventions of morally problematic displays of luxury can partially explain later patristic discomfort with literalist readings of this passage.

Did Tatian write his gospel in Greek or Syriac? Treatments of this most beleaguered crux in Diatessaronic studies have largely depended on a now defunct approach to the source material. The ‘New Perspective’ on Tatian's Diatessaron wants for a new study of this old question. A problematic arrangement of textual data at Luke 19.4 offers unrecognised evidence that Tatian composed in Greek – namely, contradictory testimonia to the Syriac word for Zacchaeus’ ‘sycamore’ in Tatian's gospel reflect different etymological translations of a distinctive, Greek textual variant.

In History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, Martyn argued that John 9.22 concerns the formal expulsion from the synagogue of Jews who were confessing Jesus as the Messiah of Jewish expectation. Johannine scholars following Martyn have often claimed that a ‘high’ Christology must have provided the catalyst for this trauma, not the ‘low’ Christology posited by Martyn. For Martyn, however, a ‘high’ Christology was a subsequent development, leading to a second trauma, that of execution for blasphemously claiming that Jesus was somehow equal to God. Accepting Martyn's argument on 9.22 with respect to this issue, and leaving aside the debate about the relevance of the Birkat ha-Minim, this article seeks to determine why local synagogue authorities, evidently represented in John's narrative by the Pharisees, would have found the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah so offensive that they formulated a decree to expel fellow Jews espousing this new messianic faith. Analysis of John 5, 7 and 9 demonstrates that the Pharisees in the Johannine setting found this confession offensive because they regarded the behaviour of Johannine disciples on the Sabbath as thoroughly inconsistent with their own understanding of the Sabbath commandment and as significantly hindering their desire to play an authoritative role in determining what counted as acceptable behaviour on the Sabbath and what did not. In short, the specific catalyst for expelling Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah from the synagogue was their Sabbath observance, which the Pharisees in the Johannine setting came to regard as an unacceptable deviation from their own developing views on the matter in the period after 70 ce.

The enigmatic name of the poor man in Luke 16.19–31 has invited diverse interpretations of its significance for the parable's meaning. After sketching the character and function of the poor man, this study evaluates several such interpretations, both ancient and contemporary. It then argues for a narrative-critical reading of Lazarus’ name that is congruent with Luke's putative purpose in including this parable in his narrative of Jesus’ ministry, where the poor are afforded honour and the rich are exhorted to respond to the material needs of their neighbours.

Much light has been shed on the history of the manuscripts of Berat (now kept in Tirana) by Didier Lafleur in his recent catalogue of the NT manuscripts of Albania. However, an aspect of the story was left in the shadow: what is the source of von Soden's information about these manuscripts? The sparse data furnished by von Soden himself and an unpublished report by Harnack show that the German scholar made use of information collected in Albania by one of his collaborators, Alfred Schmidtke. Furthermore, the value of this information for the history of the Berat manuscripts is confirmed by the fact that it is somehow linked to a process of inventory done in September 1901 by a priest of the city.

Scholars have often explained discrepancies in evidence for women's participation in the early church by reference to the gendering of public and private spaces. Public spaces were coded male, and when churches moved into these spaces, women's leadership was disavowed. This article rejects the usefulness of the public/private dichotomy as an explanatory tool, arguing that the modern sense in which these terms are used was anachronistic to the New Testament period. The overlap between public functions and space that the modern concept of the ‘public sphere’ takes for granted did not exist in the ancient world. Public functions often occurred in household spaces, and functions considered private also took place outside homes. For these reasons, scholars should look for new language that better describes the ancient patterns.

A survey of the current state of research shows that scholars are at an impasse regarding the text of Matt 16.2b–3. A fresh application of reasoned eclecticism to the unit uncovers new evidence supporting the longer reading. A reappraisal of the Greek manuscripts, early versions and early Christian literature shows that the longer and shorter readings are of approximately equal antiquity as far as can be established from presently available evidence. Analysis of the Eusebian apparatus strongly suggests that the shorter reading was often the result of intentional scribal change. Of the various explanations for such change, the most persuasive view is that proposed by Scrivener, Tregelles and Weiss – the shorter reading was probably an assimilation to Matt 12.39.

Past scholarly literature has interpreted the orientation of the teaching of the Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel as either retrospective or prospective. First, I will argue that it is prospective, but that this does not imply that the Paraclete teaches things that have not yet been taught by Jesus. The Gospel text challenges us to conceive the teaching of the Paraclete as prospective, but also as repeating Jesus’ teaching. A synthesis of the retrospective and prospective interpretation is thus required. Second, I will argue that this paradoxical synthesis can be obtained on the basis of Kierkegaard's category of repetition.

This article argues that the current predominant interpretation of the use of Psalm 16 in the speech in Acts 2, namely the ‘proof’ from prophecy explanation, as well as the few other models which have been advanced, are unconvincing on narratival grounds. Instead, it suggests that the Psalm is primarily quoted as a rationale to explain why Jesus rose from the dead and death could not detain him – namely because of his righteousness. The article concludes by submitting that this reading sheds important new light on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus as a divine necessity in the early kerygma in Acts.

Paul's strange confession in Gal 2.19–20 poses a question: is the ‘I’ who was crucified with Christ and no longer lives the same self as the ‘I’ who now lives and in whom Christ lives? To ask this question is to be drawn into conversation with the reception history of Galatians and also to be invited to locate the Pauline ‘I’ in and across the movements from death to life. This article suggests, in dialogue especially with Martin Luther, that for Paul the movement from the state of creation to the state of sin is a movement from life to death; the movement from sin to salvation, conversely, is a movement from death to life. Within or across these ruptures, salvation is as radical as death and resurrection. In this sense, the no longer and now living selves are not identical: the ‘I’ is in another as a gift. And yet, the ‘I’ who lives by grace is also the ‘I’ who was, is and will be loved by the ‘Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.’

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.

By portraying Jesus both as a son of David through Joseph and as virginally conceived, Matthew and Luke suggest that Joseph adopted Jesus into the Davidic line. Most modern interpreters assume that Joseph adopted Jesus through some Jewish law or custom. However, Yigal Levin has argued that adoption did not exist in Judaism and therefore the First and Third Evangelists must have appealed to Roman law (implying a gentile provenance for Matthew and Luke). This article reviews and critiques Levin's study and argues that early Jews did have a concept and practice of adoption and therefore an appeal to Roman law is unnecessary.

Henry Chadwick proposed in the 1960s that Philo's Questions and Answers in Genesis 4.69 is important for understanding Paul's mission strategy in 1 Cor 9. In 2011 David J. Rudolph revisited that ‘missionary-apologetic’ reading of QG 4.69 in a discussion of Paul's observance of the Torah but refrained from drawing firm conclusions. This article subjects the missionary-apologetic hypothesis to closer scrutiny, especially regarding its plausibility as a reading of Philo. It argues that Chadwick's hypothesis lacks both evidence and explanatory power. QG 4.69, therefore, contributes little to our understanding of 1 Cor 9 and of Paul's missionary strategy and Torah observance.