Reviewing John Barclay's Paul and the Gift, Susan Eastman recognises the need for ‘fuller analysis of judgment’ in Paul to accompany such penetrating work on grace. The dearth of interest in wrath often perpetuates the Marcionite premise that wrath precludes mercy, a false antithesis that especially skews interpretation of Romans. This presumed opposition leads scholars to find dithering dialectic, two covenants, two Israels or contradictory fantasy in Rom 9–11. Replacing the simple binary with a thicker lens of provisional judgement clarifies Paul's argument that God strikes Israel in wrath in order to heal them.

That Jesus carried the horizontal bar of the cross, also named patibulum, is often assumed, and argued by John Granger Cook. Gunnar Samuelsson disagrees, however, and argued that we grope in the dark about the exact nature of the σταυρός that Jesus carried. Both major crucifixion scholars refer in their argumentation to Latin sources in which a patibulum is carried. But these sources have not been thoroughly assessed on their own. In this article the eight Latin sources mentioned in support of the ancient practice are analysed. It is argued that only four of these sources should be counted as referring to ‘traditional’ cross-bearing practices.

1 Tim 5.3–16 defines which women may be registered for financial support at church expense. It is integrated around four ‘household rules’, but is not concerned to regulate an ‘order’ or ‘office’ of widows. Rather, it clarifies that the church should not supplant households in financial matters, and should be responsible only for destitute widows who have no other network support. Since χήρα can mean ‘woman without a man’, the instructions in 5.11–15 are best interpreted as directed against young women who have chosen celibacy. By contrast, the author conceives of the church as a network of Christian households connected by mutual economic support.

This article proposes that the Synoptic Gospels’ pronouncements of Isa 40.3 (Matt 4.3; Mark 1.2–3; Luke 3.4–6) invite a comparison with the Roman road system and its extensive broadcast of Roman imperial ideology. Heralding the sovereignty of a coming king on newly constructed roads through difficult terrain, Matthew, Mark and Luke portray the coming of the kingdom of God in terms analogous to the laying of Roman roads followed by the enforcement of Roman rule throughout the Roman Empire. If Isa 40.3 heralded the arrival of the true God through the ministry of Jesus, as the Synoptic Gospels proclaim, then Rome's pretentions were by implication counterfeit. The engineering feats of raising ravines, levelling heights, smoothing terrain and making straight highways denoted Roman expansion, conquest and the standardisation of Roman imperial ideology. In contradistinction, the Synoptic Gospels’ citations of Isa 40.3 presage the triumph of God, while simultaneously parodying Roman imperial ideology.

Drawing on recent insights into textual authority, this article examines how the authoritativeness of the Jewish scriptures is manifested in 1 Clement. The article argues that the relationship between the letter and the writings it uses in its argumentation should be seen as a two-way process of mutual authorisation. Moreover, the article illuminates the interrelatedness of textual authority, scriptural argumentation and the legitimation of leadership and power. Thus, the analysis both contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions of scriptural authority and highlights the role of scriptural argumentation in the identity-building of early Christians.

This article explores the literary relationship between the Matthean tradition and the Ascension of Isaiah, a second-century pseudepigraphon detailing Isaiah's visions of the ‘Beloved’ and his polemical (and fatal) engagement with the ‘false prophet’ Belkira. While the lexical affiliation between these texts has been a point of interest, the discussion has oscillated between types of sources utilised, whether gospel material mutually shared with Matthew or Matthew itself. Though this paper details lexical contact, it pushes beyond philological similarity and posits narrative imitations as well as shared polemical strategies. The result is that Isaiah is more readily seen as a figure fashioned after the Matthean Jesus, and the ‘martyred prophet’ motif that ripples throughout the Gospel of Matthew as appropriated and narrativised by the Ascension of Isaiah for a second-century conflict over prophetic practices.

In Sermon studies and their discussion of structure, scholars disagree on how to understand the latter half of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 6.19–7.12). This section breaks the almost seamless structure of the first half of the Sermon (5.17–6.18). In what follows, I will argue that the latter half of the Sermon displays more structure than is generally acknowledged by Graham Stanton and others and gives us key insights into the overall message of the Sermon. I will argue that the structure of the latter half of the Sermon is marked by internal structuring, thematic consistency and verbal patterning. Matthew's emphasis in this section is on disciples having heavenly priorities while on earth.

The Synoptics narrate a single Passover during Jesus’ ministry, whereas John's Gospel spans three Passovers. The Diatessaron harmonised the Four Gospels, but previous scholarship has misapprehended Tatian's chronology of Jesus’ ministry. The Diatessaron included all the Johannine festivals, but Tatian rearranged the order of events. Distinctively resolving a significant disagreement between John and the Synoptics, Tatian innovated a narrative sequence wherein Jesus’ temple disruption occurs at the second of three Passovers.

The present article argues that 666 in Rev 13.18 is best related to the notice of Solomon receiving 666 talents of gold (1 Kgs 10.14 // 2 Chr 9.13), which is, in turn, an important notice of this king's wayward and unjust practices: his inordinate wealth, exploitation of his own people and eschewing of God's law.

The form-critical method found an English-speaking champion in R. H. Lightfoot of Oxford University. Through multiple publications he promoted the ideas of Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Dibelius and Ernst Lohmeyer. However, a close comparison of their texts reveals that Lightfoot sometimes simply translated the words of Dibelius and Lohmeyer, at times without appropriate attribution, and presented their ideas as his own. Recently discovered letters in the Lightfoot archive at Oxford University provide a more complete picture of Lightfoot's travels and interaction with German NT scholars. These discoveries call for a reassessment of Lightfoot's place in the history of NT scholarship.

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.