While traditional Christian thought has honoured the disciples, they have since Wrede been increasingly regarded as bearing the brunt of Mark's animus. This paper is a new examination of the role they play in Mark's thought. It is not inappropriate to present it at a meeting of the Society in the U.S.A., where so much original and fascinating work on the place of Mark as author has been advanced in recent years. It may be that Mark did not conceive of the disciples as playing any particular role. In the tradition their lives were too closely intertwined with that of Jesus for Mark to have been able to omit them from his account. Given their necessary presence he might have regarded them purely as background, an ineradicable part of the scenery but of no importance in themselves and having no essential function in what he wrote. We will not dispute this now, but all that is argued later about the disciples indicates that they were not mere scenery; Mark gave them a definite role in his book. But what role? This is a legitimate question and needs to be asked once we abandon the view that Mark is writing pure biography.

The subject presents one of those questions in New Testament criticism in which mental bent, apart from the bias of prejudgment, is chiefly influential in deter-mining the conclusions reached.

This statement with which I. T. Beckwith introduced in 1919 his discussion of the authorship of the Apocalypse (Apoc) still proves to be true today. It can be equally applied to the question whether the Apoc should be assigned to the same school or circle that was responsible for the Fourth Gospel (4G) and the Johannine Epistles. The judgement moreover also pertains to the historical and theological interpretation of either the Apoc or the 4G. Mental bent and systematic presuppositions determine the various reconstructions of the history of the Johannine community as well as the theological interpretations of its literary works.

The problem of the original setting of the Apostolic decree (Acts xv. 20, 29, xxi. 25) is still with us, in spite of the epoch-making and powerfully influential work of M. Dibelius and E. Haenchen on Acts xv as a whole. After analysing that chapter in detail, Dibelius concluded that the Decree stemmed from pre-Lukan documentary tradition but denied that the events described by Paul in Gal. ii. 1–10 could be the setting for the creation of the tradition Haenchen went still further, endorsing Dibelius' reservations about source criticism and veering decisively towards the view that Luke himself, dependent no doubt upon a contemporary and non-literary tradition, was responsible for the material He too disputed any connection with Gal. ii. 1–10 and followed C. von Weizsäcker in tracing the Decree to an attempt to cement together Jewish/Gentile Christian relations, certainly later in time than the controversy in Antioch described in Gal. ii. 11–14. The history of research into this problem during the last few decades has shown a quite remarkable degree of unanimity in accepting two basic conclusions: (I) Lukan theology is quite sufficient to explain the presence of the Decree in the Acts narrative of the so-called Apostolic Council, i.e. Luke's view that Gentile converts participate in that true Judaism set out by Moses and fulfilled in Jesus, provided they respect the law. (2) The Decree is the product of a process of conciliation. While scholars disagree as to whether Jerusalem was involved in the process, it is widely agreed that the conciliation was in time later, not earlier, than the clash in Antioch.

Les commentateurs de l'épître aux Hébreux sont unanimes à reconnaître l'importance particulière des dix premiers versets du chapitre v, texte qui présente d'abord une description du sacerdoce (v. 1–4) et en précise ensuite l'application au Christ (v. 5–10). L'attention des exégètes, cependant, ne s'attache guère à l'interprétation d'ensemble de ce passage, elle se concentre le plus souvent sur certains problèmes de détail, comme celui de l'exaucement de la prière du Christ, qui a suscité, on le sait, une conjecture célèbre de Harnack. Quant à l'interprétation d'ensemble, on estime apparemment qu'elle ne présente pas de difficulté, et cette opinion fait qu'on se dispense de traiter clairement certaines questions, qui, mériteraient pourtant d'être discutées.