The rationale of this endeavor is explained in the Introduction, and so a brief preface will be an opportunity to record some remarks of a more personal nature.

One's debts to teachers and colleagues are always great, but especially so in the case of the first book. My chief debt is to W. D. Davies, who guided my doctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary, in New York City, with great sensitivity and devotion, and who has been a source of encouragement and sound counsel to me ever since. During those years I also profited from the advice of John Knox and J. Louis Martyn, and, in the field of Old Testament, from James Muilenburg and Samuel Terrien. The foundation of my interest in Biblical Studies was laid by Leslie Hewson of Rhodes University in the Republic of South Africa, and nurtured by C. F. D. Moule, Hugh Montefiore and Ernst Bammel at Cambridge University. To all these men I owe more than can be expressed.

Most of this work was written in the stimulating atmosphere of Claremont, California. My colleagues and students in the Humanities at Scripps College provided the indispensable atmosphere of lively scholarship and broad humanistic interest, in which theology can live and breathe as a vital human concern. Colleagues and graduate students in the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity and at the Claremont Graduate School taught me the real meaning of the phrase ‘a community of scholars’. To all these I express my gratitude.