Üblicherweise spricht man von den Anfängen einer ‘christlichen Gemeinde’ in Rom, wenn man von den Anfängen des Christus-glaubens in Rom sprechen will. Wir haben uns im Titel unseres Beitrages dieser Konvention angeschlossen. Wir möchten aber von vornherein darauf aufmerksam machen, daβ diese Terminologie anachronistisch ist. Es ist zwar wahr, daβ Christusgläubige schon früh von auβen als eine eigenständige Gruppe erkannt und als solche auch Opfer von Maβnahmen römischer Machtpolitik werden konnten. Unseres Erachtens geschieht das spätestens unter Nero. Doch ist die Bezeichnung ‘Christianer’ (Xριστιανοί lat. Chrestiani oder Christiani) erst in Dokumenten nach 70 faβbar (Acta 11.25; Tacitus Ann. 15.44; Sueton Nero 16.2). Bemerkenswert ist, daβ in Suetons Hinweis auf das Claudiusedikt (‘Da die Juden unter ihrem Anführer Chrestos beständig Unruhe stifteten, vertrieb er sie aus Rom’) die Christusgläubigen noch ethnisch und religiös ganz zu den Juden gerechnet werden. Wir kommen auf diese Stelle später zurück, möchten jetzt aber schon darauf aufmerksam machen, daβ Sueton unter Claudius jedenfalls keine ‘Christianer’ in Rom erwähnt. Gewiβ stimmen wir denjenigen Gelehrten zu, die annehmen, daβ Chrestus hier gleich Christus ist, d.h. Jesus (Christus) meint. Wir können also auf Grund von Suetons Notiz annehmen, daβ es schon unter Claudius Anhänger des Christus-glaubens in Rom gab. Doch hat M. Stern recht, wenn er schreibt, ‘However, the words of Suetonius could convey the impression that Christus himself was present at Rome at that time, and that the disturbances were instigated by him personally, while Tacitus, indeed, was better informed on the whereabouts of Christus.’

Kaum ein Papyrusfund hat in diesem Jahrhundert so Furore gemacht wie der des P. Lond. Christ. I, oder, unter seiner bekannteren Inventarnummer, Papyrus Egerton 2. 1934 von einem ägyptischen Händler an das British Museum London verkauft, gilt er seit seiner Erstedition 1935 als eine der ältesten christlichen Handschriften auf Papyrus, paläographisch zu datieren um 200P. Keine Frage, daβ das Schriftstück das Interesse der neutestamentlichen Forschung auf sich zog, waren doch aus ihm möglicherweise neue Erkenntnisse über die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition zu erwarten. Die Grundfrage, die seit seiner Entdeckung an das Evangelienfragment gestellt wird und weiterhin zu stellen ist, ist dementsprechend die nach dem literarischen Verhältnis zu den kanonischen Evangelien. Die Alternative heiβt: Entweder ist Egerton diesen gegenüber sekundär und ohne groβen Wert für den Historiker, oder er bietet eine von den Evangelien unabhängige, ja möglicherweise sogar ältere Überlieferung.

According to the most widely accepted theory, Luke and Matthew used the gospel of Mark as the main source for their own gospels. In so doing, Matthew reproduced almost all the contents of Mark; Luke however omitted one large block of Marcan material: Mark 6.45–8.26. Luke may have omitted this section because his copy of the gospel of Mark was lacking this section, or because, although he knew this material, he chose to omit it from his gospel.

Over the years textual critics have given great attention to the New Testament text of the Acts of the Apostles. Like all New Testament texts, it merits particular attention, but especially because its textual tradition is enriched by the principal representative of the so-called ‘Western’ text, the Greek Acts of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis. The presence of this defining element of the ‘Western’ text has made the Acts of the Apostles an exceptionally fertile environment for the production, evaluation, and refinement of theories about the history of the Greek New Testament text. The favoured status of the Greek Acts extends to the ancient versions as well. Even the Old Georgian version of Acts has been grouped with ‘Western’ witnesses – F. C. Conybeare studied a few chapters of one manuscript of the Georgian Acts and concluded that it had many ‘Western’ readings.

Certainly since the groundbreaking work of Ferdinand de Saus-sure, the social character of language has been axiomatic for most linguists. Saussure writes: ‘The structure of a language is a social product of our language faculty. At the same time, it is also a body of necessary conventions adopted by society to enable members of society to use their language faculty.’ Eugene Nida and Johannes Louw, writing in the supplement to their New Testament lexicon, acknowledge the connection between their treatment of semantics and sociology, but they refrain from specifying what they think the relationship between language and society to be. Nida is somewhat more forthcoming in his study of componential analysis when he writes:

There are analogies between the structure of a culture and the semantic structure of a corresponding language, but there is no set of one-to-one correspondences. A language must be free to describe a variety of possibilities, including those which have not as yet entered the culture. Nevertheless, the language does reflect in certain aspects of its semantic structure those aspects of the culture which for one reason or another have become salient in the lexical contrasts.

Galatians 1–2 is a well-worn scholarly path, but Gal 1.10 is a suggestive marker that has been overlooked by many exegetical travellers:

‘For now do I seek the approval of humans or of God? Or do I seek to please people?

If I were still pleasing people, I would not be Christ's slave.’

Exegetes often cite the list in Gal 4.10 (⋯μέρας κα⋯ μ⋯νας κα⋯ καιροὺς κα⋯ ⋯νιαυτούς days and months and seasons and years) as parallel in content and function to the list in Col 2.16 (⋯ορτ⋯ς ἤ νεομηνίας ἤ σαββάτων a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths). J. B. Lightfoot provides the most extensive explanation of the content and function of these lists, and he reaches two conclusions that permeate the exegetical tradition of these two verses. First, he concludes that the content of the list in Galatians describes a Jewish timekeeping scheme since the list in Colossians clearly does so. His rationale is strengthened by Paul's polemic against the Judaizers in Galatians. Second, he deduces that the Colossian list functions to describe the non-Christian practices of the opponents since the list in Galatians is clearly a non-Christian temporal scheme that should be rejected.

Scholars have always found the series in Col 3.11b difficult to interpret gracefully. There it is stated that in Christ the distinction with βάρβαρος, Σκύθης ‘barbarian, Scythian’, has been abolished, along with that between the more comprehensible oppositions of ‘Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision … slave, free’. The increased sensitivity of contemporary NT scholars to the social dimension of texts, as well as to their rhetorical and stylistic deployment, however, may at last offer the possibility of unravelling this intriguing set of antitheses, particularly at its critical point, that is, the interpretation of Σκύθης.

Christ describes himself in Rev 3.14 as ‘the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God’. Commentators have suggested a variety of backgrounds for the threefold title. The purpose of this study is to review these proposals and argue in support of one of them.

Sixteen years ago I published a brief study in NTS1 in which I ‘underscore[d] the “tackiness” of using rabbinic material in support of or against an interpretation of NT material’. The present article returns to that subject by means of an examination of the use of a passage in the Babylonian Talmud in the magisterial two volume work by Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah.2 It is not, however, intended to be a comment on anything in this massive work other than the discussion on pages 376–7. My attention to the passage was drawn by a comment on an enclosure that came with the volumes: ‘…No one concerned with Jewish-Christian relations should fail to study his deliberate, sensitive and nuanced treatment of the Trial of Jesus.’

The Speech of Stephen in Acts 7 has become a fertile ground for source criticism. It has been argued that because the speech in Acts 7 is so different from the other ones in Acts, it was likely not written by Luke himself. The suggestion that we have in this speech a verbatim account of Stephen's defence has been virtually laid to rest by scholars, with the recognition that the speech does not fit in its context as a defence against the charges levelled at Stephen (Acts 6.13–14). Enough evidence, however, of Lucan redaction has been found in Acts 7 to suggest to a number of scholars that the speech comes essentially from Luke, either as the author of the whole speech, or as the composer of the speech with use of earlier materials.