The importance of Paul's first extant letter to the study of early Christianity has clearly been demonstrated by the attention paid to just a small part of it, the ‘dreadful text’ of 1 Thessalonians 2.14–16, a ‘passionate, generalizing, hateful’ diatribe against the Jews for having killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and for interfering with Paul's mission to the Gentiles. Or so it has seemed to most historians, theologians, and exegetes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have studied the passage. Those early, stunning verses of Paul, written probably in 50 or 51 C.E. from Corinth to his recently founded church in Thessalonica, have proved especially embarrassing to Jews and Christians who, in post-Holocaust self-examination and post-Vatican II ecumenical spirit, have been trying to exorcise the demons of antisemitism. How could Paul, a proud Jew and Pharisee, so categorically condemn his own people? And how can so early and sweeping a condemnation be explained by scholars who argue that such virulent antisemitism did not in fact develop until the latter part of the century, after the destruction of the Temple and the council at Jamnia?

The 1 Corinthians passage, in which Paul insists that a woman praying or prophesying in the Christian assembly should have her head covered (11.2–16), has been said to be ‘in its present form hardly one of Paul's happier compositions. The logic is obscure at best and contradictory at worst. The word choice is peculiar; the tone peevish.’ On an earlier occasion I addressed myself to the interpretation of one of the difficult phrases in this passage, and I now turn to another one in v. 3 because some recent discussion of this verse may be obscuring its basic thrust and because some evidence relevant to its meaning has not been considered. It has to do with the sense in which Paul uses κεφαλή in this verse, which reads:

1 Cor 15.50–57 is frequently cited as evidence that Paul expected to be alive at the parousia, chiefly on the basis of the distinction in v. 52 between ‘the dead’ who ‘will be raised imperishable’ and ‘we’ who ‘will be changed’. Paul ‘expects that at the parusia he himself will not be among the dead (of whom he speaks in the third person), but among the living (of whom he speaks in the first person)’. There are, however, a number of factors that persuade us to question this conclusion.

According to John 6.52–59, participation in the eucharistic meal is necessary for ‘life’: ‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’ (v 53). The manifest allusion here to the Lord's Supper, together with the insistence on its indispensability for Life, has led a majority of interpreters to conclude that this passage is ‘sacramentalist’. This conclusion has found reinforcement in what looks like a close parallel from Ignatius, whose writings are presumably contemporaneous with the Fourth Gospel:

It is hardly necessary to emphasise the problematic nature of this passage. Its tragic misuse, in past and present, in the interests of supporting oppressive regimes and suppressing protest can neither be denied nor condoned. It is easy to lay the blame for such abusesat the door of non-contextual literalism, with its hidden agenda of endorsement of the status quo. Liberal interpreters, however, also work with a hidden agenda and cannot be allowed to assume that they know from the outset the ‘right’ interpretation of the passage.That is why we have described it as a test case for New Testament interpretation. It is not simply that the passage is being tested. Thetest is whether New Testament hermeneutics is able to handle acase as difficult and controversial as Rom 13. 1–7 while remaining true to its principles and without resorting to emergency procedures, such as drastic surgery!

Few scholars have proposed that there is any precise OT background for Paul's view of reconciliation, even though there has been much discussion about the formulation of the doctrine. There is no Hebrew word for ‘reconciliation’ in the OT; there is general agreement that Paul obtained this word from not only the Jewish but also the Greco-Roman world. The καταλλάσσω–διαλλάσσομαι word group is found in the Septuagint (rarely), 2 and 4 Maccabees and Josephus as well as in classical, hellenistic and koine writings. The use of the word group in these writings has been well documented.

Since the first significant studies of Semitic influence on the NT published by Wyss, Pasor and Trom in the mid 17th century, there has not been a lack of interest in the topic of the language of the Greek Bible. Treatments of Semitic influence on the Greek of the NT usually concentrate on two issues: the current languages of lst-century Palestine, and various theories regarding the nature of the Greek of the NT. Whatever answers might be posited for the other books of the NT, few scholars have been completely satisfied with estimations given concerning the Apocalypse. Here most acutely the question of the languages used in Palestine during the 1st century overlaps with, if it is not dependent upon, the question of the nature of the Greek of the NT.

In a previous issue of NTS, Richard Bauckham suggests that Acta Thomae 146 contains a lost parable of Jesus about a vine. The second section of the article comprises a study of Odes of Solomon 38. 16–18 (17–19), in which Bauckham proposes to find certain traces of the same parable. In this short note, I shall be concerned principally with this section of Bauckham's article.