Philippians 3 is central to the question of integrity of the letter. While those who argue for three fragments struggle with the intention of the chapter, those who argue for the letter's integrity vote for its function as an exemplum. This article argues that there is some truth in both positions. Philippians 3 imitates the Jewish testament genre in which an ideal biography is depicted to become a model of religious advice. But while Paul deals critically with genre, he became a religious hero in the canonical letter, which was edited by the Philippians in the early second century ce.

Zu den Vorarbeiten für einen Kommentar zum Römerbrief gehört der Versuch, über den Zweck und den Gesamtcharakter dieses Apostelschreibens Klarheit zu gewinnen. Darum gibt es von Ulrich Wilckens einen ‘Aufsatz Über Abfassungszweck und Aufbau des Römerbriefs’, vier Jahre vor dem ersten Band seines Kommentars erschienen,2 und von Peter Stuhlmacher einen Vortrag ‘Der Abfassungszweck des Römerbriefs’,3 erwachsen aus der Vorarbeit für seinen Römerbrief-Kommentar im ‘Neuen Testament Deutsch’, mit dessen Erscheinen bald zu rechnen ist. Einen ähnlichen Stellenwert und Sinn hat für mich das folgende Referat im Blick auf die Kommentierung des Römerbriefs im Theologischen Handkommentar zum Neuen Testament, die mir übertragen worden ist. Dabei freue ich mich besonders, diesen Vortrag in eben dem kirchlich-gesellschaftlichen Raum halten zu können, in dem auch der Kommentar in erster Linie seinen Beitrag zum Verständnis und zur Wirkung des Neuen Testaments leisten soil. Daraus könnte eine Diskussion erwachsen, die meine Arbeit an der Auslegung des Briefes durch neue Gesichtspunkte anregt und vorantreibt.

Andrew Overman, Anthony Saldarini and David Sim overstate their case when they conclude that the religion of the Matthean community was not Christianity but Judaism. The appeal to 5.17ff. and the exclusivist sayings will not bear the weight of the hypothesis. There is far too much newness in Matthew and the differences with Judaism are too great to conclude that Matthew exhibits mere ‘deviance’ from other Jewish groups. The ‘new things’ involve a radical reorientation of previous perspectives wherein Christ takes central place previously held by Torah. Matthew's community is thus best described as a Jewish form of Christianity.

In The Oral and Written Gospel, Werner Kelber argues that the first written gospel was an attempt to supersede oral tradition by the creation of a literary ‘counterform’. It aimed to discredit ‘oral authorities’ (identified as the disciples and family of Jesus and Christian prophets). Similarly, the paucity of sayings in Mark indicates a suspicion of the sayings genre, which is taken to be the oral genre par excellence. The sayings represent the living voice of the living Lord. The substitution of a written gospel would silence that voice as an ongoing phenomenon by relegating it to the dead past. The passion narrative is essentially the creation of Mark, and with its emphasis on the death and post-resurrectional silence of Jesus, creates a new Christology in opposition to the ‘oral Christology’ of the sayings, which never refer to the death of Jesus. The net effect of the written gospel was to inaugurate a theology (or ‘hermeneutic’) of death and absence in contradiction to the principle of presence that informed the oral tradition.

Constitutional questions are posed in much recent study of Christian origins. What was the significance of the ministry of Jesus for the contemporary Jewish polity, and the subsequent growth of the Christian ecclesia? The differing emphases of the answers can be roughly labelled ecclesiastical, for example in B. F. Meyer, or national, for example in G. B. Caird and E. P. Sanders. Despite such differences, the twelve must needs be central in the subject-matter (as in B. F. Meyer, 134; Sanders, 326). Can one go further towards determining the constitutional significance of a body of twelve for a Jew of the first century A.D.?

One possible model for the twelve, the group of tribal princes, seems to be relatively neglected. In what follows attention will be drawn to it, and an attempt will be made to characterize its interpretation in ancient Judaism. Finally, against this background, brief comment will be offered on the place of the twelve in early church order and in the ministry of Jesus.

If we ask the question, ‘Did Paul know Jesus?’, we find that it is not so simple because of the ambiguities of the word ‘know’. Some other expression would make for clarity, e.g. ‘Did Paul have any contact or relationship with Jesus?’, or, even more pointedly, ‘Did Paul see Him, go further and listen to Him, and still further and speak with Him?’ ‘Know’ can mean, ‘know Him by sight’, ‘have a slight contact with Him’, ‘have close relations with Him’; ‘know about Him’ from others; and, finally, ‘form a judgement about Him’ or ‘understand Him’. Moreover, again and again when this question is raised in its simple form the ambiguous II Cor. v. 16 is invoked.

The problem of continuity between Jesus and Paul is an old one, not least with regard to their respective attitudes towards the law. For example, in a private conversation some years ago Ernst Käsemann maintained a typically provocative position: (1) that Jesus' attitude to the law lies very much at the heart of Jesus' distinctiveness; (2) that Paul's attitude to the law was in fact the same; and (3) that Paul was independent of Jesus at this point. The conversation unfortunately had to end before we could pursue such further questions as whether in that case Paul was as religiously significant (distinctive? unique?) as Jesus. But it highlights an important problem: if Paul's attitude to the law, with its coordinate teaching about grace and justification, is central to the Christianity of the Gentile mission, then in what sense or degree is his teaching continuous with or dependent upon the traditions which stemmed from Jesus - if at all?

Since the rise of the interdisciplinary approach to the study of Christian origins in the 1970s, little attention has been given to the problem of social control within the early church. This is true although control issues arose early in the Christian movement and have continued throughout Christian history. Before 1970 scholars treated the problem historically and theologically under the topic of discipline. Among scholars who utilize the social sciences in their approach to Christian origins, there are some scattered materials on internal social control but little direct, sustained investigation.

A parenetic text from Qumran, which is only unofficially published, refers to ‘the vessel of your bosom’. This passage might shed new light on the enigmatic σκη⋯оς of 1 Thess 4.4.

The passage in question belongs to one of the admonition sections of Sapiential Work A from Qumran. Sap. Work A is a sapiential composition preserved in seven fragmentary copies, one from Cave 1 (1Q26) and six from Cave 4 (4Q415/416/417/418a/418b/423). Six copies display early Herodian script (30 BC – 20 AD), while one (4Q423) represents a late Herodian hand (1 – 50 AD). The high number of copies and the fact that this book was being copied even until a late stage in the history of the Qumran settlement shows that it was highly regarded within the Essene Community.

The parable of the Good Samaritan presents Jesus' distinctive interpretation of the Torah in parabolic form. When it confronts a priest with a dead or dying man, it sets up an unusual, halakhically debatable situation, since the commandment that a priest avoid contracting corpse-impurity conflicts with the commandment to love the neighbour. One commandment must take precedence. Jesus' Jewish contemporaries would have disagreed as to how the priest should behave, but the general halakhic principle which the parable suggests – that the love commandment should always override others in cases of conflict – seems to be unparalleled.

Die Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte gehört zu denjenigen Disziplinen der Altertumswissenschaft, die im 20. Jh. die größten Fortschritte gemacht haben; man braucht nur auf die Entwicklung der Epigraphik und der eng mit ihr verbundenen Prosopographie oder auf die beiden monumentalen Monographien von Rostovtzeff hinzuweisen, die dafür ein deutliches Zeugnis ablegen. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, daß sich auch die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft seit etwa 20 Jahren intensiver sozialgeschichtlichen Fragen, speziell dem Problem der sozialen Schichtung der frühen christlichen Gemeinden, widmet.

What really happened at Jesus' baptism? We can be quite sure that Jesus was baptized by John, if only because his baptism caused such problems for the later church, the foremost among them being the clash between the developing idea of Jesus' sinlessness and the historical memory of his participation in John's ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1.4). The subordination to John implicit in the baptism, moreover, conflicts with a general tendency in the Gospels to subordinate John to Jesus. The fact of the baptism itself, therefore, is a bedrock historical datum.

This critical note explains the most likely origin of the dislocated text at the end of 1 Corinthians 14 in the Greek twelfth century AD minuscule 88.1 There are four distinctive features of this passage in ms. 88.

1) Cor 14.36 follows immediately after 14.33.

2) Cor 14.34–5 follows 14.40.

3) Cor 14.34—5 is a distinct unit separated from v. 40 by a double slash on the base line in the space normally occupied by letters. The words on each side of this double slash are much farther apart than any other adjacent words on this page, so the original scribe must have inserted the double slash before writing w. 34–5. (See line 15 of the enlarged photograph, p. 158.) The end of v. 35 coincides with the end of a line. (See line 22 of the enlarged photograph.) Nothing follows on this line after its closing punctuation dot,2 even though each of the remaining three lines on this page extends one or two more letters beyond this dot. The next line, which begins chapter 15, is the only line on this page to be indented.3

4) There is a corresponding but smaller double slash above the last letter of 14.33.4 (See line 6 of the enlarged photograph.) It is placed at a sharper angle than the double slash before vv. 34–5 to help it fit between the lines of text. Another larger double slash, at the same level as the Greek letters on the last line of v. 33, is in the right margin where it is easy to see.

The problem raised by the use of food offered in sacrifice to idols, remote though it is from modern western Christianity, played a large part in Christian thought in and for some time after the New Testament period. The evidence for this statement, so far as the New Testament is concerned, is, briefly, as follows.

In recent years there appeared to have developed a general consensus of opinion in the English-speaking world about the use of the term ‘Son of man’ in the Synoptic Gospels which may be summed up as follows: Jesus adopted the title ‘Son of man’ from Daniel vii, where it signifies one who was destined to receive kingship from God, and used it with reference to himself in three types of saying, namely group A with reference to his present activity in his earthly ministry; group B with reference to his suffering, death and resurrection; and group C with reference to his future coming, exaltation and function at the last judgement. Genuine sayings of Jesus are to be found in each of these three categories, and together they give us a picture of Jesus as One destined for triumph and sovereignty but achieving this destiny by the path of humiliation, rejection and suffering which was prophesied for the Servant of Yahweh. It is often held that Jesus' use of the title may have had a certain ‘collective’ nuance; just as in Daniel vii it indicated a representative or symbol of the saints of the Most High, so in the Gospels it may refer to the people of God whose head Jesus conceived himself to be.

This study's point of departure is the important article of H. D. Betz, ‘The literary composition and function of Paul's letter to the Galatians’, published in this journal in 1975. In that article the author suggests a new approach to the letter to the Galatians, by using the generative rules of Graeco-Roman rhetoric to analyse the structure of the letter. A rigorous examination leads him to the conclusion that the form of the various parts and the order in which they are arranged completely conform to the classical rules of rhetoric for a judicial speech (genus iudiciale). Paul is under accusation by opponents. The Galatians play the role of judges. The letter contains a speech in which Paul, following all the rules of the art, defends himself before the jury.

The study of NT Christology will be renewed if it recovers its proper subject-matter - christology - and its proper scope, the New Testament.

The scholarly literature shows that what is called NT christology is, by and large, really the history of christological materials and motifs in early Christianity, and their ancestry. This massive preoccupation with history has, to be sure, produced impressive results. In fact, today it is difficult to imagine a study of NT christology which is not influenced by this historical analysis of early Christian conceptions of Christ and their antecedents. Nevertheless, the time is at hand to take up again what was set aside - an explicitly theological approach to NT christology, one which will be in-formed by the history of ideas but which will deliberately pursue christology as a theological discipline. It is doubtful whether the study of NT christology can be renewed in any other way. This essay intends to illumine and substantiate this claim by considering briefly the nature of christology, then by reviewing the turn to history and its consequences for the study of NT christology, and finally by sketching elements of an alternative.