Stephen's speech undoubtedly stands apart among the speeches found in the Acts of the Apostles.1 The two main problems which have to be solved are: (i) its meaning and (2) its origin and background.

(i) With regard to its meaning two ideas are to be noticed. Some scholars consider this speech in the first place as an attack on the Jerusalem temple and its cult.2 On the other hand others consider it as an effort to show the Jews that they are always rebelling against God's will.3

The Revelation of John presents to its readers a scenario that describes the oppression and persecution of the early Christian communities of western Asia Minor by external pagan forces (specifically, the Roman government). Later Christian tradition tied the Apocalypse to the later years of the reign of Domitian and consequently dubbed that emperor a second Nero. Until relatively recently, this scenario has been affirmed by both the church and the academy. However, mid-twentieth century scholarship successfully challenged the validity of this viewpoint, based upon a review of the historical evidence. Since that time, scholars have scrambled to reconcile the historical world lying behind the Apocalypse with the narrative world presented by the text. Such figures as James A. T. Robinson, Adela Yarbro Collins, and Leonard Thompson have considerably advanced the discussion in our time. However, these recent attempts to detail the relationship between Christianity and pagan society have so dominated the attention of scholars that a serious discussion of the tensions within the Asia Minor Christian communities has been largely neglected. The present study is offered as a partial corrective to this trend.

First of all, the title of this paper needs justification. Why should we assume that anyone ever made interpolations in the text of Acts? Ropes, who is still the most considerable authority on this subject, spoke of the ‘Western’ text all through his work on the Text of Acts in The Beginnings of Christianity as if it gave evidence of the work of a reviser of the text, not of an interpolator, and many scholars before him had the same opinion. On the other hand, very recent scholarship has tended to the opposite view, that it is wrong to hold that ‘Western’ readings in the New Testament necessarily represent a single continuous revision done at one particular moment in the history of the text. Professor G. D. Kilpatrick, for instance, in a recent article suggests that every reading in Acts has to be considered on its merits, independently of speculation about whether it represents a revision or a recension or a ‘good’ MS tradition. He believes that the ‘Western’ readings often do not represent a revision or recension, but are single examples of original, correct readings preserved in this particular MS tradition. In his view, word order, orthography, and grammatical, syntactical and philological considerations applied de novo to each reading should be paramount in attempting to discover correct readings. The wisdom of this approach has been confirmed by the careful scholarship applied to the subject by M. Wilcox in his book The Semitisms of Acts (1965).

‘Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.’1 Does the author of the Gospel of Mark believe that the fever in Mark 1.30 is demonic? Or does he trace it to the power of God? It is also possible that he looks at the fever as a result of medical causes. It could be the case he author has no clear perception of the cause of the fever. In the Greco-Roman culture of Mark's audience, the fever could be seen as the result of medical, astrological, divine, or demonic causes. This set of facts will be established below. The text in Mark can then be read in four different ways depending on the understanding of fever that the scholar chooses to adopt. Given the cultural possibilities for understanding fever, Mark's text takes on a certain ambiguity. The ambiguity should be carefully upheld in light of recent attempts to precisely identify the Markan etiology of the fever.

In Gal 3.16 Paul asserts that Abraham's seed is the messiah. While some have suggested that the rationale for this assertion is Paul's identification of Abraham's seed with David's seed, few have identified evidence for this rationale in the immediate context of Galatians 3, and none have genuinely argued for it. Noting that the reappropriation of scriptural idioms is a common feature of ancient messiah discourse, I demonstrate that Gal 3.19 entails a reappropriation of the wording of Gen 49.10, an oracle often interpreted as Davidic-messianic, and thereby I elucidate the scriptural reasoning undergirding Gal 3.16.

The letter to the Colossians—most probably a deuteropauline document—reflects a theology of memory. Far from having the ambition of saying something new, the author aims at offering the addressed community a re-reading—paradoxically highly original in its form and content—of its own religious tradition so that the addressees will be able to interpret in a persuasive way their present situation, a situation that became more and more opaque and conflictual. The explicit confrontation with the ‘Colossian philosophy’ seems to be secondary at first sight, but a multiple reading of the letter allows one to discover strong ties between the non-polemical and the polemical parts of the letter. Read in this perspective, Col 2 reveals between the lines a conflict of interpretation about some central notions, such as ‘humility’, ‘intelligence’, ‘wisdom’, among others.

In 1954 the first issue of New Testament Studies (NTS) was released under the auspices of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS), which was founded on 16 September 1938 in Birmingham. The journal aimed to interlink (European) NT scholarship and to ensure its quality and standards by the society's members. Why did it take so long to release the journal, even though the Dutch NT scholar Johannes de Zwaan (1883–1957), who initially came up with the idea, intended the publication of an international quarterly right from the beginning? In 1953 he was not considered for election to the Editorial Board and therefore decided to publish another New Testament journal whose first issue appeared in 1956: Novum Testamentum. De Zwaan's correspondence with some of SNTS's first members and other so far unknown sources can elucidate these circumstances.

The present essay focuses on Paul's interactions with Philo's theory of two men in 1 Cor 15.45–49. It argues that instead of rejecting that theory, Paul transforms and reinterprets it in such a way as to substantiate his own doctrine of the resurrection as developed in 1 Cor 15.35–58 (i.e., his doctrine of eschatological bodily change). The essay provides a careful analysis of Philo's theory of two men as well as an exegesis of 1 Cor 15.35–58.

This article proposes to interpret the appearance of the risen Jesus to the community of the disciples on Easter evening in terms of a Johannine theology and spirituality and as integral to the Johannine resurrection narrative as a whole. The scene is a narrative exploration of Johannine ecclesiology, that is, the establishment of the New Covenant with the New Israel and the raising of the New Temple, the body of Jesus, in it midst.

Die Argumentationsweise des Paulus in seinen Briefen ist wohl immer Gegenstand der exegetischen Arbeit gewesen. Erfreulicherweise haben in letzter Zeit Exegeten, die sich mit Nachbardisziplinen wie der Sprach wissenschaft, der Sprachphilosophie und der Rhetorik befassen, auch Interesse für die Argumentationsstrategie des Apostels gezeigt.1 Nachdem ich früher das 6. Kapitel des Römerbriefes auf seine argumentative Funktion hin befragt hatte,2 wäre es nun angebracht, mit dem 7. Kapitel fortzufahren. Ehe der Textabschnitt 7.7–25 in dieser Weise analysiert werden kann, ist es aber erforderlich, den dazwischenliegenden Teiltext 7.1–6 näher zu untersuchen, nicht zuletzt, um den Zusammenhang zwischen Kap. 6 und Kap. 7 besser verstehen zu lernen. Es geht dabei um die argumentative Funktion dieser sechs Verse.