On a warm, sunny afternoon— one which we so much missed this year in our part of the globe— I stood on the beach of our Dutch seacoast. There was a crowd so tightly packed that one could hardly discover the sand or the sea. The only thing one sees is the highly variegated species of man; the only thing one hears is the cacophony of sound produced by this crowd.

The life or death of a church depends on how much its members are willing to proclaim the gospel to the world. If its ministers are satisfied merely with performing their functions and counselling religious people, if its members confess their faith just as far as it is socially acceptable, the church will grow more and more into a sterile institution that is far from the living church of the New Testament. The purpose of this study is therefore to ask what connexion may exist between the church and its mission to the world in both the generally accepted and in the disputed letters of Paul.

Among the several scholars of the ancient Church who occupied themselves with the textual criticism of the Bible, one of the most influential was Lucian of Antioch. Though not as learned or as productive in a literary way as either Origen or Jerome, Lucian's work on the text of the Greek Bible proved to be of significance both in his own day and, to an even greater extent, during the centuries following. In fact, his recension of the text of the New Testament, with only minor modifications, continued to be used widely down to the nineteenth century, and still lives on in the so-called Ecclesiastical text of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In 1869 Monoseigneur David then rural bishop of Mosul, came to Europe and brought along with him, among others, an inteesting manuscript which had been copiedon his initiative from an old exemplar in the Monastery of Rabban Hormizd at Alqosh near Mosul. First this manuscript was placed in the Museo Bortiano di Propaganda at Rome, where it was catalogued as K VI 4.1 Renowned orientalists such as I. Guide, O. Braun and J.-B. Chabot publised many parts of it an Syriac or in translation.2 In 1899 the Syriac manuscripts of Museo Borgiano were tranferred to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, where students had easier access to it. Our manuscript was listed as Borgia Syriaca 82.3

Daß der Apostel Paulus mit der Urchristenheit die Auferweckung des gekreuzigten Jesus als eschatologisches, ihn zum Herrn und Christus erhöhendes Ereignis verstanden hat, ist allgemein anerkannter Tatbestand. Dieses Ereignis ist für Paulus der Anbruch des kommenden äon, der verborgen unter dem gegenwärtigen bestehenden äon geschieht. Diesen kommenden äon in der Herrschaft Jesu Christi angebrochen zu proklamieren, ist seine Botschaft, zu der er sich ausgesandt weiß. Wenn er von ihr spricht, wird eine doppelte Stellung zur Tradition sichtbar, deren Beachtung zur Klärung der Fragen führen kann, die mit dem eschatologischen Charakter der urchristlichen und paulinischen Theologie zusammenhängen.

Das urchristliche Kerygma verkündigt das Kreuz Jesu als Heilsereignis. Es tut dies, indem es Jesus Christus als den verkündigt, der stellvertretend oder als Sühnopfer für die Sünden der Menschen gestorben ist. — Wir fragen nun, ob diese Verkündigung mit theologischem Recht geschieht; d. h. wir fragen nach der Legitimität dieses Kerygmas.

Fragen wir nach dem Heiligen Geist im Spätjudentum, so fragen wir nach Gottes Geist in seiner soteriologischen Wirksamkeit. Es ist die einhellige Ansicht des Spätjudentums, daπ dieser Heilige Geist in den Männern des Alten Testamentes gewirkt hat und zwar nicht nur in der Niederschrift der biblischen Bücher, sondern auch in ihrem ganzen Tun und Leben, doch wird später die Inspiration mehr auf die Abfassung der heiligen Schriften begrenzt.

We may begin our analysis of the synoptic tradition peculiar to Luke with a study of one of its most important component parts, namely that preserved in the fifteenth chapter. The whole of this chapter constitutes a single literary unit, whose beginning and end are well defined and whose internal structure, while not uniform, is perfectly self-consistent. The introduction to this literary unit points to the ‘grumbling’ of the Pharisees and Scribes in response to Jesus' behaviour of receiving and eating with those tax collectors and sinners who had come to hear him. This response of the Pharisees and Scribes occasions a threefold response from Jesus, namely a threefold insistence upon the single point that it is right to accept the repentance of sinners and to rejoice with them, since their repentance is accepted by God who himself in heaven rejoices over their return.

It is usually assumed that Matthew did not know Luke, nor Luke Matthew. The non-Marcan (‘Q’-) materials common to Matthew and Luke, then, ultimately go back to a common source or sources, oral or written, much of which anyway had reached a fixed Greek form. Attempts have been made to split up the source of the Q-materials into two documents, into one-sheet ‘tracts’, and into individual floating sayings.

The task of the critic who attempts to pierce behind the written Gospels to the events which they record is notoriously hazardous and, in the opinion of some scholars, unrewarding and futile. In the case of the Feeding of the Multitudes the difficulties are particularly acute but not necessarily insuperable. Usually the debate has centred on the miraculous nature of the feeding, but it is the aim of this paper to show that the real importance of the historical incident underlying this tale lies elsewhere.

In recent years an old problem has been reconsidered in four studies, apparently written independently of one another, which with similar arguments arrive at virtually the same conclusion:1 The Epistle to the Philippians is actually a composition of three Pauline Epistles or fragments thereof.2 According to this conclusion, Phil. iv. 10−20 was the first letter written by Paul to Philippi, i. 1−ii. 30 (or iii. 1) the second, and iii. 1 (or 2)−iv. 1 the third, while the distribution of iv. 2−9 and 21−3 remains uncertain.3

The object of this paper is to examine the tenability of the generally accepted view that the term ‘kingdom of God’ or ‘kingdom of heaven’ ought properly to be rendered as ‘Reign, or Rule of God’. This view assumes that the basic idea of the expression βασιλεία Τοũ θεοũ implies that God is, or becomes, king, that he sets up his kingly rule, or asserts his divine sovereignty over or in the world.

In a recent article in New Testament Studies (vol. IV, Jan. 1958, PP. 115–19) ProfessorJ. Jeremias maintained that when Luke deviates from Mark's order in the succession of narratives, it is a clear sign that he is following his special source. In the course of his argument he examines the narratives of the Crucifixion in Mark xv. 20b–41 and Luke xxiii. 26–49 and maintains that, if Luke had followed Mark, he would have thrown the material into complete confusion. He supports this claim by numbering the fourteen separate details in Mark's account and the seventeen in Luke and by setting against the Lukan series the corresponding numbers of the Markan series. Thus arranged the Markan series of the details in question is I, 6, 2, 6, 4, 8, 10, 7, 5, 9, 12, II, 13, 14. He is clearly justified in saying that in this rearrangement the Markan narrative would be completely ‘muddled up’ (voliständig durcheinandergewirbelt). It is reasonable to conclude that Luke is not using Mark, but his special source.

These are perhaps the most important verses in the Synoptic Gospels. Discussing them in 1927, the late Claude Montefiore2 candidly confessed that, as a Jew, he would like to prove them spurious because, if it could be shown that Jesus had really uttered them, orthodox Christianity would have received notable encouragement. This however, he judged very unlikely, and he went on to predict that, as the years went by, the voices raised in defence of their authenticity would grow feebler and fewer.

Le Quatrième Evangile présente le Christ comme le Révélateur et comme faisant corps, pour ainsi dire, avec l'objet mēme de sa rèvélation. Nombre de positions thèologiques propres a l'èvangile johannique trouvent là leursassises premieres. Sur le plan littèraire, ce ‘principe’ de christologie entraine Ia creation, ou simplement l'utilisation de formes spècifiques de r`v`lation.

The present work is intended to furnish a further contribution to the much debated, yet still unsettled question as to whether the Skeireins was the original work of a Gothic commentator writing in his vernacular, or whether it was translated into Gothic from a commentary in Greek or Latin.

The not inconsiderable portions of the N.T. in Gothic bear witness to the manner in which the translators followed the Greek original word by word, and often syllable by syllable. Their literalism extends to the order, the vocabulary, the constructions and often to exact calques of the Greek words.