It is clear from John 20.31 that Christology is the central concern of the author of the Fourth Gospel, and this article is an attempt to survey some of the main features of the Christology of the fourth evangelist. When classical Christology was being formulated in the period of the creeds and the great councils the Fourth Gospel played an important, indeed a major role in the debates. If our understanding of that Gospel has now changed and developed, and if classical Christology is constantly being re-examined, those factors only underline the importance of a constant return to and re-evaluation of the original sources in general and the Fourth Gospel in particular.

For centuries the disease of leprosy and the book of Leviticus have been linked together. The description of skin disease given in the thirteenth chapter of that book has long been thought to be that of the disease known to medicine as leprosy or Hansen's disease as modern leprologists prefer to call it in order to avoid the stigma which still attaches to the name leprosy. As a result, the regulations in that chapter have determined the attitude of Western communities towards persons suffering from this disease, and have largely influenced the public health measures of control applied by these communities when cases of the disease were discovered.

The church's Christological confession of the uniqueness of J. Christ's relation to God has always been understood to include the historical Jesus. In theory, at least, this is a point at which faith must be vulnerable to historical investigation. To what extent can Jesus' unique relation to God be affirmed on historical grounds? While the church is not limited to believing about Jesus only what he explicitly believed about himself, a certain correspondence is necessary for the credibility of Christology. If there were no evidence that Jesus understood his relation to God to be in any way distinctive it would be difficult to maintain that he was in fact uniquely related to God. Both doctrine and history suggest that the most profitable line of enquiry into this question will concern Jesus' consciousness of sonship. It is a line of enquiry which may in its turn elucidate some of the problems of Christology.

There is a small number of places in the Psalter where almost every commentator seems to agree about the need to emend the Hebrew word kabod (glory) to kabed (liver), namely Pss. 7.5 (Heb. 6); 16.9; 30.12; 57.8(9); 108.1(2). The argument that follows is that the reading Kabod should be retained and that it contains strong spiritual implications which are lost in the process of emendation.

‘The kingdom of God’ is central in the proclamation of Jesus, the reality to which his preaching points and which the parables are designed to explicate; the student of the New Testament must understand this concept if he is to appreciate dominical theology and the ecclesial theology which developed from it. Since Albert Schweitzer's well-known study, it has been taken as a matter of course that Jesus' kingdom concept was ‘apocalyptic’. Yet just this assumption has necessitated crucial qualifications. To take two notable examples of this, Rudolf Bultmann asserted that Jesus rejected ‘the whole content of apocalyptic speculation’, and Norman Perrin went a step or two further by saying that ‘the difference between Jesus and ancient Jewish apocalyptic is much greater than Bultmann will allow’. At this point, the term ‘apocalyptic’, as applied to Jesus' preaching, is practically evacuated of content. On purely logical grounds, the propriety of its continued usage in this connexion is seriously to be questioned.