In his excellent study of crucifixion, Martin Hengel has documented the harsh reality of the penalty in antiquity and has shown that it was seldom portrayed in detail or in an idealized manner. These facts are important and should be kept constantly in mind. They make all the more pressing the question why a detailed narrative of Jesus' death was composed and lead us to look closely at the way the story is told. An ancient opponent of Christianity, Celsus, provides an interesting illustration of both the cultural situation and the literary question. On the one hand, he expressed the general view that crucifixion was the most ignominious and shameful type of death. On the other hand, he made charges that were based, not so much on the disgrace of death by crucifixion as such, but on the way the story is told, on the character of Jesus as revealed by the narrative. As is well known, in part of his work entitled On the True Doctrine, he employed the device of a fictitious Jewish interlocutor. Alluding to the scene in Gethsemane, this critic challenged the teaching that Jesus was a god or the son of the most high God because he hid and tried to escape when the Jews decided that he was worthy of death. Further, this so-called god was betrayed by his own disciples, a criticism that applies to several scenes of the passion narrative. Returning to the Gethsemane story, the interlocutor attacks the theory that Jesus foreknew and intended his sufferings on the basis of his portrayal as mourning and lamenting and praying that this cup might pass from him.

In his excellent study of crucifixion, Martin Hengel has documented the harsh reality of the penalty in antiquity and has shown that it was seldom portrayed in detail or in an idealized manner. These facts are important and should be kept constantly in mind. They make all the more pressing the question why a detailed narrative of Jesus' death was composed and lead us to look closely at the way the story is told. An ancient opponent of Christianity, Celsus, provides an interesting illustration of both the cultural situation and the literary question. On the one hand, he expressed the general view that crucifixion was the most ignominious and shameful type of death. On the other hand, he made charges that were based, not so much on the disgrace of death by crucifixion as such, but on the way the story is told, on the character of Jesus as revealed by the narrative. As is well known, in part of his work entitled On the True Doctrine, he employed the device of a fictitious Jewish interlocutor. Alluding to the scene in Gethsemane, this critic challenged the teaching that Jesus was a god or the son of the most high God because he hid and tried to escape when the Jews decided that he was worthy of death. Further, this so-called god was betrayed by his own disciples, a criticism that applies to several scenes of the passion narrative. Returning to the Gethsemane story, the interlocutor attacks the theory that Jesus foreknew and intended his sufferings on the basis of his portrayal as mourning and lamenting and praying that this cup might pass from him.

The expression ⋯ νἱ⋯σ το⋯ ⋯νθρώπον, found primarily in the Gospels on the lips of Jesus, has been the object of a centuries-long investigation that has sought to determine its meaning and origin. Patristic and medieval authors understood the phrase as a title of Jesus meaning ‘the Son of the human’, with ‘the human’ referring to either Mary or Adam. With the renewal of learning in the Renaissance and Reformation, interpreters began to examine the phrase in light of its Semitic background, tracing it to Hebrew ben adam or Aramaic bar enasha. A host of new interpretations arose. While most scholars continued to view the expression as some sort of title, others saw it as a nontitular idiom. Three possible idiomatic senses of the expression were investigated: the circumlocutional sense (‘this man’ = ‘I’), the generic sense (‘man’ in general), and the indefinite sense (‘a man’, someone). These nontitular interpretations, part of the debate since 1557, have become more prominent in the last 25 years and form an important feature of the current discussion.

The expression ⋯ νἱ⋯σ το⋯ ⋯νθρώπον, found primarily in the Gospels on the lips of Jesus, has been the object of a centuries-long investigation that has sought to determine its meaning and origin. Patristic and medieval authors understood the phrase as a title of Jesus meaning ‘the Son of the human’, with ‘the human’ referring to either Mary or Adam. With the renewal of learning in the Renaissance and Reformation, interpreters began to examine the phrase in light of its Semitic background, tracing it to Hebrew ben adam or Aramaic bar enasha. A host of new interpretations arose. While most scholars continued to view the expression as some sort of title, others saw it as a nontitular idiom. Three possible idiomatic senses of the expression were investigated: the circumlocutional sense (‘this man’ = ‘I’), the generic sense (‘man’ in general), and the indefinite sense (‘a man’, someone). These nontitular interpretations, part of the debate since 1557, have become more prominent in the last 25 years and form an important feature of the current discussion.

A salient feature of the so-called cult-didache in Matt 6.1–18 is its concern for typically Jewish forms of piety. Almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are discussed in a way which to many commentators suggests an inner-Jewish debate. The provenance of the section would be a reform movement within Judaism with few distinctive Christian emphases. In contrast to this line of interpretation, it will be argued that the traditional cultic section as well as its redaction and incorporation into the Sermon on the Mount belong in a community which had broken its ties with Judaism decisively on a practical level. The community still adhered to the religious symbols of Judaism, but these symbols were filled with new meanings and were designed to legitimate what was basically a rather different symbolic world.

Die Täuferüberlieferung der Evangelien steht nicht am Rande. Das gilt sonderlich für Matthäus und Lukas, die über Markus hinaus eine breitere Wortüberlieferung kennen. Dabei handelt es sich vor allem urn zwei Komplexe: die Täuferreden Mt 3 par Lk 3 und das an die Johannesfrage anschließende Urteil Jesu über den Täufer Mt 11.2–19 par Lk 7.18–35. Die weitgehende Parallelität der Überlieferung wird gemeinhin damit begrüindet, daß beide Evange-listen aus Q schöpfen. Eher ist aber an literarische Abhangigkeit von Matthäus zu denken. Daß Lukas das Matthäusevangelium kennt und literarisch benutzt, habe ich schon an anderem Ort dargelegt. Da sich diese These nicht allgemeiner Anerkennung erfreut, soil sie am Beispiel der Täuferüberlieferung weiter erhärtet werden. Das Gewicht der Täuferüberlieferung im Lukasevangelium zeigen schon die Kindheitserzählungen in den ersten beiden Kapiteln. Hier werden Johannes und Jesus in überbietender Parallelität einander zugeordnet. Auf eine solche überbietende Paralellität stoßen wir auch in dem viel diskutierten Vers Lk 16. 16, mit dem wir die Untersuchung beginnen.

The words ⋯ βδελνσσóμενος τ⋯ εἴδωλα ἱεροσνλεῖς; have given constant trouble, as translations show. They appear in a subordinate passage but they deserve attention. The immediate context is clear. It appears that God will punish sinners of every race and culture, but those subject to the Law of Moses will be judged by that Law (Rom 2.12). It is not a nullity. Nevertheless the Judgment will apply a law of conscience to all, including them (Rom 2.15–16).

Ever since a fragment of the Gospel of Peter was discovered at Akhmîm in 1886–7, and published in 1892, scholarship has been divided over its relationship to the New Testament gospels. In 1892 J. Armitage Robinson argued that the gospel was a tendentious appropriation of canonical material which contained no traces of a primitive Urevangelium. In 1893 Adolf von Harnack argued tentatively for its independence from the canonical gospels, while Theodore Zahn argued for a late date and complete dependence upon the four gospels. In the flurry of articles and monographs which followed, scholars aligned themselves with one or the other of these two positions, depending upon whether they viewed the new gospel's similarities with, or divergences from, the New Testament gospels as being more decisive. Since both striking similarities and striking divergences appear throughout the Gospel of Peter, a stalemate was soon reached, and scholarly interest in the question declined. In the late 1920s Gardner-Smith could write that ‘interest in the discovery has waned’, and Léon Vaganay that ‘a virtual silence has fallen upon the journals’. In his commentary Vaganay attempted to settle the argument in favour of the Gospel of Peter's dependence. Using literary criticism he showed how the material in the gospel could be seen as a free literary re-working of the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, a re-working driven by sectarian and apologetic interests, as well as by the personal predilections of its author.

There are several objectives in teaching New Testament Greek and these to a large extent overlap. Our final goals for students include a good command of the structure and working of the language, along with an ability to read the New Testament in Greek with comfort, while intermediate goals include insights into the nature of the language, the nature of translation, and the nature of the text.

In the second volume of their ICC commentary on Matthew, as they comment on the parable of the sower, W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison state that yields of thirty-fold, sixty-fold, or one hundred-fold ‘do not seem obviously out of the ordinary. We therefore register our disagreement with Jeremias. The yield in our parable is not spectacularly overdone.’ Davies and Allison are not alone in saying this of the yield of the seed that fell on the good soil in the parable, although most commentators do interpret the passage in terms of the miraculous yield of the seed sown on the good soil. This matter is of some importance in the interpretation of the parable, though, because if Davies and Allison are correct, then the parable has quite a different focus than that generally understood. The parable would then only highlight the variation in fruitage, not the miraculous yield.

Scholarship has commonly treated the sayings in the Lukan Last Supper discourse (22.14–38) more or less as pearls on a string; it is their poignancy as separate elements rather than any significant unifying features to which attention has typically been drawn. This is especially apparent when one surveys research on Luke 22.24–30. Until recently it has been usual for scholarly work on this text to be heavily influenced (sometimes unconsciously) by tradition-historical concerns, with the result that 22.24–7 and 22.28–30 are analyzed as independent sayings. Consequently, the lack of a parallel in Luke 22.24–7 to the ransom saying in Mark 10.41–5 is a common point of scholarly interest, as are possible developments from a ‘Q’ form behind Luke 22.28–30 and Matt 19.28. This type of approach, with its primary focus on layers of tradition, however, has often prevented scholarship from exploring or even observing the unifying features of Luke's finished work in 22.24–30.

There has been much discussion in recent articles on the significance of the Spirit's ‘groaning’ in Rom 8.26. What has not been adequately treated is the OT background to v. 22. That verse reads as follows: οΪδαμεν γ⋯ρ ἵτι π⋯σα ⋯ κτ⋯στε σƲσΤεƲάζει κα⋯ συνωδ⋯νει ἄχρι το⋯ ν⋯ν and can be translated literally as follows:

We know that the whole creation groans together and travails together until now.

In his History of Dogma, Adolph Harnack wrote that the ‘Pseudo-Clementines contribute absolutely nothing to our knowledge of the origin of the Catholic Church and doctrine.’ Hans Lietzmann, Harnack's successor in Berlin, concluded similarly in his assessment of these writings. He wrote that the Clementines are ‘fictions without historical basis, and valueless for the study of the early Christian and Judaistic period’.