In light of a recent surge of interest in time across a range of disciplines, a case has been made that New Testament studies has experienced a “temporal turn.” This claim raises an important question about how one understands the relation of recent developments to earlier, long-held debates about time among New Testament scholars. This question is answered here by revisiting the “salvation history” debate between Oscar Cullmann and Rudolf Bultmann, with the help of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis in Time and Narrative and in the context of recent trends in work on “temporalities.” This article argues that, although in many respects recent work on time offers fresh language to describe the kinds of time at stake for New Testament scholarship, it is also true that attending to the earlier debates shows how parts of the temporal turn are in fact a return to questions long considered.

The modern discipline of New Testament Studies has subjected the various components of the New Testament to close scrutiny, yet it persistently fails to ask critical questions about the New Testament considered as a whole. In its familiar twenty-seven book form, the New Testament may be seen as a fourth-century anthology of early Christian writings based on earlier collections or sub-collections (the fourfold gospel, the Pauline letter collection), yet innovative in establishing a sharply defined boundary between included and excluded texts. An analysis of contributions to this journal over a recent five-year period demonstrates the pervasive influence of this fourth-century construct in determining the scope and priorities of (so-called) ‘mainstream’ scholarship. Greater attention to the contingencies of canon-formation will enable us to locate the texts that came to form the New Testament within a wider early Christian literary landscape.

In recent years, a number of New Testament and early Christian scholars have begun to use cognitive science approaches in their work. In this paper, I situate those efforts within the larger framework of the changing humanities, and the increased interest among humanistic scholars and social scientists in drawing on the growing body of knowledge on the cognitive and evolutionary roots of human thinking and behaviour. I also suggest how cognitive historiography can be helpful in shedding new light on issues discussed by New Testament scholars, by elaborating a case study: an analysis of the rite introduced by John the Baptist.