Paul's address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 stands at the center of an extended treatment of the internal life of the church (20.1–21.17), and constitutes Luke's last portrait of the believing community. In this section, scenes of community life (20.7–12, 17–38; 21.8–14) alternate with travel episodes (20.1–6, 13–16; 21.1–7, 15–17) to show the relationship among groups of believers scattered around the Aegean and back to Caesarea. The resulting portrait of believing communities echoes some important features of the early descriptions of community life in Jerusalem. In this larger literary context, the speech to the Ephesian elders takes on a different appearance from its usual characterization as the farewell address of Luke's hero, Paul. The speech repeatedly connects the church to God, introducing Luke's larger themes of God's plan, the action of the Holy Spirit, and the instruction of Jesus himself. These features show that the church's future, in Luke's view, has less to do with its imitation of Paul than with its relationship to the God who calls it into being.

Ματθαιος μεν εγραψεν Εβραιοις θαυματα Χριστου,

Μαρκος δ Ιταλιη,

Λουκας Αχαιαδι,

Πασι δ Ιωαννης,

κηρυξ μεγας, ουρανοϕοιτης.

(Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina dogmatica 1.12.6–9)

Richard Bauckham has called on scholars to abandon the reading strategy of redaction criticism that had risen to prominence especially in the 1960s, and return to the way the gospels had always been understood before that – as having been written ‘for all Christians’. The present essay resituates this debate as actually yet another instance of a very old and enduring hermeneutical problem in the exegesis of Christian literature: the relationship between the particularity and universality of the gospels. Study of patristic gospel exegesis reveals no author who says the gospels were written ‘for all Christians’, and, even more importantly, shows that early Christian readers – through evangelist biographies, localizing narratives, audience request traditions, and heresiological accounts of the composition of individual gospels, as well as in their theological reflections on the fourfold gospel – engaged in a sustained and deliberate dialectic between the local and universal audiences of the gospels which defies any simple dichotomy between ‘specific’ and ‘indefinite’ readers.

L'attention de la majorité des commentateurs qui se sont penchés sur l'étude de Jn 3.29 a été focalisée par le contenu de l'expression ο ϕιλος του νυμϕιου, expression souvent rapprochée du “garçon d’honneur”de la tradition juive, et la signification théologique profonde du verset s’en est souvent trouvée occultée. Le présent article se propose de montrer – notamment à travers un examen des prédéterminations et du schéma eschatologiques de ce verset – que la joie accomplie du Baptiste apparaît ici comme étant le résultat du salut effectif, opéré par la révélation plénière et définitive apportée par Jésus. En ce sens, il constitue l'une des expressions de l'eschatologie inaugurée du quatrième Évangile.

Although the term ‘rewritten Bible’ has been used primarily of postbiblical Jewish retellings of the Hebrew Bible, the phenomenon which it describes extends to the present day, and pertains to the NT as well as the Hebrew Bible. This paper examines two examples of ‘rewritten Gospel’—Dorothy Sayers's play cycle, The Man Born to Be King (1941–2) and Sholem Asch's novel, The Nazarene (1939)—in order to argue that such postcanonical Jesus narratives should be of interest to NT scholarship just as ‘rewritten Bible’ is of interest to scholars of the Hebrew Bible.

That the ‘Church’ constitutes the main theme of the Epistle to the Ephesians is the opinio communis in exegesis. Going beyond the undisputed letters by Paul ἐκκλησία would thus no longer designate the local congregation but the universal Church instead. Yet it is still open to question whether ecclesiology becomes the theological centre, out of which Christology, too, enfolds, and the Church acquires a soteriological function. The paper argues for a re-examination of the term ἐκκλησία and the metaphors used in the epistle. It then emerges that Ephesians does indeed have an ecclesiological theme, but not yet the concept of one ‘Church’ as a transcendent entity. Of major importance are the various body metaphors, as they imply the unity of the assembled. Nevertheless, even the body metaphors do not presuppose an already developed concept of the ‘Church’ as the ‘realm of salvation’ or any other spatial metaphor. Instead, they demonstrate that soteriology and ecclesiology remain strictly related to Christology. With a view to the epistle's intention this means that Ephesians develops a vision of the unity and community of believers, not, however, as the theological construct of the Church, but rather as a paraenetic goal to integrate Christians of differing persuasions.

Much current NT scholarship holds that Paul conducted a ‘Law-free’ mission to Gentiles. In this view, Paul fundamentally repudiated the ethnic boundaries created and maintained by Jewish practices. The present essay argues the contrary: Paul's principled resistance to circumcising Gentiles precisely preserves these distinctions ‘according to the flesh’, which were native to Jewish restoration eschatology even in its Pauline iterations. Paul required his pagans not to worship their native gods—a ritual and a Judaizing demand. Jerusalem's temple, traditionally conceived, gave Paul his chief terms for conceptualizing the Gentiles' inclusion in Israel's redemption. Paul's was not a ‘Law-free’ mission.

It seemed appropriate that a lecture given to honour a scholar whose concerns have been centred on the Old Testament, by someone whose field is the New Testament, should link together these two topics. I have therefore chosen to consider one aspect of the problem of the way in which the Old Testament is interpreted by New Testament authors: more specifically, the authority ascribed by one of them – St Paul – to the Old Testament in relation to the revelation of God in Christ.

Current methodological discussion within the field of New Testament studies focuses today on the influence of the work and its history, and is often motivated by newer findings in linguistics and literary criticism. Such inquiry is broadened through its correlation to reception theory, i.e. that inquiry that focuses on how readers understood the work during the course of its transmission or reception. By contrast to the above, textual criticism is that science that tries to discover the ‘original text’ as exactly as possible. Here I would like to ask, to what extent do the ‘witnesses’ (e.g. manuscripts, versions, quotations, etc.) of textual criticism also function as interpreters and ‘receivers’ of the text. In all three of the topics handled here we have been aware of an interaction between text and reader.

This article interprets Paul's self-reflections in Phil 1 in light of the most current discourse about the ‘(introspective) self’ in antiquity: it is argued that Paul – in his last letter writing during his final imprisonment (in Rome?) – offers insights into his ‘inner self’ by construing the reflective mode of introspection. Similar to how ancient philosophers – such as Seneca in his letters – develop introspection when dealing/coping with the expectatio mortis, Paul too, in Phil 1–3, has to respond to his expectation of his pending death. While Phil 1.21–6 – which is to be read in the frame of chapters 1–3 – reflects Paul's situation highly individually and autobiographically, ancient philosophical introspective speaking modes in general tend to remain generic. In its ‘autobiographical consolidation’ Phil 1.21–6 is also to be seen in a ‘contrastive analogy’ to Rom 7.

The role of the mother of Jesus is explored in view of ancient constructions of paternity especially as expressed in the Aristotelian theory of epigenesis. It concludes that beyond framing Jesus' life in the flesh, she is present under the cross as his kin in a group uniquely composed of family and friends together. As Jesus entrusts her and the beloved disciple to each other, a process is begun whereby a familia dei comes into being – in which the matter provided by the mother is superfluous. These children are begotten/born from above ‘not of blood(s) or of the will of flesh or of the will of man but of God’ – alone.

Noting the conjunction of ‘mercy’ and ‘Israel’ in Galatians 6.16 and Romans 9–11, this article argues that in both letters ‘Israel’ denotes the Jews. In Galatians 6.16, with an on-going mission to the Jews in view, Paul invokes peace on those who live according to the new creation, and mercy on unbelieving Israel. In Romans 9–11, he draws on both Scripture and his own experience of mercy to revisit the question of Israel's destiny, discerning therein a providential pattern of a divine call that is interrupted by obduracy under the law, and ultimately fulfilled in Christ.

This paper explores the boundaries between fact and fiction in ancient literature. The historians effectively created the concept of ‘fiction’ in Greek literature by defining what could be incontrovertibly established as ‘fact’ by accepted rationalistic criteria. Anything beyond these limits (tales involving distant places, or the distant past, or divine intervention) was widely perceived as belonging to the realm of ‘fiction’. To readers from this background, Acts would fall uncomfortably on the boundary: much of the narrative would sound like fiction, but there is a disturbing undercurrent which suggests that it might after all be intended as fact.

In the past fifteen years or so New Testament scholars have sought to balance the predominantly historical orientation of biblical studies with insights and methods derived from literary studies and literary criticism. In addition, discussions of hermeneutics and pastoral ‘application’ have attempted to replace the overall framework of meaning that has been eroded by the eclipse of biblical theology understood as salvation history. Finally, the studies of the social world of early Christianity have focused anew on the social-political situation and economic-cultural conditions of the New Testament writers and their communities. However, these discussions have not yet led to the formulation of a new integrative paradigm in biblical interpretation. This paper seeks to contribute to this three-pronged discussion by utilizing rhetorical criticism for the interpretation of Paul's first extant letter to the community of Corinth. My main goal is thereby not to add a ‘new interpretation’ to the many variant readings of 1 Corinthians but to explore the questions, methods, and strategies involved in the interpretation of the letter.

Philippians 3 is central to the question of integrity of the letter. While those who argue for three fragments struggle with the intention of the chapter, those who argue for the letter's integrity vote for its function as an exemplum. This article argues that there is some truth in both positions. Philippians 3 imitates the Jewish testament genre in which an ideal biography is depicted to become a model of religious advice. But while Paul deals critically with genre, he became a religious hero in the canonical letter, which was edited by the Philippians in the early second century ce.

‘That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, concerning the word of life’ (1 John 1.1). However that claim to ear-, eye- and touch-witness is to be understood, there can be no dispute that for 1 John a claim to ‘that which was from the beginning’ is a linch-pin in the argument and in the theology of the letter. Yet the question of the use of Scripture in 1 John points further – to the relation between New Testament and Old, theologically and historically, but also to the origins and development of Johannine Christianity.

After discussing the scholarly preference for dating Jesus' crucifixion to 7 April 30 CE, this article argues that the precise date can no longer be recovered. All we can claim with any degree of historical certainty is that Jesus died some time around Passover (perhaps a week or so before the feast) between 29 and 34 CE. The emergence of the Johannine tradition (in which Jesus died on the day of Preparation) and the Markan tradition (in which Jesus died on the Passover itself) are explored through the lens of social/collective memory.

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.

Roy D. Kotansky* argues in ‘The Star of the Magi: Lore and Science in Ancient Zoroastrianism, the Greek Magical Papyri and St. Matthew’s Gospel’ that the pericope in the M Source regarding the star of Bethlehem reflects Zoroastrian traditions about Magi who divine from a star seen falling to Earth the birth of a coming saviour, who will deliver the world from bondage and inaugurate the blessing of a new millennium. Following Nikos Kokkinos’ chronology for Jesus’ birth, Kotansky argues that the star of Bethlehem is not part of a midrash fulfilling the prophecy that ‘a star shall come forth out of Jacob’ (Num 24.17), but Halley’s comet, which appeared twice (perihelion) in the sky in 12 bce during the rulership of Herod the Great. According to Kotansky, the author of the Gospel of Matthew integrated Zoroastrian interpretations of this astronomical phenomenon with Jewish messianic and Bethlehemic segments such as Mic 5.2 (Matt 2.6). As Kotansky acknowledges, his interpretation results in two Synoptic dates for Jesus’ birth – (1) 12 bce with the appearance of the comet (Matt 2.2, 9, 10), and (2) 6/7 ce at the time of the census by Quirinius (Luke 2.2). This essay explores whether the messianic and Bethlehemic segments of Matthew 2 refer to a lost tradition of the birth of John the Baptist that took place in 12 bce at the time of Halley’s comet, suggesting a separate tradition of Jesus’ birth in 6 ce at the time of the ‘first census’.