In Acts 1–7, the Holy Spirit functions as the restored temple presence of the Lord that will restore the kingdom to Israel via the Ekklesia. The Holy Spirit acts through the Ekklesia as one would expect the Lord's temple presence to act. When Barnabas, Ananias, and Sapphira bring their offerings to the temple, they place them at the feet of the leadership of the new religio-fiscal center of restored Israel. As proof that the Lord's presence has indwelled this eschatological temple community, an improper act can, and does in this case, result in immediate death.

The apostle Paul has been viewed by many as a cosmopolitan thinker who called Christ-followers to embrace the ideal of a single humanity living in harmony with a divinely ordered cosmos. A close comparison of Paul's apocalyptic theology with various interpretations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ over the centuries, however, shows few points of agreement. Paul was fundamentally a Jewish sectarian whose vision for a better world embraced only Christ-followers and involved the cataclysmic end of the present world order. Those who accepted and lived by this vision were effectively relegated to the same marginal position in civic life as the local Jewish community.

An approach to Gospel narratives that treats them as realistically depicted stories and emphasises the way their details function within the time-of-Jesus scenes they portray yields substantial exegetical results. Alternative approaches such as allegorical reading, focus on theological words, and the pursuit of intra-Gospel allusions sometimes stand in tension with this kind of concrete reading, and can distract interpreters from attending to surface-level scenes and details. The value of concrete reading and the effects of alternative approaches may be seen through examining several texts: the Nicodemus narratives of John; Mark 8.22–6; John 1.35–9; Mark 14.38; and John 21.15–17.

Matt 5. 27–32, from the Sermon on the Mount, and Mark 9. 42–10.12 are passages that contain similar material, although neither is directly dependent on the other. Both have sayings that deal with ‘offences’ caused by certain body members (the verb used is σκανδαλίζω), and both contain a version of Jesus' prohibition of divorce. Between these two passages and a third, b. Nid. 13b, from the Babylonian Talmud, there also exist several similarities. Despite this intriguing configuration of materials, which might indicate that all three passages are dependent on a common set of traditions, scholars have approached these texts from a very different perspective. Those who posit a connection between the synoptic and the rabbinic materials do so only with respect to Matt 5, never Mark 9; and several scholars have instead sought parallels to the synoptic passages in Hellenistic gnomic literature, disregarding or ignoring the rabbinic material altogether. In the present study I intend to challenge the validity of these approaches and propose that there is indeed a common set of traditions to which all three of these texts are indebted. I will begin my investigation by highlighting three peculiarities of Mark 9. 42–48, and then posit a relation between this passage and b. Nid. 13b. Following this I will bring the material from Matt 5. 27–32 and Mark 9. 49–10. 12 into consideration. One of the results of this study, as I shall explain more thoroughly in the conclusion, will be the identification of a discussion on male sexuality that took place in Jewish and Christian circles sometime in the middle of the first century C.E

The logion of Matt 11.27 (// Luke 10.22) – ‘All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ – has long been considered a ‘Johannine meteorite in the Synoptic sky’ and, after fierce exegetical battles, a sort of ‘foreign body’ in both Matthean and Lukan theological projects. This paper intends to question this assumption on the basis of recent works both on the historical Jesus and on Synoptic theology. It suggests that this verse not only fits very well with the theological and literary project of the Synoptics’ authors but can also shed some light on Jesus’ theology of creation. The way Jesus articulates his own special relationship to ‘his father’ with the human relationship of God's children to ‘their father’ is coherent with the theology implied by this logion.

Si nous énoncions notre sujet sous forme d'une question: l'évangile johannique connaît-il une histoire du salut, nous serions tentés, de prime abord, d'y donner une réponse négative. En effet, le quatrième évangile ne se distingue-t il pas des autres évangiles précisément par le fait que tout se passe, ici, en dehors d'une histoire ‘horizontale’? Ne s'agit-il pas d'un ‘nunc aeternum’, d'une irruption du ‘tout autre’ dans chaque instant, d'une histoire dont le symbole ne serait pas la ligne, mais le point? Le prologue de cet évangile ne place-t-il pas, à priori, la pensée johannique sur un plan opposé à celui de l'histoire du salut? L'affirmation concernant la relation entre Jésus et Jean-Baptiste à la fin de ce prologue: ‘celui qui vient après moi a été avant moi, car il a été le premier par rapport à moi’, ne prouve-t-elle pas que Jésus-Christ, pour cet évangéliste, signifie ‘fin de l'histoire’? La déclaration du Christ johannique au chap. viii. 58: ‘avant qu'Abraham ne füt, je suis’, ne confirme-t-elle pas que la perspective n'est plus celle de l'histoire du salut? D'autre part, la tension entre ‘ce qui est déjà accompli’ et ‘ce qui n'est pas encore achevé’, cette tension si caractéristique de toute la pensée du Nouveau Testament et qui marque une évolution temporelle, ne disparaît-elle pas dans notre évangile, puisque tout y est accompli en Christ? Le jugement qui a lieu déjà (chap. xii. 31, νυν κρίσıς έστίν), la résurrection déjà réalisée (chap. xi. 25), ne mettent-ils pas en évidence que l'eschatologie johannique n'est plus une eschatologie temporelle dans le sens d'une histoire du salut?

Unter dieser Überschrift erschien im letzten Band der NTS (S. 585–592) ein Aufsatz von H. W. Bartsch, der nicht ohne Ergänzung bleiben kann, zumal er als Eröffnung des Heftes gedruckt wurde. Denn er geht von nicht ausreichenden Voraussetzungen aus, trägt aber seine Folgerungen mit solcher Sicherheit vor, daß mancher sie vielleicht als tatsächlich zutreffend übernehmen wird.

In my The Death of the Messiah, preparatory to examining the Gospel accounts of the trial/interrogation of Jesus by the chief priest(s) and San-hedrin, I surveyed the extra-Gospel evidence for authoritative Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus, derived from Jewish, Christian, and pagan sources. From the Jewish evidence I discussed two items: the witness of Josephus (Ant. 18.3.3; #63–t) and a baraita from TalBab Sanhedrin 43a which I quoted from the London Soncino translation (Nezikin volume 3.281):

On the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practised sorcery and enticed Israel to apostacy. Anyone who can say anything in his favour, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favour he was hanged on the eve of Passover.

To speak of the symbolic in exegesis means running into a veritable mine field. Everywhere, you are in danger of finding ‘booby traps’ liable to explode the most solid systematic constructions instantly. However, I would like to venture with you into the field of John's symbolism, since I think that it has been insufficiently explored and appreciated in the classical commentaries. If this seems a bit grandiose, I would like to attenuate my apparent pretension. I would first like to present you with a global approach to the subject and then I would like to investigate with you a few concrete examples: the sign of the temple, a saying addressed to Nicodemus and the ‘bread of life’. We shall try to see what a so-called ‘symbolic reading’ of these passages can contribute to their understanding.

These three short papers were delivered at the 72nd General Meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, held in Pretoria, South Africa, on 8–11 August 2017. The ‘Quaestiones disputatae’ session was chaired by the President of the Society, Professor Michael Wolter. The first two papers engage with Teresa Morgan's book, Roman Faith and Christian Faith, and Professor Morgan responds to them in the third.

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.

Bittgebete gehören zu den besonderen Ausdrucksformen religiöser Überzeugungen. Schon in der Antike lassen sich Beziehungen zwischen Bitten, die an Menschen adressiert sind, und Bitten, die an Gott bzw. Götter gerichtet werden, ausmachen, Für einen Vergleich mit Ermutigungen zum Bittgebet im Matthäusevangelium werden Beispiele aus den Epigrammen Martials vorgestellt. Der Bittsteller, der bei Martial vor allem materielle Güter anstrebt, scheut sich beim Bitten nicht, den Kaiser mit Jupiter zu parallelisieren. Doch prägt ihn die Unsicherheit, ob die ausgesprochenen Bitten Gewährung finden. Von ‘Erhörungsgewißheit’, wie sie für die verglichenen Texte im Matthäusevangelium kennzeichnend ist, kann nicht gesprochen werden. In den Epigrammen Martials wird vor allem um die Steigerung persönlicher Lebensqualität gebeten. Demgegenüber begegnen bei Matthäus Gemeinschaftsbitten, die nicht nur persönliche Interessen im Auge haben. Nicht die bloße materielle Existenzsicherung oder persönliche Bedürfnisbefriedigung ist hier das Thema, sondern die Herrschaft Gottes.

Building on the research done by E. J. Epp, B. D. Ehrman situates the origin of the ancestor of the text of Codex Bezae in an anti-Semitic milieu, which would explain the anti-Judaic tendencies of that text. This localisation of the ideological discourse in a specific milieu characterized by a negative stance toward the Jewish people on ethnic grounds seems to rest on the assumption that the text was produced by a non-Jewish Christian. The goal of the present contribution is to test this assumption as it relates to the text of the Acts of the Apostles in the Codex Bezae. With the aid of the concept of ethnicity, and especially the idea of common ancestry, we aim to discover how this text, compared to the text of Codex Vaticanus, depicts the relation of ethnic identity with the Jewish people. Contrary to what might be expected from Ehrman's suggestion, the text of Acts in Codex Bezae emphasizes the indicators of Jewish ethnic identity.

Since 1950, studies of Luke–Acts have been influenced by a downgrading of eschatology (at least of the expectation that the goal of history would be near). Conzelmann's slogan ‘Die Mitte der Zeit’ (the earthly mission of Jesus as the ‘centre of history’) suggested a long ‘time of the Church’ with the gift(s) of the Holy Spirit as a substitute (and not a foretaste) of the kingdom of God. The present study challenges this influential view of Luke's theology and its impact on definitions of the genre of Acts.

Reading Jesus’ conception and genealogy in the context of claims about Augustus brings clarity to the perplexing identification of Adam as God's offspring (Luke 3.38). Jesus was fathered by God's spirit (1.35), as was his ancestor Adam (through Joseph). Likewise, some claimed Augustus was fathered by Apollo and that his ancestor Aeneas (through adoption by Julius Caesar) was the offspring of Aphrodite/Venus. This comparison suggests that Jesus is comparable to Augustus and that Jesus’ kingdom of God is comparable to Augustus’ Golden Age. Moreover, the logical force of these parallels favours the inferring of Joseph's adoption of Jesus in Luke.