One of the most interesting passages to deal with the apostle Paul's thoughts on the Last Day and the final Judgment is found in 1 Cor 3.10–15. Far from being an excursus, a digression or an insertion, having almost nothing to do with its context, the verses are an important element in Paul's arguments on the diversity in the Christian community in Corinth in chapters 1–4. It runs partly parallel with vv. 5–9, illustrating the same point along more or less similar lines: people responsible for the growth of the Christian communities are just servants of God and will be recompensed according to their labours at the end of time.

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 genre of 1 Cor 13 remains a problem, despite nearly universal agreement on the structure of the chapter. Eleven different genres have been proposed.Yet, as D. A. Carson has noted, only two of those options, hymn and paraenesis, have attracted much scholarly backing.

Reflecting upon ethical ideals upheld by the Apostolic Fathers scholars have noted the presence of a ‘positive attitude towards pagan society’, ‘ideas comparable to those of nineteenth-century petty bourgeoisie’, a vision of the church made up of ‘generous householders, well-disciplined children, submissive wives, and reliable slaves’. Commenting on the renunciation of Paul's preference for virginity by the beginning of the second century, Elizabeth A. Clark concludes that ‘… the ordering of the household deemed normal by late ancient pagan society tended to prevail in Christianity as well’. Recent work on the implications of remaining unmarried for the lives of early Christian women has perhaps allowed the tipping of the scale away from the preference for the privileges of virginity towards the ideal of wifely submission to stand out in even fuller relief. The obvious question is why the Christian ideal of the married couple with its apparent openness to Greco-Roman ethics emerges so boldly at the turn of the century. The attractive solution most frequently proposed is, as Clark puts it, that wives exhibiting the characteristic virtues of good domestic order, discretion and modesty, stood as ‘apologists for the new faith’.

1.1 Seit der Arbeit von Karl Weidinger ist die – im Anschluß an Martin Dibelius ausgearbeitete – These akzeptiert, daß es im Neuen Testament ‘Haustafeln’ gibt. Die seitherige Forschung hat sich zwar nicht zufrieden gegeben mit der von Weidinger vertre-tenen These hinsichtlich der Frage, wo diese Haustafeln ihren religionsgeschichtlichen bzw. traditionsgeschichtlichen Hinter-grund haben. Dennoch wurde überwiegend seine Ableitung von der durch das hellenistische Judentum vermittelten stoischen Pflichtenlehre als plausibel angenommen, wenn auch z.T. nur mangels besserer Alternative. Weniger Resonanz fanden Ver-suche, die Haustafeln ganz vom atl-jüdischen Hintergrund her zu verstehen (Lohmeyer) oder in ihnen genuin christliche Schöpfun-gen zu sehen (Rengstorf, Schroeder). Eine deutliche Modifikation der These Weidingers stellte die Arbeit von Crouch dar, der stärker die jüdisch-hellenistische Ausprägung betonte sowie in der ältesten christlichen Haustafel (Kol) eine speziell anti-enthusiastische Aus-richtung sah.

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.