The ending of Mark, ‘And they (the women) said nothing to anyone for they were afraid’ (16.8) is one of the most famous cruxes in the New Testament. Could the author really have intended to complete the gospel in such a way? Building on a suggestion made by Joel Marcus and Benoit Standaert, this article defends the hypothesis that Mark is deliberately making a reference to Genesis 18.15 LXX. The same rare expression ἐφοβήθη γάρ which has the verb ‘to be afraid’ followed by the preposition γάρ, appears in a comparable context. In both cases, one or more women are presented by God or his messengers with what could appear to be an unlikely promise and a radical impossibility: the birth of a child in old age or the resurrection of a dead person. While presenting a critique of S. Hultgren's recent proposal that Dn 10 is the background of Mark, the approach here is to add an argument based on a scriptural allusion, which Mark was perfectly capable of making, in support of the now predominant view, but still with many critics, that the writer fully intended to end his gospel with 16.8b.

This paper addresses longstanding questions about how promise and obligation, two of the key conceptual building blocks for psychological contract research, are conceptualized and operationalized: How do employees understand these concepts? Would their understandings be congruent with the researchers’ and how would this knowledge inform future psychological contract research? Drawing on interviews with 61 Chinese workers from diverse backgrounds, our results suggest the concepts have distinct meanings for participants in terms of three criteria (defining characteristics, key features and manifestations in employment). We argue that promise and obligation are likely to serve different functions in employment relationship and have different meanings for researchers versus participants, and accordingly we highlight the challenges of using them to conceptualize and operationalize psychological contracts in China and beyond.

Background: The adoption of new medical devices and diagnostics is often hampered by lack of published evidence which makes conventional health technology assessment (HTA) difficult. We now have 5 years’ experience of the Medical Technologies Advisory Committee of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the United Kingdom, addressing this problem. This committee assesses devices and diagnostics against claims of advantage, to produce guidance on adoption for the health service.

Methods: We have reflected on the practical, technical, and intellectual processes we have used in developing guidance for the health service.

Results: When scientific and clinical evidence is sparse, promise and plausibility play an increased part in decision-making. Drivers of promise include a clear design and mechanism of action, the possibility of radical improvement in care and/or resource use, and improving health outcomes for large numbers of patients. Plausibility relates to judgements about the whether the promise is likely to be delivered in a “real world” setting. Promise and plausibility need to be balanced against the amount of evidence available. We examine the influence they may have on decision-making compared with other factors such as risk and cost.

Conclusions: Decisions about adoption of new devices and diagnostics with little evidence are influenced by judgements of their promise and the plausibility of claims that they will provide benefits in a real-world setting. This kind of decision making needs to be transparent and this article explains how these influences can be balanced against the use of more familiar criteria.

This essay offers some brief thoughts on Seana Shiffrin’s recent work regarding the divergence of contractual and promissory norms. I conclude that Shiffrin does not do enough to separate and account for the different consequentalist and deontological justifications underlying each institution, and does not do enough to explain how promises give rise to the “moral” duties she posits. I suggest, instead, that the divergence between contract and promise is justified by the different roles each institution plays in our lives, and that, in fact, keeping strictly promissory duties outside the scope of state coercion actually facilitates a strong culture of responsible moral agency.