Mark 2. 23–28 relates an incident which took place when Jesus was walking through the fields with some of his disciples one Saturday: the disciples plucked ears of corn, and some Pharisees objected to this on the ground that it was a breach of Sabbath Law. Jesus defended his disciples with two arguments which have proved difficult to understand, and which have led many scholars to imagine that the passage is not a unity and is mostly a product of the early church. I propose the following reconstruction of Mark's Aramaic source, on the basis of which I shall argue that the incident is authentic and intelligible.

The story of Jesus and the Adulteress (John 7. 53–8. 11) is fraught with historical and literary problems, many of which have seemed insoluble. On only two points is there a scholarly consensus: the passage did not originally form part of the Fourth Gospel, and it bears a close resemblance to Synoptic, particularly Lukan, traditions about Jesus. The arguments for these judgments are overwhelming and do not need to be repeated here. In some respects these unanimous conclusions have themselves brought into sharp focus the thorny problems of the story's textual and pre-literary history: (1) Textual. Since the oldest and best textual witnesses of the Gospel of John do not contain the passage, how should the allusive references to it from the second and third centuries be evaluated? Did Papias know this story? If so, did he find it in the Gospel according to the Hebrews? Or was it Eusebius, who informs us of Papias's knowledge of this or a similar story, who found it there? What form of the story was known to the author of the Didascalia and his subsequent editor, the author of the Apostolic Constitutions? Did Origen know the story? If not, when was it first accepted into the Alexandrian canon? (2) Preliterary. How should this story be classified form-critically? And in what Sitz im Leben of the early church would it have thrived? Does the story preserve authentic tradition from the life of Jesus? Scholarship has reached an impasse on these questions because the early evidence is so sparse. Martin Dibelius's famous pronouncement from a different context applies here as well: ‘Enlightenment is to be expected not from new hypotheses but only from new discoveries.’

The pericope in Matthew entitled ‘on following Jesus’ (8. 18–22) has sparked more than its share of debate this century. Because it is closely paralleled in Luke (9. 57–60), it has been carefully scrutinized both for information regarding the historical Jesus and in terms of its place in the so-called document Q. Correspondingly less attention has been paid to it as a pericope within Matthew itself. The purpose of this article is to examine it afresh precisely as such. New is the claim that one finds the clue to the proper interpretation of key points by relating it to such ‘call passages’ as Matt 4. 18–20, 21–22; and 9. 9 (cf. further 19. 20–22).

The Tol'doth Yeshu is a medieval Jewish antigospel which exists in various forms. Basically it says that Jesus was born illegitimate, learned the Name of God in the temple, performed miracles by pronouncing the Divine Name and finally was executed by the Jews. His body was stolen from the tomb by Yehuda the gardener, an act which led to the assertion by the disciples that he had arisen from the dead and had ascended into heaven.

The date of the Tol'doth Yeshu is assigned by Krauss to c. 500 CE; it is assigned by Klausner to the tenth century. Some of the traditions it draws upon are much older since they are reflected in such writings as the Talmud and Origen's Contra Celsum.

Die Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte gehört zu denjenigen Disziplinen der Altertumswissenschaft, die im 20. Jh. die größten Fortschritte gemacht haben; man braucht nur auf die Entwicklung der Epigraphik und der eng mit ihr verbundenen Prosopographie oder auf die beiden monumentalen Monographien von Rostovtzeff hinzuweisen, die dafür ein deutliches Zeugnis ablegen. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, daß sich auch die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft seit etwa 20 Jahren intensiver sozialgeschichtlichen Fragen, speziell dem Problem der sozialen Schichtung der frühen christlichen Gemeinden, widmet.

That blindness should be a theme in the Johannine literature need cause no surprise; with the dualism of light and darkness and with the emphasis on what has been seen, witnessed and believed, the surprise is rather that the theme is not more prevalent. Only at two places in the Gospel and one in the Epistles is the language of blindness explicitly used, in John 9, John 12. 40 and 1 John 2. 11. However, since each of these can be seen as a focal point or interpretative key to the Johannine tradition the theme could be held to present in microcosm the history of the Johannine community. Chapter 9, the healing of the blind man, has played a central role in recent reconstructions of that history, while the reflection on the effects of Jesus's public ministry in 12. 37–50, before he turns away to address ‘his own’, invites similar treatment. Finally, the redirection towards internal opposition of language originally aimed outwards has long been seen as a mark of 1 John and as central to its interpretation. The exploration of the theme may serve in the same way to test in microcosm the presuppositions and results of such reconstruction. It also does more than this, for the imagery of blindness is by no means unique to John and raises clearly the question of the origins as well as of the context of Johannine thought.

The ‘enigmatic ending’ of Acts continues to baffle the exegetes. Not the least of its difficulties is the status of ‘the Jews’ after Paul's peculiarly solemn pronouncement of Isa 6. 9–10 against a ‘closed’ and ‘hardened’ people (Acts 28. 26–27). Coming as it does as a climax to the equally ponderous pronouncements of judgment in Acts 13. 46 and 18. 6, for many scholars the cumulative, three-fold impact of this indictment resounds a note of finality, of foreclosure upon Israel which consequently consummates an era and looks ahead almost exclusively to a Gentile church. The two leading clusters of opinion expressing this understanding are those associated with E. Haenchen – viz., that repentance for Israel by the end of Acts is de facto now over, with Gentiles replacing Jews as the people of God – or with J. Jervell – that a core of repenting Jews constitutes a restored Israel which, along with increasing numbers of Gentiles, by the end of chapter 28 has completed its mission to unrepenting Jews who no longer have a right to the name ‘Israel’ or ‘people of God’.

Much of the scholarly attention given the Thessalonian epistles has been devoted to various debates. These polemics have included the epistles' authenticity, with some arguing that 1 Thess 2. 13–16 and Thessalonians are post-Pauline, often by appealing to letter structure. Lack of agreement exists as well with the interpretation of Paul's eschatology–the letters' main concern - and difference of opinion also characterizes the function of Paul's apology in 1 Thess 2. 1–12 and his paraenesis, particularly in 1 Thess 4. 1–12. While scholars have actively pursued the pros and cons of these issues, most have been rather passive when it comes to discussing ‘the idle’ (l Thess 4. 11–12; 5. 14; 2 Thess 3. 6–13) – the second most significant theme in the epistles. They usually continue the traditional eschatological explanation for the origin of the problem. This study will survey the history of this interpretation, investigate 2 Thess 3. 6–13 and recommend that a social explanation best satisfies the evidence. This study also seeks to demonstrate the fallacy of explaining historical phenomena from just theological structures and the importance of the interaction between the world of ideas and social structures for interpretation – the importance of which has been shown by redaction criticism's concern for the Sitz im Leben and by recent social descriptions of early Christianity.

George W. Knight III has continued the scholarly inquiry into the word αὐθεντέωand its use in 1 Tim 2. 12 with his well researched 1984 NTS article ‘ΑϒΘΕΝΤΕΩ in Reference to Women in 1 Timothy 2. 12’. It is a study using what scholars have used until now as their main reference tools, that is, Greek lexicons and their referenced citations. Since that time, however, there has opened up an additional tool for linguistic scholarship, the computer database. The ‘Thesaurus Linguae Graecae’ computer database project (developed and housed at the University of California – Irvine) is presently becoming available for scholarly use and it has been consulted on the strange philological development of this same Greek word αὐθεντέω (with its cognates αὐθέντης and αὐθεντία and its solitary NT usage in 1 Tim 2. 12.