In The New Testament the word ‘Law’ is largely equivalent to what we today call the Old Testament. But there are exceptions to this use of the term. The Law sometimes designates the Pentateuch. This is the case in the liturgy of the Synagogue. But for the Jews the term ‘Law’ also could include their entire religious tradition. It governed the daily life of the people—not only in matters of what we call worship, morality, ethics or religion but also in matters legal, social and political. Additions to the commandments found in the Pentateuch and the commentaries that had been added and still were being added, were not thought to be something foreign to the law. It was thought that they simply applied what the Scriptures said. The phrase ‘it has been said to them of old times’ is often understood as being merely a formula of disapproval, since in the Gospels Jesus criticised these rules. But their original purpose was to continue the tradition of which the Scriptures were the core. Their contemporary significance was manifest in the constantly renewed discussion of how they were to be interpreted and applied. For this purpose casuistic rules were needed, that took into account all the concrete situations of life. Thus a lawabiding Jew could always know how he had to act.

The ‘philosophical theology’ of Paul Tillich is one of the most remarkable features of today's theological landscape, and obviously impressive on any estimate. Yet it has given rise to a great deal of puzzlement. This is not simply because the tightly systematised nature of Tillich's thought has led him to wrap up his ideas in a special terminology. Although the volume of his work in English is now reasonably large, so that his technical vocabulary is no longer unfamiliar, there still seems to be considerable uncertainty about just what is involved in the synthesis between philosophy and religion upon which his theology is based.

The discovery of the Qumran texts, as is well known, has produced a whole spate of books and articles many of which deal inter alia with affinities between the doctrinal formularies of the sect and the NT and between its organisation and practice and that of the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. However, in all this literature, which has now reached unmanageable proportions, it would seem that insufficient attention has been paid to affinities between the texts and Christian post- Apostolic literature. The purpose of this article is to examine the theology of the epistolary tract known as the Epistle of Barnabas in the light of the Qumran scrolls.

What does the Church expect of her historians? What kind of person does one imagine when one speaks of a teacher of Church History? Is it too much of a caricature to say that one expects him to be a venerable scholar, steeped in learning, meticulous and perhaps a trifle pedantic, inclined to be sceptical about the motives of men in the ecclesiastical crises of the past, and above all characterised by an academic detachment which can clearly do more good in a library writing books than in a parish in the cure of souls?