La chronologie de la Passion plaçant au mardi soir la Cène de Jésus a suscité les réactions les plus diverses: de l'adhésion chaleureuse à l'opposition la plus vive. Le ton passionné de certaines ‘réfutations’ pourrait surprendre s'il ne s'expliquait précisément par la grande diffusion de la thèse.

The message of Stephen and its relationship to flrst-century Judaism and early Christian theology has recently been the subject of several studies. It is, I suppose, universally agreed that Stephen was a hellenistic Jew of the Diaspora who came into acute conflict with other Diaspora Jews of a more conservative kind domiciled in Jerusalem and that these took the initiative in effecting his arrest and trial. But that is as far as agreement goes. The attempt to understand further Stephen's message and influence has produced the widest divergence of opinion. To some he is the originator of the mission to the Gentiles and Christian universalism whose conception of Christianity was adopted by later preachers and teachers with momentous consequences for Christian history. To others he remained in essence a Jew, albeit of a liberal kind, even after his conversion, whose aim was to propagate a type of Judaism which was strongly anti-Temple and anti-cultus. On this view Stephen stands in the line of Nathan, Hosea, Trito-Isaiah, the Rechabites, some Essene circles and the Ebionites, as pictured in the Pseudo-Clementine writings, in asserting a non-material form of worship, independent of the Temple cultus, as being authentic Judaism. Still others believe that Stephen cleverly preached Jesus in his interpretation of Joseph, Moses and Joshua; on this view he is a typologist whose aim is to show that Jesus' passion has been pre-figured in the persecutions which God's righteous servants have always had to endure. It is not our purpose here to examine and criticize these conflicting opinions in detail but to seek to answer two questions, namely (i) Was Stephen's position an isolated ine in first-century Judaism and in the early Church? (ii) And, if so, is it yet possible to trace his influence on Alexandrian Christianity when it comes into historical perspective in the early second century of our era?

Nur an zwei Stellen der Apostelgeschichte ist der Wortlaut missionarischer Anreden an Menschen überliefert, die nicht Gott, sondern die Götter verehren. Die beiden Reden sind die Predigten auf dem Athener Areshügel (Apg. xvii) und in Lystra (Apg. xiv. 15–18).

In a previous article I argued that the fourth Gospel may best be understood as an evangelistic appeal addressed to Greek-speaking Diaspora Judaism to accept as the Christ him whom ‘the inhabitants ofJerusalem and their rulers’ (‘the Jews’ of this Gospel) refused to acknowledge. If this thesis is to establish itself it must be prepared to account for the evidence of the Johannine Epistles. For, whether or not they come from the same hand as the Gospel, the milieu they presuppose is so similar that any theory about the nature of the community for which the Gospel was written which will not fit the evidence of the Epistles is bound to be precarious.

In a previous study in this journal we compared the Passion Narratives of the Fourth Gospel and of Mark, reaching the conclusion that John shows knowledge not of the Gospel according to St Mark, but of a Passion Story which Mark also knew, a narrative included in the B stratum of the Marcan Passion Account as analysed by Principal Vincent Taylor. Recently, Dr Peder Borgen has offered the criticism that we had taken into account only the agreements of John with Mark and had not considered the similarities with Luke and Matthew. The limitation was imposed by the nature of our inquiry at that stage. To widen the scope of our investigation by taking Matthew and Luke into account is the inevitable next step. Far from disproving the hypothesis we were led to advance, the examination of the passages involved tends to confirm it.

The relationship between John and the Synoptics and the closely linked question of the historicity of an independent John-source have been the concern of contributors to this journal since its institution. In a recent article Ivor Buse has drawn attention to the ‘striking similarities’ between certain of the Marcan Passion Narratives and the account in John, basing his study on the conclusions reached by Dr Vincent Taylor in his commentary on St Marks Gospel. I should like to pursue this question further.

The early evidence for the martyrdom of Peter in Rome is extremely exiguous. Perhaps the most important passage is I Clement v. 4. Certainly none other until the end of the second century is equally explicit as to Peter's fate. Therefore it is of some interest that I Clem. v. 4 can itself be completely explained as exegesis of Acts iii-v and xii, especially of v. 17 and xii. 17.

Such metaphorical expressions as υióς εlρήvής (Luke x. 6) and (John xvii. 12) are usually explained by commentators as Hebraisms or translation-Greek, despite the caution given by A. Deissmann (Bible Studies, trans. Alexander Grieve, 2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1909, pp. 161–6) and MoultonMilligan (The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, London, 1952, p. 649), who suggested that the N.T. examples could readily be accounted for on ‘the theory of analogical formations’. In support they cite from the inscriptions such examples as υióς πóλεως, υiòς toū ńμoυ Deissmann also stated that his attention had been called ‘to the in the Tragedians, and filius fortunae in Horace’, p. 166. He does not cite the passages, but the Hecuba of Euripides contains an analogous expression. Hecuba cries out to Polyxena: , ‘O daughter of an untimely and lamentable fate’, 425. The correctness of Deissmann's observation is now further vindicated by Papyrus Bodmer IV (Bodmeriana Bibliotheca, 1958), which contains an almost complete text of Menander's Dyscolos. In this play a slave Pyrrhias had been sent by Sostratus to beg the hand of Cnemon's daughter. Pyrrhias receives a rather rough welcome and returns to his master shouting: ‘He is a madman, one possessed, a lunati’, 88, 89.