The question, What did Paul know about Jesus of Nazareth?, has long been debated by students of the New Testament. The debate has not issued in any consensus. Indeed, critical appraisals of Paul's relation to the Jesus of history and to traditions about him have been unusually disparate. Thus, on the one side, W. D. Davies has argued that ‘Paul is steeped in the mind and words of his Lord.’ On the other side, R. Bultmann could claim that ‘the teaching of the historical Jesus plays no role, or practically none, in Paul’. The contrast between these two assertions is puzzling, and all the more so as neither can be regarded as idiosyncratic: Davies is not alone in avowing that sayings of and traditions about Jesus were of momentous significance for Paul, and it is not difficult to find critics at one with Bultmann. Moreover, as our two quotations do not simply represent two circles of opinion but also mark poles between which appears a variety of viewpoints, matters are even further complicated.

The use of Ioudaioi in the Fourth Gospel (hereafter, FG) has attracted much scholarly attention. It is a consistent conclusion of such investigation that the term Ioudaioi in the gospel has a variety of meanings. It is also noted and generally agreed upon that one of the ways in which the term is used is unique to John among New Testament authors and indeed among ancient authors in general; it is this unique usage of Ioudaioi which has been the focus of the investigation. However if we look only at this peculiarly Johannine use of Ioudaioi we find that scholars have disagreed both about which texts within the gospel constitute this usage and also about the identity of the persons referred to by the term. Some authors have seen this usage as referring to the entire Jewish nation composed of both the common people and the narrower circle of religious authorities. Other scholars have considered the term to refer exclusively to religious authorities.

Das Anliegen dieses methodologischen Aufsatzes ist bescheiden, zugleich aber anspruchsvoll und schwierig, bescheiden, weil die viel verhandelte Materie der neutestamentlichen Gleichnisse und die unterschiedlichen Auslegungsmodelle in aller Kürze im methodischen Ansatz referiert und kritisch gewürdigt werden sollen, anspruchsvoll (und in gebotener Kürze angemessen kaum durchführbar) ist dieser Versuch, weil exemplarisch gezeigt werden soll, was linguistisch orientierte Exegese leisten könnte und wie sie historisch-kritische Methoden integrierend zu reflektierteren und stärker kontrollierbaren Ergebnissen kommt, vielleicht auch neue Einsichten vermittelt. Schwierig ist dieses Unterfangen vor allem, weil es die linguistisch Methode (und Terminologie) nicht gibt, sie sich nach B. van Iersel als ‘ein unfaßbares und vielköpfiges Ungeheuer’ gebärdet, sie ‘mehr von einem Lebewesen als von einem Bauwerk an sich zu haben (scheint)’, das ‘unablässig in Entwicklung und Bewegung’ ist. Doch Sicherheit durch Flucht oder Enthaltsamkeit ist nach van Iersel abzulehnen, es bieibt nur der ‘Versuch, den Drachen zu zähmen’, ‘die Linguistik als Hilfswissenschaft’ der ‘exegetischen Arbeit dienstbar zu machen’.

Les mss. grecs, dont nous allons examiner les variantes pour Jacques, sont tous médiévaux, donc tardifs. Plusieurs d'entre eux ont des états de texte apparentés: il s'agit d'un groupe de minuscules apparu lors d'un classement antérieur, fait à partir d'une collation de 498 états de texte sur 25 lieux variants de Jacques, et complété par des témoins absents de la collation ou sans parenté évidente avec le groupe. Au départ, l'intérêt de ce groupe est d'occuper une place originale par rapport aux deux types de texte admis, le lsquo;syro-byzantin’ et l'‘alexandrin’. Nous avons disposé, pour collationner 239 lieux variants, de l'apparat de Von Soden et des collations de Scrivener et de K. Clark. Dans la mesure o< ces sources sont fiables – et nous le supposerons pour cette étude –, nous tâcherons de répondre à deux questions: ce groupe est-il homogéne? Quelle est l'ancienneté possible de ses leçons les plus caractéristiques? Accessoirement, nous reviendrons sur le classement de Von Soden, pour juger de son bien-fondé en ce qui concerne notre Epître.

In a previous study ‘How Many Cock-Crowings? The Problem of Harmonistic Text-Variants’ I raised the question of ‘harmonistic’ readings in synoptic texts. When dealing with the triple tradition we have been trained at points in a gospel where there are two possible readings, one of which agrees with the other two gospels and one of which does not, to favour the odd man out. In that instance I argued that the byzantine text of Mark with its two crowings had got out of step with Matthew and Luke because of an accidental interpolation into its text, and that the ‘harmonistic’ reading was in fact original. More often, however, the byzantine text of one gospel is suspected of getting into step with the other two through harmonistic changes. But it is unwise to assume this too readily, as may be illustrated from the most notorious example: the case of the rich young man in Matthew 19. 16, 17. This example raises sharply two questions: What is the relation between textual criticism and the synoptic problem? And what place should be given to supposed harmonization in assessing readings?

Interpreters of Paul have expressed no doubt until the present era that Paul's viewpoint on sexual intercourse is articulated in 1 Cor. 7.lb: καλòνανθρωπωγυναικòς μń âπт*σθαι This association of the most outstanding Christian theologian with sexual asceticism has caused significant repercussions in Western culture. But now there is much uncertainty as to whether the apostle was: (a) asserting his position in his own words; (b) quoting a slogan of some Corinthians that he accepted; or (c) quoting a Corinthian slogan that he rejected. In this essay a sampling will be given of these major interpretive positions and an argument in favour of the third will be presented.

In spite of the amount of writing about grammatical questions on NT Greek, it is not superfluous to develop and to document some of these subjects whose extension exceeds the limits of handbooks of Morphology and Syntax. The present work has been suggested by Prof. G. D. Kilpatrick and it tries, by its exhaustiveness, to determine what hitherto could only be the fruit of an intuition based on partial or sample studies.

Discussion of the meaning of σκєυ>ος in 1 Thess. 4. 4 has traditionally centred on two possible connotations, ‘body’ and ‘wife’ (cf. respectively, B. Rigaux, Les Epitres aux Thessaloniciens, 1956, pp. 503–7; E. Best, The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, 1972, pp. 160–5).