Christian discourse tends to treat the concept of ‘priesthood’ univocally, so that ordained priests are seen to share the priesthood of Christ. But a careful reading of Hebrews shows clearly that the priesthood of Christ is unique to him. There are four (even five) types of priest in the New Testament and each of them is distinct and not to be confused.

Paul quoted extensively from scripture, especially in Romans. Many of these citations are from the Psalms, using the Septuagint. Paul could have found all his vocabulary and concepts for ‘justification by faith’ in the Psalms. The Psalms contain a doctrine of ‘righteousness through faithfulness’: God is righteous by forming a covenant with Israel, and proves his righteousness by remaining faithful to that covenant despite Israel's failings. He will remain faithful to the end by vindicating his righteous ones when they are oppressed by the ungodly. Israelites are righteous by having been elected to the covenant and will remain righteous through faithfulness to God, the marks of which are the avoidance of idolatry and keeping the law. Far from rejecting this Old Testament inheritance, Paul takes over this doctrine of ‘righteousness through faithfulness’ as it stands in the Psalms (Romans 1:18–3:20) and then christologises it (from 3:21). The mark of faithfulness to God now is no longer the law, however, but faithfulness to Christ, who is himself the model of faithfulness and what it is to be righteous. This understanding of how one becomes righteous is located by Paul himself within his fivefold scheme of salvation at Romans 8:30: foreknown, predestined, called, made righteous and glorified.

The legacy that Paul received was the Jewish scriptures that he quoted extensively in Greek from the Septuagint. This was a legacy not widely appreciated, for various theological reasons, until relatively recently. However, a count of Paul's citations, quotations from and allusions to scripture comes to over 250. Paul's thinking was framed by his re-reading of scripture and emphasises how Jewish was his historical context and theological frame of reference. How this affects our interpretation of Paul's theology is illustrated by four examples from Wisdom, the Psalms in general, Ps 78 in particular, and Paul's rewriting of the Shema Israel in 1 Cor 8.6. There are some brief comments on the difficulties that Paul's use of scripture leaves us with.

Maternal inheritance of extranuclear mitochondrial genes has been demonstrated in Aspergillus nidulans using the ‘blue’ ascospore colour mutants in combination with heterokaryon incompatible strains. It appears that heterokaryosis is not a prerequisite of sexual outcrossing, and that recombination of extranuclear mitochondrial markers does not occur in the sexual stage of the cell cycle.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a Notification criticising Jon Sobrino's Christology. In their criticism of Sobrino's description of Jesus as a man of faith, they risk introducing a semi‐Docetism by emphasising Jesus' closeness to his divine Father and his relative distance from us. Paul, on the other hand, brings Christ and believers very close together – he gives them a ‘spiritual identification’ in a common experience of death, burial, sonship, heirdom and resurrection. A parallel is also drawn between the faith/faithfulness of Christ and all Christian believers who, according to Paul, are made righteous (justified) through their faithfulness.