This essay might seem inappropriate for this volume, but it is not. Krister Stendahl is particularly distinguished by a catholicity of mind and spirit which enables him to look with understanding, sympathy, and empathy on all sorts and conditions in what he once unpejoratively called “God's menagerie of religions.” That Mormons do not belong to the main bodies of Christians does not exclude them from his purview. But apart from this, the Mormons are in fact highly germane to the theme of this volume. Uniqueness is always hard to substantiate: Christians, Jews, and Gentiles have been related in many varied and complex ways. But there seems to be no parallel to the way in which Mormons—while claiming to be Christians—assert as well that they are genealogically connected with Jews and that they are therefore physically a rediscovered, restored, and reinterpreted “Israel.” As far as I am aware they constitute a very special, if not unique, case of Christians among Jews and Gentiles since by implication they have redefined all three of these terms. This is the justification for the inclusion of this essay in this volume. We here reflect on one aspect of Mormon life: their fixation of their own “canon.”

This article deals with Matthew's account of the rending of the temple veil. Matt 27:51 will be interpreted in its context: in vss 51–53 the incident is one of several taking place between Jesus' death and the centurion's confession. At the same time the verse under discussion will be considered against the background of the interpretations in early Christian literature which very often take Matt 27:51–53 as a starting point.

Judging from his relatively few surviving letters, Paul—whether as Jew or Christian—was a person with both outer and inner conflicts. We know much less than we would like about these external confrontations and inner struggles, but time and again his letters show evidence of his wrestling with one or another serious ambivalence. Actually, it is not often a present struggle that is portrayed or revealed, for Paul writes with a remarkable maturity and with the confidence of one who has moved well beyond the tossing and turning of a continuing inner struggle. Yet at times, most notably in Romans 9–11, Paul's simple statement of a mature judgment still evokes, in the very restating of his conclusions, the intensity of the original ambivalence and conflict. A further indication that Paul was this kind of person is found, if only incidentally, in his dialectical mode of thinking: if he mentions “death,” at once he thinks of “life”; if he refers to “flesh,” immediately “spirit” crosses his mind, or if he speaks of “slaves” or “slavery,” then “sons” or “freedom” is instantly present.

Modern criticism of the book of Acts began with a hyper-Cartesian decision to doubt everything simultaneously. The author was not to be trusted as a reliable reporter on any issue of significance—the character and fate of the believers in Jerusalem, the status and role of Peter, the teaching of Paul, and so on. Recently, a former student of Krister Stendahl, A. T. Kraabel, has proposed that we should extend our skepticism to yet another area of Acts, to wit, the presence of Gentiles in all of the synagogues visited by Paul on his missionary journeys.

Krister Stendahl and the colleagues assembled around him at Harvard Divinity School have contributed to the fact that the history-of-religion approach has taken a sure foothold in NT studies in the United States. In the countries of its origin this approach is in sad decline, even in the homeland of the “History-of-Religion School.” A major part of the heritage of that school has been the refusal further to abuse biblical studies for apologetic reasons lest one make the biblical environment merely a negative foil to the claim of superiority for the experience and message of Jesus and the primitive church. The attack on Christian triumphalism in exegesis and the insistence on the integrity of the historically particular, indeed of the peculiar, has been one of Krister Stendahl's hermeneutical contributions to the exegetical pursuit.

It seems suitable, when honoring a dean who has become a bishop, to write on an episcopal theologian who thought he could answer Gnostics by discussing curriculum. I doubt that in either office Krister Stendahl would ever have taken such a tack. It is odd to see Irenaeus doing so.

“My mother taught me that reading others' letters isn't nice.” Those, or something like them, were the words of Krister Stendahl when he once tried to open the eyes of his audience to some of the hermeneutical problems which pertain to the fact that Christians read Paul's letters as if they were addressed to themselves rather than to their original recipients. The following reflections deal with these problems, and they are meant as a humble tribute to my first teacher in New Testament exegesis. I begin by recalling a few facts that are intriguing once one puts them together. This will lead me to the suggestion that, when he wrote his letters, Paul had a wider usage in mind than we usually assume. Against such a background I shall discuss, in a rather unsophisticated way, some conditions that may apply to a rereading of the Pauline letters and some possible consequences for so-called historical exegesis.

Krister Stendahl taught his American students in many ways, none more important than by compelling to us to look at the way we look at the ancient texts.

5 Ezra is a curious and challenging little work, crying out for detailed examination. It exists only in Latin, which presumably was translated from Greek. The text has received minimal attention from modern scholarship, despite its presence on the fringes of the Christian canonical scriptures. 5 Ezra provides living proof that one need not wait for new manuscripts to be uncovered in graves or caves to engage in work on hitherto virtually unexamined materials, and its contents seem directly relevant to questions about early Christian use of Jewish materials.

When Paul is placed in his Greek context, it is generally his thought, vocabulary, and literary style that receive attention. This is to a degree at least also true when attention is given to the early church's interpretation of his letters. Greek influence can also be perceived in early Christian reflections on the physical appearance of Paul. Less well known to most students of early Christianity than the literary evidence are the artistic representations of Paul, but the curious literary portrait of Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which in some respects agrees with early Christian paintings, is well known. There, Onesiphorus sees Paul as “a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness; for now he appeared like a man, and now he had the face of an angel.”

When Krister Stendahl's article “Biblical Theology” appeared in the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible in 1962, it caused no little consternation in some circles. He insisted that the primary intellectual task of the biblical scholar was to make a clear distinction between what the text meant in its original setting and what it means. That ran directly counter to the practical aims of the dominant interpretive schools of the day, which wanted, as Karl Barth had once said, to dissolve “the differences between then and now.” Today the distinction for which Stendahl argued so lucidly is taken for granted in most biblical scholarship, and the question is whether there can be any significant connection between “then” and “now.” New Testament studies threatens to divide into two contrary ways of reading texts. One is a rigorously historical quest, in which all the early Christian documents alike, canonical and extracanonical, are treated as sources for reconstructing the diverse and curious varieties of the early Christian movement. The other way of reading cares not at all where the texts came from or what they originally meant; by purely literary analysis it wishes to help text and reader to confront one another continually anew.

Vernon K. Robbins' Jesus the Teacher: A Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation of Mark points to the master-disciple relationship as the critical structure in that Gospel. He sees three phases: the initial one, involving summons and response; the intermediate phase, encompassing teaching and learning; and the final phase, one of farewell and death. Robbins' stimulating account at the first two points compares Mark's portrait of the relationship with, among others, the relationship between master and disciple related in stories in the writings of the ancient rabbis of the Talmud and related literature. When he reaches the final phase, however, Robbins does not undertake such a comparison. It seems to me a suggestive exercise. So, in honor of the great master honored in this volume, I shall begin to fill the gap in Robbins' fine account.

In his undergraduate classes in New Testament Introduction, Krister Stendahl used to cite 1 Cor 15:8 as a classic example of a text with an exegetical crux that is signalled through diverse translations in the modern versions. The crucial word is ἔκτρωμα, literally “abortion,” “miscarriage,” “embryo,” or “stillborn child.” Cataloging the witnesses to the Resurrection, Paul states that the risen Christ appeared to him last, as to “an (or the) ektrðma.” But in what sense does the apostle apply the metaphor to himself?

Krister Stendahl represents, to my mind, the very best of Scandinavian-style “realistic interpretation” of the Bible, resolutely faithful in his exegesis to the historical situation of the text and its author but then marvelously insightful in eliciting from the text a fresh and sometimes surprising address to contemporary issues in church and society. As is well known, it is precisely Stendahl's interest in relations between Jews and Christians (Jewish and Gentile) that has made so much of his New Testament work so stimulating and innovative. As it happens, though, his research has tended to concentrate geographically on that large sweep of territory “from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum.” What I want to do in this article in his honor is to explore an area relatively untouched by my teacher—Alexandria—in an effort to see if anything can be said of Jewish-Christian relations there in the first century. In doing this I must perforce extend our investigation mainly to noncanonical sources. Even so the task is formidable, for the first-century Alexandrian church is, as Stendahl says, something “about which we know nothing.” What follows is, therefore, largely a matter of inference, at least insofar as it bears upon first-century Christianity in Alexandria. Insofar as it bears upon first-century Judaism, that giant among Jewish exegetes and philosophers, Philo Judaeus, will play a substantial role.

It is curious that, despite Paul's representation of baptism as a burial (Rom 6:3–4; cf. Col 2:12), his understanding of baptism has not been considered in terms of funerary rites. Rather, the symbolic and initiatory character of baptismal burial, together with its close association with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, has for about a century produced debate over alleged relationships between Pauline baptism and the initiatory rites of Hellenistic mystery cults. This essay, in honor of Krister Stendahl, is intended to demonstrate that, whatever the associations with mystery cults may be, Paul's understanding of the process of dying in which all believers participate from the moment of their baptismal burial is fundamentally informed by funerary practices and ideas. My thesis is that Pauline baptism is most comprehensively explained in terms of the widely attested, cross-cultural phenomenon of secondary or double burial. I will sketch first some of the distinctive features of Paul's views on the death of believers, then lay out some of the results of research on secondary burial, and then conclude with a few comments on Paul's perspective on the believer's experience.

In Luke 24:47 we are told that Jesus explained to the Emmaus disciples “Moses and all the prophets” and “interpreted in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” This statement reflects Luke's intense interest, both in his Gospel and in Acts, in the relationship between the ancient scriptures and the events of the life of Jesus and the activity of the apostles. In this paper I shall discuss briefly the variety of ways in which Luke quotes, paraphrases, and alludes to the scriptures.

The dean of contemporary Jewish historians, S. W. Baron, has shown that many modern conceptions of Jewish experience in medieval Christian Europe suffer from a fundamental distortion. Writing history was not a natural vocation for medieval Jews; most Jewish historiography was inspired by calamities that generated the impulse to record and, if possible, to explain. Therefore, most medieval Jewish chronicles are little more than accounts of the massacres and attacks suffered by various communities at different times. The tendency to assume that these historiographical sources present a full picture of reality resulted in what Baron called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” viewing medieval Jewish experience as essentially a succession of tragedies in a vale of tears.

Some years ago in an examination of the text noted above, I hypothesized that it could well be a response to some Christian theological position being set forth and argued against Judaism in Galilee in the fourth and fifth centuries. My choice of doctrine was that of the atonement: Christ's atoning death for the sins of humankind. The chapter, to be dealt with below in detail, is in its entirety an argument for the atoning efficacy of the death of righteous persons, that is, a doctrine of vicarious atonement. The material included centered upon the lesson read in the synagogue on the Day of Atonement, the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus. This details the ritual procedures that were to take place once a year on the tenth day of the seventh month in the cult center, in order to expiate for the ritual uncleannness and acts of rebellion, that is, “all the sins of the people.” It concludes with the words: “This shall become a rule binding on you for all times, to make for the Israelites once a year the expiation required by all their sins.”

While the topic of this paper is familiar, I believe that one source of information has been generally neglected: the arguments that Paul does not use. Since Bishop Stendahl has done so much to illuminate Paul's words, it seems appropriate to dedicate to him this brief sketch of things to be learned from Paul's silence.