Στάσις is an important theme in Luke-Acts, but one that remains understudied. Many Lukan scholars equate στάσις with Roman seditio or treason, thereby overlooking the rich philosophical reflection on στάσις in Greek political thought. In this article, I analyse Luke's use of the concept of στάσις in his depiction of Jesus’ trial against the background of Thucydides’ model of στάσις in book 3 of his history. Thucydides’ reflections on στάσις were highly influential for later historians such as Josephus, and I argue that Luke too employs the common topos of στάσις as a violent internal conflict and not an act of rebellion or insurrection to reveal how the conflict between Jesus and his opponents is symptomatic of a deeper inversion of social bonds and language within a community. He does this, I argue, to set the stage for the story of Acts where στάσεις erupt throughout the Empire wherever the gospel is preached.

The Gospels tell of Simon of Cyrene/Jesus carrying a σταυρός on the way to crucifixion. In the recent years influential scholars such as Gunnar Samuelsson and John Granger Cook entered a discussion about what we can know about crucifixion and what it was that Jesus carried. Often, scholars assume that carrying a σταυρός was a common crucifixion practice, and refer to a few Greek sources as parallels. Yet, do these sources speak of cross-bearing? In this article it is argued that possibly three of the sources could be counted as parallels to cross-bearing practices represented in the Gospels.

Within the holdings of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto there is a curious, rarely examined handwritten book entitled Opera Evangelica, containing translations of several apocryphal works in English. It opens with a lengthy Preface that provides an antiquarian account of Christian apocrypha along with a justification for translating the texts. Unfortunately, the book's title page gives little indication of its authorship or date of composition, apart from an oblique reference to the translator as ‘I. B.’ But citations in the Preface to contemporary scholarship place the volume around the turn of the eighteenth century, predating the first published English-language compendium of Christian apocrypha in print by Jeremiah Jones (1726). A second copy of the book has been found in the Cambridge University Library, though its selection of texts and material form diverges from the Toronto volume in some notable respects. This article presents Opera Evangelica to a modern audience for the first time. It examines various aspects of the work: the material features and history of the two manuscripts; the editions of apocryphal texts that lie behind its translations; the views expressed on Christian apocrypha by its mysterious author; and its place within manuscript publication and English scholarship around the turn of the eighteenth century. Scholars of Christian apocrypha delight in finding ‘lost gospels’ but in Opera Evangelica we have something truly unique: a long-lost collection of Christian apocrypha.

The level of scepticism met by the concept of macro-chiasm in ancient literature is noticeably lower today than two decades ago, with sizable agreement coalescing around certain examples. One such example is found in the synoptic double-tradition material as it is preserved in Luke's Gospel, which provides the methodological foundation for the reconstruction of the hypothetical synoptic source document Q. This article explores the study of the macro-chiasm identified in Luke (Q) 3.7–7.35 and its implications for the synoptic problem. It also addresses the methodological considerations advanced by S. E. Porter and J. T. Reed in their NTS article two decades ago, meeting a certain stipulation placed by them upon subsequent scholarship.

In studies of Pauline reception, most scholars limit themselves to works in the second or early third century (often ending with Irenaeus or the Acts of Paul) and to material from the Latin West and Greek East. Although later Syriac sources are rarely engaged, those who do work on this material have long recognised the importance of Paul's letters for that material. The present argument aims to help broaden the dominant discourse on Pauline reception by attending to early Syriac sources, principally the work of Aphrahat the Persian Sage. I focus in particular on his discussion of baptism and marriage in Dem. 7.18–20, which has confounded scholars over the years. This passage displays a kind of Pauline ‘logic’ indebted to 1 Cor 7.20, which can be discerned among other early Christian applications of that passage in similar contexts, in both East and West.

Since other evidence strongly suggests that the omission of Matt 16:2b–3 is the result of multiple emergence, this variant unit serves as a helpful case study to evaluate the usefulness of pre-genealogical coherence for detecting multiple emergence of a reading, an important premise of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). This article adapts the Wasserman–Gurry method of assessing pre-genealogical coherence in the Synoptic Gospels (for which full collation of the relevant witnesses is presently lacking) in several ways to approximate more closely the approach used in the CBGM. It also attempts to refine the data generated by the Parallel Pericopes: Manuscript Clusters tool of the INTF at certain points. The study confirms that the assessment of pre-genealogical coherence is useful in detecting multiple emergence, coincidental agreement and contamination even based on the limited data in the Parallel Pericopes volume of the Editio Critica Maior.

This article calls attention to an unpublished account of the 1954 General Meeting of SNTS in Marburg, written by C. K. Barrett. The interesting part of Barrett's account is its picture of Rudolf Bultmann who, after the evening sessions, with a group of colleagues withdrew to a pavement café at the Marktplatz and sat there ‘at the head in undisputed preeminence’.

A recent NTS article by B. Massey gives a highly critical appraisal of the work of R. H. Lightfoot, questioning Lightfoot's academic integrity and claiming that he borrowed much of his work from others without proper attribution. A study of Lightfoot's writings suggests however that Lightfoot did clearly acknowledge his debt to others and that he did not try to claim the ideas of others as his own. Further, his standing within English-speaking scholarship, as one who publicised the work of German form critics and who anticipated in a significant way the work of later redaction criticism, can remain intact and his work is still valuable today.