After discussing the scholarly preference for dating Jesus' crucifixion to 7 April 30 CE, this article argues that the precise date can no longer be recovered. All we can claim with any degree of historical certainty is that Jesus died some time around Passover (perhaps a week or so before the feast) between 29 and 34 CE. The emergence of the Johannine tradition (in which Jesus died on the day of Preparation) and the Markan tradition (in which Jesus died on the Passover itself) are explored through the lens of social/collective memory.

Although Romans has been heavily mined for scriptural allusions in recent years, the influence of Isaiah 49–50 on Rom 7.14-25 has gone largely unnoticed. Building on Philonenko's work on the allusion to Isa 50.1 in the phrase ‘sold under sin’ (Rom 7.14), this study seeks to identify additional echoes from LXX Isa 49.24–50.2 in Rom 7.14-25 and to interpret Paul's discourse in the light of the sin–exile–restoration paradigm implied by both the source's original context and Paul's own strategic use of Isaiah in his portrayal of the plight of ἐγώ. The identification of these echoes, it is suggested, aids in interpreting the story of ἐγώ by connecting the allusions to Israel's early history in Rom 7.7-13 to images of the nation's later history in 7.14-25, thus showing the speaker's plight under sin to be analogous to Israel's own experiences of deception, death, and exile.

Three questions have remained central to the Erastus debate (Ἔραστος ὁ οἰκονόμος τῆς πόλɛως, Rom 16.23): the date of IKorinthKent 232, the nature of the office of οἰκονόμος (τῆς πόλɛως), and the frequency of the name ‘Erastus’ in antiquity. The present article focuses on the third issue. Moving beyond Meggitt's earlier research (1996, 1999), the author here furnishes a comprehensive catalog of literary, papyrological, and epigraphical occurrences of the name (in Greek and in Latin) in antiquity. The chief payoff of the catalog is two-fold: (1) it provides, for the first time, comprehensive quantitative evidence that the name was in fact rare; and (2) it reveals a significant dearth of attestations from first-century Greece.

According to the prevailing interpretation of 1 Cor 3.15, the phrase διὰ πυρός must be taken in the local sense, and the fire of vv. 13 and 15 plays no soteriological function. This article contests this reading, arguing that Paul's probable allusion to Mal 3 and his reference to the testing function of fire may imply refining as well. More importantly, it demonstrates that whereas the phrase διὰ πυρός is indeterminate and may take either the local or the instrumental sense, nearly every other instance of the construction σῴζω + διά + genitive in the relevant Greek literature has an instrumental sense.

It is regularly suggested that the great weakness of reformational orderings of ‘faith’ and ‘justification’ is that they fail to coordinate Christology and the doctrine of justification. Behind this assertion is a particular construal of the pistis Christou debate: the interpretative decision to read Christ as the object of faith contributes to an anthropocentric account of justification whereas a ‘subjective’ interpretative of the genitive phrase restores the (Pauline) relationship between Jesus and justification. This article will argue that this is a misreading of Protestant theology, at least as it comes to expression in Martin Luther's exegesis of Galatians 2.16, 19-20 which presents a radically Christocentric account of ‘faith in Christ’. For Luther, the sola fide, as an interpretation of a Pauline antithesis—‘not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ’—, is an anthropological negation and a christological confession: it excludes the human as the subject of salvation and confesses Christ, who is present in faith, as the one by, in, and on the basis of whom God justifies the ungodly.

The present study is prompted by Hellen Mardaga's recent discussion and definition of so-called hapax legomena (HLL), ‘rare words’ or ‘words occurring only once’, within and outside the MT, the LXX and/or the NT. After interacting with Mardaga's theses an alternative definition is provided, developed from and proved by several examples. By doing so the significance of HLL for the pragmatic linguistic analysis of a text is highlighted, of which HLL form an integral and interesting element. Throughout the study, however, it is stressed that HLL are only one element among many in a full analysis of a text and the language of its author. Consequently, HLL need to be evaluated within the context of all elements of such an analysis.

It has long been recognized that one of the main topics of the Gospel of Philip is ritual, including ‘the bridal chamber’, and numerous studies have discussed what practices and attitudes toward sexuality and marriage are implied by this imagery. This article will build on these studies to argue that the Gospel of Philip portrays the incarnate Jesus as actually married (to Mary Magdalene) and it represents that marriage as a symbolic paradigm for the reunification of believers with their angelic (spiritual) doubles in Christian initiation ritual, a ritual which effectively transforms initiates into members of the body of Christ and also enables ‘undefiled marriage’ for Christian partners by freeing them from demonic influences. The article aims to show that this distinctive position on Jesus' marital status was catalyzed by reading Ephesians 5 in conjunction with Valentinian incarnational theology.

Following the recent emphasis on studying early Christian manuscripts as historical artefacts, whose text and meta-textual aspects comprise important embodiments of reception and interpretation, this article re-examines the early Titus fragment 𝔓32 (P.Ryl. Gr. 1.5) with respect to its physical situation within the manuscript. I expand the scope of current reconstructions to consider in detail the lost beginning of the epistle, and argue that Titus was not the first document in the codex: at least one other preceded. Although the identity of the accompanying material cannot be deduced codicologically, patristic evidence suggests that Titus was normally transmitted in a collection of thirteen or fourteen Pauline epistles when the 𝔓32 codex was produced, rendering these the prime candidates.