Helmut Koester

Jesus the Victim

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ΓΝΩΜΑΙ ΔΙΑΦΟΡΟΙ.: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity

I. The Crisis of the Historical and Theological Criteria. Already Walter Bauer, well known as a lexicographer, but unfortunately little known as a historian of the Ancient Church, in his ingenious monograph Rechtglaubigkeit und Ketzerei im altesten Christentum (1934), had demonstrated convincingly that such Christian groups which were later labelled “heretical,” actually dominated in the first two or three centuries, both geographically and theologically. Recent discoveries, especially those of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, have made it definitely clear that Walter Bauer was essentially right and that a thorough and extensive re-evaluation of early Christian history is called for.

The Divine Human Being

The belief in the greatness of individual human beings who are acknowledged as benefactors of the city, the nation, and humankind is as old as the beginnings of Western culture. When the first Christian apostles encountered this belief, it was already well established in the Greco-Roman world. And, with all its intriguing lure, it is still an important and pervasive current in our present situation. Indeed, this belief is very much alive as all of us face the demand for excellence in our teaching and our studies, as well as the expectation that graduates will emerge as recognized leaders in religious communities and in our society at large.

“Outside the Camp”: Hebrews 13.9–14

Hebrews 13.9–14 is among the most difficult passages of the entire New Testament. Here, in the context of a warning against “diversified and foreign doctrines” (διδαξαi πoικiλαι καi ξeναι), a Christological argument occurs (13.11-12). It is obviously the intention of the writer to ground his objection to the “foreign doctrines” on this Christological basis. But the character of the doctrines opposed in these verses has remained an enigma to commentators inasmuch as the function of the Christological argument in this polemical setting has not been recognized clearly. However, a closer examination of the Old Testament passage which underlies the Christological argument in Hebrews 13.11 may provide a key for a fresh solution of the complex problems of this passage.

The Memory of Jesus' Death and the Worship of the Risen Lord

On the Ides of March of the year 44 BCE, the dictator of Rome, Julius Caesar, was assassinated. Nobody knew whether this would reconstitute the Roman Republic of old or would only usher in a new period of civil war like the one that had devastated not only Rome and Italy but also the provinces for many decades before Caesars ascendancy to sole power.

New Testament Scholarship through One Hundred Years of the Harvard Theological Review

In order to answer the question of the involvement of Harvard Theological Review in the publication of essays relating to the New Testament, I have gone through all the published indices that were issued by the journal. The first index was published in 1938 and covered the journals first thirty years; thereafter indices were published at ten-year intervals. The figures to which I shall refer in this paper are not necessarily exact, but they offer a reasonably good indication of the commitment of Harvard Theological Review to the field of New Testament studies. I did not limit the following survey to essays that deal with the New Testament proper, narrowly defined. There are numerous articles that contribute to New Testament studies indirectly, as they deal with the literature of postexilic Israel, the so-called Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, or rabbinic Judaism. Other areas of scholarly endeavor relating to the New Testament and early Christianity are the history of ancient Christianity, New Testament apocrypha including the writings from Nag Hammadi, the Apostolic Fathers, early Christian apologists, and ancient church history in general. Finally, many of these essays, often written by New Testament scholars, deal with material from the Greco-Roman world.

The Apostolic Fathers and the Struggle for Christian Identity

This article is the first in a forthcoming series which will look at the corpus of writings known as ‘The Apostolic Fathers’. This series will bring readers up-to-date with the latest scholarly discussions of these texts, as well as providing a comprehensive introduction to the issues raised by these writings.