Religion_Christianity

The First and Second Letters of Paul to Timothy and the Letter of Paul to Titus, three small epistles traditionally part of the Pauline corpus, are written not to churches nor to an individual concerning a special problem but to two individual addressees in their capacity as pastors, or leaders of their local churches. The purpose of the letters is to instruct, admonish, and direct the recipients in their pastoral office. Since the 18th century they have been referred to as a unit, the Pastoral Letters, and they contain common injunctions to guard the faith, to appoint qualified officials, to conduct worship, and to maintain discipline both personally and in the churches. Their similar peculiarities of style and vocabulary as well as the similarity of the heresies and other problems they faced place them in a common time and allow them to be dealt with as a unit. Their content presents a picture of the post-apostolic church when pastoral offices and tradition came to the fore and the formerly high apocalyptic tension appears attenuated.

The Muratorian Canon (a list of biblical books from c. 180) includes references to the Pastoral Letters and notes that they were written "for the sake of affection and love." They have a place in the canon because "they have been sanctified by an ordination of the ecclesiastical discipline." These letters, however, do not appear among the Pauline letters in P 46, an early-3rd-century manuscript, and there is no clear external attestation in the primitive church concerning them until the end of the 2nd century. Not until the 19th century were doubts expressed about the Pastorals as being authentically Pauline, when German scholars and others noted discrepancies in style and vocabulary, church organization, heresies, biographical and historical situations, and theology from those found in the Pauline letters. The problems of authorship, authenticity, and dating almost paralyze investigation of the Pastorals unless discussion of these problems is seen as connected also with the literary character of the material.

Church offices are more developed in the Pastoral Letters than in Paul's time. There are presbyters and bishops, but these are sometimes used interchangeably and the monarchical episcopate is not yet depicted, although church offices appear to be heading in that direction. Requirements for office are strict and leaders are chosen and ordained by laying on of hands. Such leaders must be able to teach true and sound doctrine and guard what has been entrusted to them, the paratheke--i.e., the deposit of teaching or the message to be carried on. They must also be able to stand firm and argue against heresy. Such offices and aims suggest an expectation of future generations of faithful witnesses to carry on the traditions, perhaps particularly necessary as some may be killed for the witness they make.

The heresies referred to appear to be Gnostic and the arguments are rather mild and reasonable, unlike Paul's urgency in combatting heresy with strenuous argumentation. The heresies taught by false teachers are an early partly Encratitic (abstaining) Gnosticism, with "higher knowledge" that emphasizes "godless and silly myth," or are statements that the resurrection has already taken place, which is a denial of future resurrection and a glorification and spiritualizing of resurrection as a rebirth, as, for example, in Baptism.

Biographical notes about Paul's journeys and situations contradict his own letters as well as the accounts in Acts. The Pauline sense of living in a time close to the end of the age is missing in these descriptions of churches; they are viewed as settling down with a succession of tradition with Hellenized expressions of salvation and a replacement of enthusiasm with bourgeois ethics. This indicates a period of de-emphasized eschatology and an expectation of a long community life in which people must live out their lives in Christian responsibility and moral behaviour.

I Timothy and Titus are more similar to each other than to II Timothy, but all three exhort to lives of exemplary conduct and give rules of conduct for church order and discipline for the group as a whole and for individual parts of it--sometimes in terms of catalogs of virtues and vices recalling the Jewish two-way orders: the way of life being good, the way of death including a list of sins. Each concludes with a final blessing or salutation. They are all pseudonymous, using Paul as an epistolary model and using pseudonymous devices, such as naming individuals known to be Paul's co-workers. Paul's authority is invoked to lend credence to the teachings contained in the letters: the avoidance of heresy, holding to sound doctrine, and piety of life. The author is anonymous, the place of writing and the addressees are unknown, but they probably are later spiritual children of Pauline teaching. The date of the letters is about the turn of the 2nd century.

II Timothy uses the background of Pauline imagery most fully. It is cast at least in part in the testament form to Timothy as his spiritual heir because Paul is depicted as suffering, fettered in prison, and awaiting the martyr's crown. He exhorts Timothy and through him the church to share in these sufferings as they will eventually share in glory. II Timothy, chapter 2, verses 1-13, is an exhortation to martyrdom with a faith that Christ, triumphant over death, will save his faithful witnesses. Recollection of the creed is followed by a direct application to bearing suffering and its meaning in God's plan of salvation. The words "faithful is the word" occur in 2:11. This "word," unlike Paul or any Christian, cannot be bound. It both confirms salvation described in the preceding verses and introduces a hymn that may represent liturgical usage in that it is poetic and balanced.

The hymn preserves within itself a reflection of sayings of Jesus that those who endure and persevere will reign with the Lord and that even to those who deny him (as did Peter) God will remain faithful because Christ cannot deny his own faithfulness. Even in this hymn there is allusion to a "testament" form, with Paul already martyred, as a pseudonymous device to spur the Christian on to endurance and faithfulness as a member of the redeemed community.

From Ephesus, where he was imprisoned (c. 53-54), Paul wrote his shortest and most personal letter to a Phrygian Christian (probably from Colossae or nearby Laodicea) whose slave Onesimus had run away, after possibly having stolen money from his master. The slave apparently had met Paul in prison, was converted, and was being returned to his master with a letter from Paul appealing not on the basis of his apostolic authority but according to the accepted practices within the system of slavery and the right of an owner over a slave. He requested that Onesimus be accepted "as a beloved brother" and that he be released voluntarily by his master to return and serve Paul and help in Christian work. Paul appealed to the owner that Onesimus (whose name in Greek means "useful") is no longer useless because of his conversion and claimed that the owner owed Paul a debt (as he probably was also instrumental in his conversion) and that any debt or penalty incurred by the slave would be paid by Paul. Such manumission is part of Paul's concept of being an ambassador to further the mission of Christianity, rather than a judgment on the social framework of slavery, because in the Lord such social order is transcended.

Philemon, however, is not a purely personal letter, because it is addressed to a house church (a small Christian community that usually met in a room of a person's home), and it ends with salutations and a benediction in the plural form of address. The body of the letter, however, uses "you" (singular) and is addressed to the slave's owner, a man whom Paul himself has not met. Philemon, the first name in the address, is called a "beloved fellow worker," which implies that he knew Paul, and it has been convincingly argued that the slave's owner was Archippus (see above The letter of Paul to the Colossians), perhaps Philemon's son, who was called a "fellow soldier," a term usual in business accounts and suitable for a document on the manumission of a slave. The thanksgiving contains the main theme of the whole letter: sharing of faith for the work of promoting knowledge of Christ.

In a letter to the Ephesians (c. 112) by Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, the language is very reminiscent of Philemon, and the name of the bishop of Ephesus (c. 107-117) was Onesimus. It has been suggested that the slave was released to help Paul, that in his later years he might have become bishop of Ephesus, and that his "ministry" or "service" was the collection of the Pauline corpus. This is based not simply on the identity of name, but on similarities to Philemon found in Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians, as well as two possible plays on words in chapter 2, verse 2 (cf. Philemon, verse 20), and chapter 4, verse 2 (cf. Philemon 11), relating to the bishop and unity of the church. Such a prominent position and role for one of Paul's followers might shed further light on why Philemon, apparently a very personal plea, became a part of the canon and Pauline corpus. Even if this suggestion cannot be proved, Philemon still shows Paul in his apostolic ministry, furthering the message of Christ and seeing beyond the limitations of the social order of his day, in which both slaves and freemen are servants of God.

The writing called the Letter to the Hebrews, which was known and accepted in the Eastern church by the 2nd century, was included also by the Western church as the 14th Pauline epistle when the canon of East and West was assimilated and fixed in 367. Hebrews has no salutation giving the name of either the writer or the addressees, although it does have a doxology and greeting at the end, which suggest that at some point the writing was sent as a letter to a community known to the author. There are also numerous admonitions in the text that appear to be directed to a definite circle of addressees and some admonitions to the church at large. In chapter 6, verses 4-8, is a severe warning against the sin of apostasy, for which there is no second repentance. Even so, Hebrews is essentially more a theological treatise than a letter. It is homiletical in style and calls itself a paraklesis, which has many meanings: consolation, exhortation, sermon, advocacy, and even intercession.

The thoughts, metaphors, and ideas of Hebrews are distinct from the rest of the New Testament, with closest affinities to Stephen's speech in Acts, chapter 7. It attempts to prove the superiority and ultimacy of the revelation in Christ and the perfection of his offering of himself once and for all supersedes and makes obsolete any other revelation. Hebrews gives strength to its readers through the example of Christ and the hope and promise of free access to God and to eternal rest, an access in which Christ is High Priest and mediator forever. Such promise, on the basis of Christological developments and new covenant hopes, enables endurance in persecution, but its vocabulary is that of the sacrificial language of the Old Testament. Another theme is a typological analogy with the wilderness wanderings of Israel in which, despite their murmurings of unbelief and the hardening of their hearts in their trials, they persevered. Thus, the church, as the pilgrim people of God, travels toward the future place of Sabbath rest with Christ as their pioneer and perfector of faith.

Hebrews was considered a Pauline letter in the early Eastern church. Clement of Alexandria, a theologian of the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries, held that Paul had written it in Hebrew for the Hebrews and that Luke had translated it into Greek. Origen, Clement's successor as leader in the catechetical school at Alexandria, commented that its thoughts reflected Paul but that it was written at a later time with a totally different style and phraseology, and he stated "who wrote the epistle, God knows." Paul, for example, uses the term mediator only once and in a negative sense, in Galatians, chapter 3, verse 19, but Hebrews uses it several times of Christ as mediator of the new covenant. In the West, Tertullian, a North African theologian of the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries, suggested Barnabas as the author, because Hebrews, called a "word of consolation," might have been written by Barnabas, whose name is translated by Luke as "son of consolation" in Acts, chapter 4, verse 36. After Hebrews' acceptance into the canon in the mid-4th century, it was considered Pauline, but doubts persisted; and because of basically different content and style in contradiction to Paul, various authors have been suggested for Hebrews--e.g., Apollos (a Jewish Christian Alexandrian), or a follower of Stephen and the Hellenists, who had come into conflict with those not sharing his universalistic ideas. Hebrews, however, remains anonymous. The title "To the Hebrews" is secondary and may reflect either an idea as to its addressees or that it was influenced by its extensive Old Testament material.

Hebrews constitutes the first Christian example of a thoroughly allegorical, typological exegesis (critical interpretation) of the Old Testament. There were precursors of such a methodology in Jewish Alexandrian biblical exegesis (e.g., Philo), and Platonic tendencies found in Hebrews can also be found in Jewish-Alexandrian methods of interpretation of the Old Testament. The language of Hebrews is extremely polished, elegant, and cultured Greek, the best in the New Testament. Linguistically and stylistically, it shows only a slight influence of the Koine (common Greek). The Attic style is broken only in passages in which Hebrews quotes the Septuagint. Plays on words and synonyms with similar beginnings for emphasis show the author's literary craftsmanship.

The church is viewed as being in danger of discouragement in the face of persecution and possible apostasy. If faithless, church members risk total loss, for no second repentance is possible. Through his special Christology, the author seeks to help the readers by showing that Christ is the saviour superior to any other and that as Saviour, Son of God, High Priest, pioneer, guide, and forerunner, he who has already suffered and been glorified will lead the wandering people of God to their eternal Sabbath rest, an eschatological future state of peace and renewal.

This high type of Christology is combined with much stress on Jesus' humanity. He partook of man's nature and overcame death to destroy the power of the devil in order to deliver man. Thus, having been made like his brethren he has become a faithful High Priest to make expiation for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered and was tested, he can help those who are tested and tempted. Through suffering, tears, and obedience Jesus was made perfect and thus the source of help and salvation, being designated by God a High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High in Abraham's time.

Christ and his once for all (ephapax) sacrifice has superseded and made all Old Testament sacrifices and cultic practices obsolete. Christ is superior to the prophets because he is a son, superior to the angels because they worship him, and (in the light of his cosmic role as apostle and High Priest) superior to Moses, who brought God's Law to Israel, because Moses was a servant in God's house and Christ a son. Christ is also superior to Moses' successor Joshua, because Joshua did not bring the wandering people into a perfect rest; superior to the Old Testament priesthood of Aaron, because Christ, the true High Priest, has sacrificed himself once for all and is without sin; and superior to the patriarch Abraham, because Abraham paid tithes to the priest of Salem, Melchizedek, who as the prototype of Christ had no human antecedents. Christ, High Priest forever by obedient suffering and perfection in that he lives up to the demand, has become the source of salvation. He is High Priest in the heavenly tabernacle and mediator for the new covenant. On the basis of this Christology and ecclesiology, the rest of Hebrews is composed of injunctions to faithful life in all situations, spiritual or temporal. In chapter 11, verse 1, Hebrews gives a programmatic statement that should be translated: "Faith is the Reality [rather than "assurance," as in the usual translation] of what is hoped for and the Proof concerning what is invisible." In Hebrews, Jesus is that Reality and that Proof, and everything else is unreal or at best an earthly copy or a shadow. The heroes and martyrs of old were looking toward his coming (chapter 11) and those now under persecution look toward him and find strength (chapter 12) as they leave the ultimately unreal structures of this world, seeking the "coming city" and going out to him who was executed outside the walls of the city made with hands. Thus, the message of Hebrews is: Reality versus sham and shadow, Christ's sacrifice (priest and victim in one) versus the cult of temples, and the real heavenly rest and heavenly city versus the sabbath and Jerusalem.

As the history of the New Testament canon shows, the seven so-called Catholic Letters (i.e., James, I and II Peter, I, II, and III John, and Jude) were among the last of the literature to be settled on before the agreement of East and West in 367. During the 2nd and 3rd centuries, only I John and I Peter were universally recognized and, even after acceptance of all seven, their varying positions in Greek manuscripts and early versions revealed some conflict concerning their inclusion. The designation Catholic Letters was already known and used by the church historian Eusebius in the 4th century for a group of seven letters, among which he especially mentions James and Jude. The word catholic meant general--i.e., addressed to the whole, universal church as distinguished, for example, from Pauline letters addressed to particular communities or individuals. The earliest known occurrence of the adjective "catholic" referring to a letter is in the account of an anti-Montanist, Apollonius (c. 197) in his rebuke of a Montanist writer who "dared, in imitation of the Apostle [probably John] to compose a catholic epistle" for general instruction. In the time of Origen (c. 230), the term catholic was also applied to the Letter of Barnabas as well as to I John, I Peter, and Jude.

In the West, however, "catholic" took on the meaning in Christian usage as implying a value judgment as to orthodoxy or general acceptance. Thus, the West used it for all the New Testament letters that were in the canon along with the four gospels and Acts. All letters considered authoritative and of equal standing with those of Paul were therefore termed canonical in the West. Not until the Middle Ages did both East and West designate the seven as "catholic epistles" in the sense of being addressed to the whole Christian Church, in order to distinguish them from letters with more particular addresses. Had not the main tradition placed Hebrews in the Pauline corpus, it would perhaps rather have been counted among the Catholic Letters. Hebrews, however, looked "Pauline" rather than "Catholic" in that it presented an extensive theological argument to which the parenesis (advice or counsel) was applied at the end.

These seven letters are grouped together despite their disparate authorship and dates because of a number of characteristics common to all of them. Though the three Johannine letters, and especially I John, are distinctly Johannine in character, the four other Catholic Letters are of special interest precisely because they lack strong personal or peculiar traits both in their theological and in their ethical statements. This characteristic makes them a good source for understanding the piety and life-style of the majority of early Christians. These letters differ from the Pauline letters in that they seem to have been written for general circulation throughout the church, rather than for specific congregations. Though Paul wrote as a missionary responsible for his recent Gentile converts, these letters address established congregations in more general terms. It is interesting to note, for example, that in I Pet. 2:12 the word Gentiles refers to "non-Christians" without any awareness of its older and Pauline meaning of "non-Jews."

The purpose of the Catholic Letters is to meet ordinary problems encountered by the whole church: refuting false doctrines, strengthening the ethical implications of the Gospel message, sharing in the common catechetical and moral materials, and giving encouragement in the face of the delay of the Parousia and strength in the face of possible martyrdom under Roman persecution. They guide the ordinary Christian in his day-to-day life in the church.

The Catholic Letters preserve a considerable common legacy of ethical themes and quotations. Such themes and quotations (from the Old Testament) were handed down traditionally, though the writers interpreted them independently for their situations. For example, Proverbs, chapter 3, verse 34, showing God's scorn to scorners and favour to the humble, is used in James, chapter 4, verse 6, as a warning against involvement in the world and an exhortation to submission and humility, but in I Peter, chapter 5, verse 5, it exhorts Christians to humility and submission in relation to one another in the church and brotherhood. Because the Catholic Letters represent a common pool of Christian teaching, there are overlapping points, but these come from shared tradition rather than literary dependency. The virtues extolled in the early church are not particularly Christian but often coincide with those cultivated in Hellenistic culture, sometimes with a Jewish Hellenistic emphasis. An act of mercy and virtue valued in both Jewish and Hellenistic tradition is epitomized in hospitality (e.g., I Peter 4:9). Similarly, Hellenistic lists of virtues and vices occur as needed from the general body of early Gentile Hellenistic tradition applied to the Christian communities. In these epistles, theological and credal statements are woven in and used for immediate ethical application. Thus, they differ from the Pauline style of extensive theological sections coupled with ethical applications that follow at the end of the epistle.

In the Catholic Letters, to be a Christian was to be in opposition to the world, a member of a minority church and thus at any time liable to be called as witness to the faith and perhaps to suffer and die for it. Eschatological trials are coming (e.g., I Pet. 1:6f., 4:12-19; II Pet. 3:2-10; I John 2:18 ff., 4:1-4; Jude 17 ff.), and the Christian views false prophecy and heresy as well as hostile encounter with the world as part of the trials. The theme of joy in persecution, suffering, and the final trial or ultimate "testing" is based on Christ's victory over these events and the sense of being a member of his community. Thus, the Christian should show submission, nonretaliation, humility and patience, good conduct, and obedience to authorities, because his witness must be blameless when his faith is tested in the world, in the courtroom, and in martyrdom.

The Letter of James, though often criticized as having nothing specifically Christian in its content apart from its use of the phrase the "Lord Jesus Christ" and its salutation to a general audience depicted as the twelve tribes in the dispersion (the Diaspora), is actually a letter most representative of early Christian piety. It depicts the teachings of the early church not in a missionary vein but to a church living dispersed in the world knowing the essentials of the faith but needing instruction in everyday ethical and communal matters with traditional critiques on wealth and status. In matters of church discipline and the practice of healing, there is stress on prayer, anointing, and confession of sin in order that the healing of the sick may be effected. Steadfastness, even joy, in persecution is based on pure religion with strong ethical demands, as noted in chapter 1, verses 2-4 and 19-27.

A debate as to how James' statement that "faith apart from works is dead" compares with Paul's "justification by faith without works" in Romans has a long history. The debate, central to the history of Christianity, has usually overlooked the simple fact that Paul speaks about "works of the Law" and does so with reference to those "works" that divide Jews and Gentiles--e.g., circumcision and food laws. James, on the other hand, refers to works of mercy. Thus, the two statements are not only reconcilable but address themselves to quite distinct and different issues. Even Paul referred to mutual support of the brethren by the glorious phrase "the law of Christ" (Gal. 6:2) and this is the same as James' "royal law" (James 2:8). The Pauline language presumably was not in James' mind. In James, chapter 2, the example of Abraham's faith is used to show justification by works. It is to be noted that Paul also used Abraham as the paradigm of righteousness to demonstrate justification by faith in Romans, chapter 4, again showing the difference in purpose and setting of the two epistles.

In view of the post-apostolic situation depicted, James, the son of Zebedee, who died as a martyr before AD 44, could not have been the author. From the content, neither could James, a brother of the Lord and the leader of the Jerusalem church; his martyrdom is reported as c. AD 62. Thus, James is pseudepigraphical, with the purpose of gaining apostolic authority for its needed message. The date of writing is probably at the turn of the 1st century, and its addressees are the whole church.

In chapter 5 the community is enjoined to patience, steadfastness, and good behaviour. The Old Testament prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, are used as examples of suffering and endurance as they awaited the Judge. Thus, reference to the Parousia of Christ may have been conflated by the Christian writer to the coming of the Lord in judgment, an interpretation with "the day of the Lord" in mind. "Behold, the Judge is standing at the doors" is accompanied by the admonition, "You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand," (chapter 5, verses 8 and 9).

The purpose of the First Letter of Peter is exhortation directed to "the exiles of the Dispersion" in Asia Minor in order that they "stand fast" in God's grace in the face of persecution. On the one hand, such persecution is viewed as part of the trials of the end-time that the community must undergo before the coming of the new age. On the other, persecution is viewed as a simple fact of Christian community life in the world. In imitation of Christ, tribulations and testing can be a basis for joy.

In the address, the author calls himself "Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ," and in chapter 5, verse 1, a "fellow-elder and witness of the suffering of Christ." Any Christian, not just a fellow eyewitness, however, might be such a witness and hope to partake in the future "glory that is to be revealed." The writer or the redactor of I Peter used Pauline and gospel theology and terminology both in quotations and in allusions and, if literary dependency cannot always be demonstrated, there is dependence on the catechetical traditions known in the post-apostolic church.

The milieu of the letter seems to reflect the time and temper of the correspondence of the emperor Trajan with Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (c. 117). Pliny requested clarification as to the punishment of Christians "for the name itself" or for crimes supposedly associated with being a Christian. I Peter, chapter 4, verse 15, appears to reflect this situation: that a Christian be blameless of all crime and, if punished, be persecuted only "as a Christian." Pliny continued that denounced Christians are executed if they persevere in their belief but that whatever their creed "contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment"; Trajan's response was that those denounced as Christians be punished. The warning in I Peter, chapter 3, on a Christian's manner of defense and submissiveness to authorities points to a date in the first quarter of the 2nd century. Such a date does not preclude reflection on earlier persecutions, such as those under Domitian.

The work is thus pseudonymous, attributed to Peter through Silvanus, whose name constitutes a part of the pseudepigraphic device that strengthens the authority of the epistle. I Peter is an excellent example of the testament form modelled on the traditions of an Apostle and the message of his martyrdom. Peter, whose death and traditions concerning him were known to the readers of the time of I Peter, gives weight and authority to the letter that is formed in many ways as a farewell and admonition to those who follow, in order that they may stand firm.

Warnings are given from the Apostle's own example along with counter-virtues for vices. Such testament forms have a mixture of wisdom material, advice, exhortation, hymns for ethical admonition, and apocalyptic elements with accounts of trials to come. This mixture is found in strange arrangements, but is perhaps solved if read as a testament form. Peter had denied that Christ must suffer and in I Peter suffering is the way of discipleship and even of joy. In Luke, chapter 22, Peter's denial was prophesied, and Jesus interceded for him in order that he might repent and strengthen his brethren (cf. I Peter, chapter 5, verses 10 and 12). In Mark and Matthew the defection of the Apostles was foretold in terms of the scattering of the sheep when the shepherd was stricken, and Peter does deny his Lord. In John, chapter 21, the risen Lord paralleled Peter's threefold denial with a threefold question as to Peter's love. At each affirmation the Lord responds with the forgiving command to feed the sheep--to care for the community. This is a central motif in I Peter. Immediately following the charge to Peter in John is the prediction of his own martyr death, and in I Peter the church is urgently admonished to accept trials as nothing strange, because they are a sharing in the sufferings of Christ. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter in particular was rebuked because he did not watch, and in I Peter the church is admonished to watch and be vigilant against the Devil. Prayer against temptation is also stressed.

In the Matthean account, Peter is delegated to build the church, and in I Peter it is the chief Apostle (Peter) who points to Christ as Shepherd and Bishop, who through his suffering collected the wandering sheep to himself. In like manner--on the model of Christ or perhaps Peter--the elders are exhorted to feed their flocks humbly and faithfully. Thus, there is a typical testament form: Peter has failed and repented; and the church is warned, admonished, and strengthened as by the Apostle, who, on the analogy of Jesus' Passion and death in innocence, exhorts the church to share in the vocation of innocent suffering and to do good in innocence. Finally, I Peter, viewed as a "testament," is in itself an apocalyptic "witness," and with its admixture of advice, example, and general address to the faithful living in the Diaspora as sojourners, with the authority of its martyred "author," it constitutes authority and strength for the church that faces the persecution of the world. References in chapter 5 to Rome (called Babylon) and to Mark are then also part of the pseudepigraphic testament form, as they presuppose the common tradition of Peter's martyrdom in Rome and his connection with Mark.

There are three Christological hymnic fragments in I Peter: 1:18-21, ransom by Christ; 2:21-25, with reference to the Book of Isaiah, chapter 53, used as ethical admonition; and 3:18-20, Christ's descent into hell. The last is in the context of Christ's going and preaching to the spirits in prison (a reference to the apocryphal First Book of Enoch with Satan chained under the earth but his descendants at work in the world until the end-time) in order to show that Christ, through his descent, has overcome the powers that underlie and engender persecution of the Christians. This is reaffirmed in chapter 5 by encouraging Christians in their fight against the Devil, for, though suffering will be a part of this resistance, there will be victory at the end. Imitation of Christ is a basis for joy even in suffering. The end is viewed as near, and final salvation can thus be anticipated.

I John, though lacking any formal epistolary salutation or ending, directs itself to a circle of readers with whom the writer is acquainted. Taking the form of an anonymous "homily" for admonition against heresy and instruction in faith and love, it was directed to a wide audience or was to be circulated beyond a particular congregation. II and III John are brief letters from an author described only as "the elder," implying a position of some authority. II John, chapter 1, is addressed to an "elect lady and her children," probably a designation of a church with difficulties similar to those found in I John. III John is the most personal, being addressed by the elder "to the beloved Gaius," who has been praised particularly for his hospitality (probably to missionaries) and his brotherly love. The presbyter (elder), probably the author of II and III John, apparently was a man who was authoritative enough to influence and direct mission activities. All three letters, despite their differences of address, appear to have been accepted among the Catholic Letters as having been circulated for the church at large.

The early church attributed I, II, and III John to John, the Apostle, the son of Zebedee. Although II and III John may possibly have been written by the same presbyter, this "elder" is not necessarily the author of I John, although it is commonly accepted that the three Johannine letters came from a "Johannine" inner circle. The earliest reference to the Johannine letters is in the Letter to the Philippians by Polycarp of Smyrna (7:1). Papias, who was a 2nd-century bishop of Hierapolis, mentions I John and quotes it several times, but he distinguishes between John, the Apostle, and John, the presbyter. Polycarp, Papias, and internal evidence point to the region of Asia Minor as the probable sources of the Johannine literature. These references and the organization of the churches indicated in the letters, as well as the lack of signs of persecution, suggest a date for the letters at around the beginning of the 2nd century.

I John assumes a knowledge of the Johannine Gospel (the author of I John may be the ecclesiastical redactor of the Gospel According to John) and adds ethical admonition and instruction regarding the well-being of the church as it confronts heresy and stresses the lack of moral concern that springs from it. There is strong defense against the threat of a type of Gnosticism called Docetism that denied the reality of Jesus' earthly life and thus the meaning of the cross. Possessing special spiritual knowledge, the Docetic Gnostics had no need of the earthly Jesus and the humanity of Christ. This Docetic heresy led them to reject the Lord's Supper, but not Baptism. Their special possession of the Spirit had led them erroneously to consider themselves sinless and to deny the fellowship that has the cleansing of sins. Because the heresy may have led to libertinism, the ethics of Christians must accord with their faith and find expression in the love of the brethren in the church. "He who hears my word and . . . believes has passed from death to life" (John 5:24) is continued in I John 3:14, "We have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren." The Gnostics separated themselves from the church in schism and have thereby committed the "sin unto death." They are false prophets and deceivers described by the term Antichrist. The true Christians, the "children of God," hold the true faith evidenced by their loyalty to the church and their charity toward its members.

A constant theme in I John is that of God's love, which makes Christians the children of God. As children of God they keep the new commandment of love, which is of light--that of brotherly love--and resist the world, evil, and false teaching. Because Christ gave his life for man, the Christian's response is also to be self-giving. Through obedience and faith, God forgives even when man's heart condemns him, "for God is greater than his heart." It is of interest to note that in I John 2:1-2, Jesus is referred to as paraclete (advocate), but in the Gospel According to John, such references are to the Spirit. John 14:16, however, refers to "another Counselor." This discrepancy can be resolved by interpreting Jesus with his disciples as their advocate with another to come (the Spirit), and, in I John 2:1-2, the risen Lord becomes the advocate for the expiation of all sin. Righteousness and faith are emphasized in chapters 4-5, and again these characteristics are those of the children of God, who will finally in the end-time be like him who gave the promise, the commandment, and the joy of love.

II John warns a specific church (or perhaps churches), designated as "the elect lady and her children," against the influence of the Docetic heresy combatted in I John, whose proponents lured Christians from "following the truth, just as we have been commanded by the Father." In II John, as in the Gospel According to John and I John, the light-darkness images are similar to those of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To "walk in the truth" in II John is to reject heresy and follow the doctrine of Christ.

The Letter of Jude, after a salutation that attributes it to Jude, the brother of James, and addresses itself to the church as a whole, develops the theme of the short letter--a polemic against heretics who have abandoned the transmitted traditional faith and who will thus be judged by the Lord. They deny Christ, and punishment similar to that of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament for such a denial is threatened. Heretical beliefs have led to various sins and libertinism, and the judgment that will come upon them is cited from Enoch 1:9, demonstrating that this short letter reflects the postbiblical Jewish apocalyptic train of thought in the early Christian era.

"Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James" is probably meant pseudepigraphically to relate this Jude to James the brother of the Lord so that this Jude is also a brother of the Lord. This, however, is impossible because the letter reflects a later time. Verse 17 refers to "the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ" concerning mockers and sinners. Thus, the author is recalling a former time that was prophesied regarding the heresies and trials of the end-time. Such a bearer of apostolic tradition is violently attacking heresy in the interest of transmitted traditional faith. Again, it would appear that the letter is pseudepigraphic and may have originated in Syria or Asia Minor.

The author struggles forcefully against heretics who deny God and Christ and attempts to strengthen his readers in their fight against such heresy that leads to wickedness and disorder. Libertinism is a characteristic of such heresy, and the punishment of the heretics will be similar to that which befell the unfaithful in the Old Testament patriarchal times. Only steadfastness in faith, true doctrine, and prayer can lead to mercy, forgiveness, restoration, and final salvation. An attempt to bring the erring to repentance may save them. The letter concludes with a typical doxology.

The Revelation (i.e., Apocalypse) to John is an answer in apocalyptic terms to the needs of the church in time of persecution, as it awaits the end-time expected in the near future. The purpose of the book is to encourage and admonish the church to be steadfast and endure. The form of an apocalypse shows affinities with contemporary Jewish, Oriental, and Hellenistic writings in which problems of the end of the world and of history are linked both with prophecy of an eschatological nature and with "sealed" secret mysteries. Such revelations are traditionally received in trances, characterized by strange symbols, numbers, images, and parables or allegories that represent people and historical situations. Apocalypticism is essentially dualistic, presenting the present eon as evil and the future as good, with an ultimate battle between the divine and the demonic to be won only after one or more cosmic catastrophes. The aim of apocalyptic literature is to depict in the age of present tribulation a knowledge of a future glorious victory and vindication, thus giving hope and assurance.

In Revelation it is God who gives the revelation to Jesus Christ to be shown by Christ through an angel to his servant John, in exile on the island of Patmos, in order that John become his seer and prophet to the church. John is to write down what he has seen, what is, and what is to come. In contradistinction to most Jewish apocalyptic works, Revelation is not pseudonymous and John is to give finally unsealed, clear prophecy related to the present and to the end-time.

As in the rest of the New Testament, the starting point of eschatological hope is the saving act of God in Jesus, a historical centre pointing toward historical developments that will bring about the establishment of God's kingdom and vindication of his people, ransomed by the blood of Christ, the Lamb who was slain. It provides certainty and encouragement with the example of the faithfulness of those who have already witnessed unto death (martyrs) and their reward--special inheritance in the eternal kingdom.

After the introduction, Revelation continues first as a series of seven letters to seven churches in the province of Asia, thence to the whole church with an epistolary introduction and, after the apocalypse proper, an epistolary blessing as the last verse. The letters sent from the heavenly Christ through John (chapters 2 and 3) exhort, comfort, or censure the churches according to their condition under persecution or danger of heresy. From chapters 4-22 there are series of visions in three main cycles, each recapitulating but expanding the former in greater and clearer detail with groups of seven symbols predominating in each (seals, chapters 6-7; trumpets, chapters 8-10; and bowls, chapters 15-16). This material is interspersed with visions of God in his heavenly council, various visions of catastrophe and of Satan, the destroyer, the appearance of two witnesses and other martyr examples to spur the church to endurance, the victory of the archangel Michael over the dragon (Satan) by the blood of the Lamb (Christ), and the representation of the powers of emperor cult and false prophecy as beasts who bring destruction to the unfaithful in God's judgment. A heavenly woman who bears a messianic son is threatened by a dragon. Her child is carried up to heaven by God, and she escapes by hiding in a place prepared for her by God. The beasts who appear persecute the Christians and the "number" signifying the first beast is that of a man, "666" (or, in a variant reading, "616") probably indicating the emperor Nero. God's triumph in history is depicted in his judgment on the harlot Babylon (Rome), and the final consummation portrays the victory of Christ over the Antichrist and his followers. In chapter 20 the thousand-year reign of Christ with those who witnessed unto death is depicted. Satan, again loosed, is vanquished by fire from heaven with the beasts (imperial power and false prophet), and the last judgment leads to a new heaven and a new earth, the new Jerusalem. This writing is, thus, a prophetic-apocalyptic work.

Apocalypticism was introduced into Asia Minor after AD 70 (the fall of Jerusalem), and c. 80-90 a prophetic circle was formed near Ephesus. Its leader was John, a prophet, who might well have been the author of Revelation, which is deeply steeped in apocalyptic traditions. The "Johannine circle" bearing the tradition of John, the Apostle of the Lord, and from which emerged the Gospel and letters bearing his name, might have been a continuation of the prophetic conventicle of Ephesus in which John was prominent. The various writings do not have to be consistent except in their basic faith in Jesus Christ; and, as the situations to which they addressed themselves were different, different styles and content were required. The seer was probably involved in an actual historical situation in the late 80s under Domitian, a time when there was open conflict between the church and the Roman state. There is a tradition supported by Irenaeus, a 2nd-century bishop of Lyons, that in this persecution punishment was death or banishment. John's prominence might have led to banishment to Patmos, an isle off the coast of Asia Minor, from his homeland in or around Ephesus. From Patmos he wrote a circular letter to the churches in Asia.

Though the style of Revelation is certainly eclectic in form and content, containing elements of a heavenly epistle and with more than three-fourths of the rest made up of prophetic-apocalyptic forms from varied sources, it reflects a systematic and careful plan. Even the apocalyptic, however, is "anti-apocalyptic" in that the seer's message is open and the mysteries serve not to conceal but to heighten what is seen and to be expected. Apocalyptic schemata and motifs are, however, used toward this purpose, and allegorical incorporation of sources is more a demonstration of the true, ultimate message than a literary device. Blurred images (e.g., God, Christ, and angels; chiliastic [1,000-year] eras and temporal duplications; as well as interpretations) are part of the apocalyptic style, but a current concrete historical situation is the foundation. Revelation is written in fantastic imagery, blending Jewish apocalypticism, Babylonian mythology, and astrological speculation. It is pictorial, dramatic, and poetic.

Revelation contains long sections characterized by Greek that is grammatically and stylistically crude, strangely Hebraized to give a unique, almost Oriental, colour. This may have been deliberate. Although Revelation is replete with Old Testament allusions, there are no direct quotations, and this may reflect the seer's conviction that the work is a direct revelation from God. In other sections the poetry of Revelation might stem from the seer's experience in the heavenly throne room of God, from hearing the hymns of the angelic host, or from his recollection on Patmos of the liturgical practice of the church. The image of the Bride and wedding feast together with the "Come, Lord Jesus!" have associations with the eucharistic liturgy of the early church.

Mysterious numbers and divisions (such as 7, 3, 12) recur and are part of the theme of assurance, because God has numbers in their order as a sign of his plan of salvation, turning chaos to orderly cosmos. The mysterious name of the first beast, 666, in 13:18, can be calculated by "gematria," assigning their numerical values to letters of the word and summing them up. The most adequate solution is Nero (the numerical value of the Hebrew letters for Caesar Neron equals 666), a demonic Nero redivivus (revived), who returns from the dead as Antichrist. Astronomy and astrology have also been applied to Revelation in terms of the signs of the zodiac or a calendar of feasts and seasons as keys to understanding its structure, because it is God who orders the times and seasons.

Two witnesses described in chapter 11 have been assumed to be Elijah and Moses, Peter and Paul, or simply two examples of martyrs through whom God shows his punishment of the wicked and vindication of the righteous to his glory. There are strong martyrological themes throughout Revelation, and it seems to stand on the borderline of the point at which the word witness (martys) became a technical term for a witness unto death, or martyr. The cosmic battle in heaven is fought by those willing to give their lives, who mix their blood with the blood of the Lamb, whose blood "ransomed men for God." The writer of Revelation based his hope for the church on perseverance, on endurance even to death, and on what the future will bring when the church will live with the glorified Christ, slain as a lamb. The harlot of Babylon will be destroyed and the church will endure; Babylon falls and the new Jerusalem, the city of God that is to come, is depicted in all its glory. These are the hopes to strengthen the persecuted church, assurance that God will soon triumph. With trumpet call and heavenly voices there is the joyful promise that "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever." (K.St.) (E.T.Sa.)

Dogmatic teachings about the figure of Jesus Christ go back to the spontaneous faith experiences of the original church. The faithful of the early church experienced and recognized the incarnate and resurrected Son of God in the person of Jesus. The disciples' testimony served as confirmation for them that Jesus really is the exalted Lord and Son of God, who sits at the right hand of the Father and will return in glory to consummate the Kingdom.

From the beginning of the church different interpretations of the person of Jesus have existed alongside one another. The Gospel According to Mark, for example, understands Jesus as the man upon whom the Holy Spirit descends at the baptism in the Jordan and who is declared the Son of God through the voice of God from the clouds. Two schools of thought developed--one associated with Antioch in Syria and the other with Alexandria in Egypt. Attempts at Christology that derive from the theological school of Antioch have followed one line of interpretation: they proceed from the humanity of Jesus and view his divinity in his consciousness of God, founded in the divine mission that was imposed upon him by God through the infusion of the Holy Spirit.

Another view was adopted by the catechetical school of Alexandrian theology. This view is expressed by the Gospel According to John, which regards the figure of Jesus Christ as the divine Logos become flesh. Here, the divinity of the person of Jesus is understood not as the endowment of the man Jesus with a divine power but rather as the result of the descent of the divine Logos--a preexistent heavenly being--into the world: the Logos taking on a human body of flesh so as to be realized in history. Thus it was that the struggle to understand the figures of Jesus Christ created a rivalry between the theologies of Antioch and Alexandria. Both schools had a wide sphere of influence, not only among the contemporary clergy but also in monasticism and among the laity. Characteristically, Nestorianism (a heresy founded in the 5th century), with its strong emphasis upon the human aspects of Jesus Christ, arose from the Antiochene school, whereas Monophysitism (a heresy founded in the 5th century), with its one-sided stress upon the divine nature of Christ, emerged from the Alexandrian school of theology.

New intermediate solutions for resolving the Christological problem constantly were proposed between the two extreme positions of Antioch and Alexandria. As in the area of the doctrine of the Trinity, the general development of Christology has been characterized by a plurality of views and formulations. Also, the creeds of the major churches have by no means agreed with each other word for word. After Constantine, the great ecumenical synods occupied themselves essentially with the task of creating uniform formulations binding upon the entire imperial church.

Even the Christological formulas, however, do not claim to offer a rational, conceptual clarification; instead, they emphasize clearly three contentions in the mystery of the sonship of God. These are: first, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is completely God, that in reality "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" in him (Colossians 2:9); second, that he is completely human; and third, that these two "natures" do not exist beside one another in an unconnected way but, rather, are joined in him in a personal unity. Once again, the Neoplatonic metaphysics of substance offered the categories so as to settle conceptually these various theological concerns. Thus, the idea of the unity of essence (homoousia) of the divine Logos with God the Father assured the complete divinity of Jesus Christ, and the mystery of the person of Jesus Christ could be grasped in a complex but decisive formula: two natures in one person. The concept of person, taken from Roman law, served to join the fully divine and fully human natures of Christ into an individual unity. Christology is not the product of abstract, logical operations but instead originates in the liturgical and charismatic sphere wherein Christians engage in prayer, meditation, and asceticism. Not being derived primarily from abstract teaching, it rather changes within the liturgy in new forms and in countless hymns of worship--as in the words of the Easter liturgy:

Faith in Jesus Christ is related in the closest way to faith in the Kingdom of God, the coming of which he proclaimed and introduced. Christian eschatological expectations, for their part, were joined with the messianic promises, which underwent a decisive transformation and differentiation in late Judaism, especially in the two centuries just before the appearance of Jesus. Two basic types can be distinguished as influencing the messianic self-understanding of Jesus as well as the faith of his disciples.

The old Jewish view of the fulfillment of the history of salvation was guided by the idea that at the end of the history of the Jewish people the Messiah will come from the house of David and establish the Kingdom of God--an earthly kingdom in which the Anointed of the Lord will gather the tribes of the chosen people and from Jerusalem will establish a world kingdom of peace. Accordingly, the expectation of the Kingdom had an explicitly inner-worldly character. The expectation of an earthly Messiah as the founder of a Jewish kingdom became the strongest impulse for political revolutions, primarily against Hellenistic and Roman dominion. The period preceding the appearance of Jesus was filled with continuous new messianic uprisings in which new messianic personalities appeared and claimed for themselves and their struggles for liberation the miraculous powers of the Kingdom of God. Especially in Galilee, guerrilla groups were formed in which hope for a better future blazed all the more fiercely, because the present was so unpromising. Jesus disappointed the political expectations of these popular circles; he did not let himself be made a political Messiah. Conversely, it was his opponents who used the political misinterpretation of his person to destroy him. Jesus was condemned and executed by the responsible Roman authorities as a Jewish rioter who rebelled against Roman sovereignty. The inscription on the cross, "Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews," cited the motif of political insurrection of a Jewish messianic king against the Roman government as the official reason for his condemnation and execution.

Alongside this political type of messianic expectation there was a second form of eschatological expectation. Its supporters were the pious groups in the country, the Essenes and the Qumran community on the Dead Sea. Their yearning was directed not toward an earthly Messiah but toward a heavenly anointed one, who would bring not an earthly but a heavenly kingdom. Fulfillment lay not in the old world but in the future, coming world, for which the main thing was to prepare oneself through repentance. These pious ones wanted to know nothing of sword and struggle, uprising and rebellion. They believed that the wondrous power of God alone would create the new time. The birth of a new eon would be preceded by intense messianic woes and a frightful judgment upon the godless, the pagan peoples, and Satan with his demonic powers. The Messiah would come not as an earthly king from the house of David but as a heavenly figure, as the Son of God, a heavenly being of the ages, who would descend into the world of the Evil One and there gather his own to lead them back into the realm of light. He would take up dominion of the world and, after overcoming all earthly and supernatural demonic powers, lay the entire cosmos at the feet of God.

A second new feature, anticipation of the Resurrection, was coupled with this transcending of the old expectation. According to the old Jewish eschatological expectation, the beneficiaries of the divine development of the world would be only the members of the last generation of humanity who were fortunate enough to experience the arrival of the Messiah upon Earth; all earlier generations would be consumed with the longing for fulfillment but would die without experiencing it. Ancient Judaism knew no hope of resurrection. In connection with the transcending of the expectation of the Kingdom of God, however, even anticipations of resurrection voiced earlier by Zoroastrianism were achieved: the Kingdom of God was to include within itself in the state of resurrection all the faithful of every generation of humanity. Even the faithful of the earlier generations would find in resurrection the realization of their faith. In the new eon the Messiah-Son of man would rule over the resurrected faithful of all times and all peoples. A characteristic breaking free of the eschatological expectation was thereby presented. It no longer referred exclusively to the Jews alone; with its transcendence a universalistic feature entered into it.

Jesus--in contrast to John the Baptist (a preacher of repentance who pointed to the coming bringer of the Kingdom)--knew himself to be the one who brought fulfillment of the Kingdom itself, because the wondrous powers of the Kingdom of God were already at work in him. He proclaimed the glad news that the long promised Kingdom was already dawning, that the consummation was here. This is what was new: the promised Kingdom, supra-worldly, of the future, the coming new eon, already reached redeemingly into the this-worldly from its beyond-ness, as a charismatic reality that brought people together in a new community.

Jesus did not simply transfer to himself the promise of heavenly Son of man, as it was articulated in the apocryphal First Book of Enoch. Instead, he gave this expectation of the Son of man an entirely new interpretation. Pious Jewish circles, such as the Enoch community and other pietist groups, expected in the coming Son of man a figure of light from on high, a heavenly conquering hero, with all the marks of divine power and glory. Jesus, however, linked expectations of the Son of man with the figure of the suffering servant of God (as in Isaiah, chapter 53). He would return in glory as the consummator of the Kingdom. This self-understanding of Jesus was compatible with Christologies derived from the concept of the divine Logos.

The dogma of the Virgin Mary as the "mother of God" and "bearer of God" is connected in the closest way with the dogma of the incarnation of the divine Logos. The theoretical formation of doctrine did not bring the cult of the mother of God along in its train; instead, the doctrine only reflected the unusually great role that the veneration of the mother of God already had taken on at an early date in the liturgy and in the church piety of Orthodox faithful.

The expansion of the veneration of the Virgin Mary as the bearer of God (Theotokos) and the formation of the corresponding dogma is one of the most astonishing occurrences in the history of the early church. The New Testament offers only scanty points of departure for this development. Mary completely recedes behind the figure of Jesus Christ, who stands in the centre of all four Gospels. From the Gospels themselves it can be recognized that Jesus' development into the preacher of the Kingdom of God took place in sharp opposition to his family, who were so little convinced of his mission that they held him to be insane (Mark 3:21). Accordingly, all the Gospels stress the fact that Jesus separated himself from his family. Even the Gospel According to John still preserved traces of Jesus' tense relationship with his mother. Mary appears twice without being called by name the mother of Jesus; and Jesus himself regularly withholds from her the designation of mother. The saying, "Woman, what have you to do with me?" (John 2:4), is indeed the strongest expression of a conscious distancing.

Nevertheless, with the conception of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, a tendency developed early in the church to grant to the mother of the Son of God a special place within the church. This development was sketched quite hesitantly in the New Testament. Only the prehistories in Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth, which, however, cannot be simply coordinated or reconciled with the statements of the preceding genealogical tables. On these scanty presuppositions the later cult of the mother of God was developed. The view of the virgin birth entered into the creed of all Christianity and became one of the strongest religious impulses in the development of the dogma, liturgy, and ecclesiastical piety of the early church.

Veneration of the mother of God received its impetus when the Christian Church became the imperial church under Constantine and the pagan masses came under Christian influences and became members of the church. The peoples of the Mediterranean area and the Middle East could not make themselves conversant with the absolute power of God the Father and with the strict patriarchalism of the Jewish idea of God, which the original Christian message had taken over. Their piety and religious consciousness had been formed for millennia through the cult of the "great mother" goddess and the "divine virgin," a development that led all the way from the old popular religions of Babylonia and Assyria to the mystery cults of the late Hellenistic period. Despite the unfavourable presuppositions in the tradition of the Gospels, cultic veneration of the divine virgin and mother found within the Christian Church a new possibility of expression in the worship of Mary as the virgin mother of God, in whom was achieved the mysterious union of the divine Logos with human nature. The spontaneous impulse of popular piety, which pushed in this direction, moved far in advance of the practice and doctrine of the church. In Egypt, Mary was, at an early point, already worshiped under the title of Theotokos--an expression that Origen used in the 3rd century. The Council of Ephesus (431) raised this designation to a dogmatic standard. To the latter, the second Council of Constantinople (553) added the title "eternal Virgin." In the prayers and hymns of the Orthodox Church the name of the mother of God is invoked as often as is the name of Christ and the Holy Trinity.

The doctrine of the heavenly Wisdom (Sophia) represents an Eastern Church particularity. In late Judaism, speculations about the heavenly Wisdom--a heavenly figure beside God that presents itself to humanity as mediator in the work of creation as well as mediator of the knowledge of God--abounded. In Roman Catholic doctrine, Mary, the mother of God, was identified with the figure of the divine Wisdom. To borrow a term used in Christology to describe Jesus as being of the same substance (hypostasis) as the Father, Mary was seen as possessing a divine hypostasis.

This process of treating Mary and the heavenly Wisdom alike did not take place in the realm of the Eastern Orthodox Church. For all its veneration of the mother of God, the Eastern Orthodox Church never forgot that the root of this veneration lay in the incarnation of the divine Logos that took place through her. Accordingly, in the tradition of Orthodox theology, a specific doctrine of the heavenly Wisdom, Sophianism, is found alongside the doctrine of the mother of God. This distinction between the mother of God and the heavenly Sophia in 20th-century Russian philosophy of religion (in the works of Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, W.N. Iljin, and Sergey Bulgakov) developed a special Sophianism. Sophianism did, however, evoke the opposition of Orthodox academic theology. The numerous great churches of Hagia Sophia, foremost among them the cathedral by that name in Constantinople (Istanbul), are consecrated to this figure of the heavenly Wisdom.

The course of Jesus' life and the geographic setting of his ministry can only be given in rough outline. The details are surrounded by many uncertainties. The period within which his ministry and death occurred may, however, be narrowed down with considerable accuracy on the basis of a synchronistic dating of the appearance of John the Baptist in the 15th year of Tiberius (Luke 3:1)--i.e., AD 28/29--which is confirmed by nonbiblical sources. But the year and place of Jesus' birth are uncertain. Mark and John say nothing about them. The only sources for them are the widely divergent birth and childhood legends in Matthew 1 and 2, where Jesus' birth and early lot are set in the time of Herod I and the change of regime (4 BC), and the narrative of Luke 2, which links Jesus' birth with the first registration in Judaea under the emperor Augustus (AD 6). There is also historical evidence of a census carried out about 8 BC. With all of this in mind, many sources estimate the year of birth as 7-6 BC. (The use of BC [before Christ] and AD [Anno Domini, or "in the year of the Lord"] was not common until the Middle Ages.)

The tradition of Bethlehem as the place of Jesus' birth has its source in all probability in the Old Testament conception of the Messiah as a descendant of David. Early Christianity took this view from the beginning. "Son of David" is found in many texts (e.g., Mark 10:48) alongside other titles of Jesus. Its original political and national sense was abandoned, even though it is still recognizable in the acclamation of the people (Mark 11:10). The theological motif of Jesus' Davidic descent, however, did not necessarily involve the idea that he was born in Bethlehem, David's hometown. That is the case only in Matthew 2 and Luke 2. The accounts differ in that, in Matthew, Bethlehem is thought of as the parents' original place of residence, which they soon change to Nazareth because of the dangers threatening their child (e.g., the flight to Egypt), whereas in the Lucan story Jesus' parents really live in Nazareth but stay in Bethlehem temporarily because they are obliged to register at the Davidic family's place of origin. Both traditions are to be judged as legendary variations of the theological theme of Jesus' messiahship, even though each in its own way assigns to his birth a place in history. The extent to which these texts are marked by theological motifs, above all by the thought that Jesus as Messiah fulfills the promises of the Old Testament and the hope of Israel and the world, is shown by the numerous quotations woven into the stories. (G.Bor.) (Ed.)

The widely differing genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 also belong in the context of the doctrine of the Davidic descent of the Messiah (Christ). They are the only New Testament evidences for genealogical reflection about Jesus' messiahship. The two texts, however, cannot be harmonized. They show that originally a unified tradition about Jesus' ancestors did not exist and that attempts to portray his messiahship genealogically were first undertaken in Jewish Christian circles with use of the Septuagint (Greek translation) text of the Old Testament. Both texts have to be eliminated as historical sources. They are nevertheless important for the development of Christology (doctrines on the nature of Christ), because they reveal the difficulty of reconciling the genealogical proof of Jesus' Davidic descent with the relatively late idea of his virgin birth.

This last tradition, too, is recorded in only two stories--in Luke 1 and Matthew 1--and was originally quite unconnected with the frequently found motif of Jesus' divine Sonship. Paul, John, and the rest of the New Testament writers are not acquainted with the idea. Also, it has left no traces in the rest of the Synoptic tradition, not even in the story of Jesus' birth (Luke 2:1-10), where Joseph and Mary appear as his natural parents. In Matthew 1 Jesus' miraculous birth is presupposed, and in Luke 1 it is explained more closely. This tradition is not to be traced back directly to the idea, widely held in classical antiquity, of heroes and great men who derived from the union of a deity with a human woman. In other words, Jesus is not characterized as a demigod here. What underlies this tradition is, rather, the concept of the creative power of God and his Spirit, which is known from Hellenistic Judaism. This theological, not biological, motif has been applied to Jesus and, with the greatest probability, only secondarily combined with the Greek version of the messianic promise of Isa. 7:14 (in the Septuagint the Hebrew word 'alma-i.e., "young woman"--is translated as "virgin"), and in this way the Christian story came about. According to a very old, reliable tradition, the village of Nazareth--which lay in the Galilean hill country, had a Jewish population, and was untouched by the influence of the Hellenistic cities--was the hometown, and then certainly also the birthplace, of the "Nazarene" (Mark 1:24; 10:47; 14:67; 16:6).

Four of Jesus' brothers and several sisters are mentioned in Mark 6 (though their identification as full-blooded siblings, half brothers and half sisters, or cousins has been long debated). All his relatives' names testify to the purely Jewish character of the family: his mother's name was Mary (Miriam), his father's Joseph, and his "brothers' " James (Jacob), Joseph, Judas, and Simon (names of Old Testament patriarchs). The same is true of the name Jesus. In the Septuagint it is the customary Greek form for the common Hebrew name Joshua--i.e., "Yahweh helps." It is also mentioned in Mark 6 that Jesus or his father (there are variant textual versions) was a carpenter. There are several not unimportant pieces of information preserved about the later history of the family. Of his father, who probably died early, little is mentioned. His mother, brothers, and sisters did not join his movement at first but, rather, disapproved of his behaviour (Mark 3:31-35). Mary is, however, mentioned as a member of the Christian Church after his death (Acts 1:14). The same is true of his brother James, whom Paul names among the witnesses of the Resurrection (I Cor. 15:7) and who was the leader of the Jerusalem Church after Peter (Galatians, Acts). The author of the Letter of James has taken a brother's name for himself, as did the author of the Letter of Jude in respect to another brother. According to a later nonbiblical account (in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, a 4th-century historian of the church), grandchildren of Jude (who otherwise remains unknown), who were living in Galilee, were summoned by the emperor Domitian as "descendants of David," but then released as representing no political danger.

Jesus most likely grew up in the piety that was cultivated in the home and in the synagogue (including Bible study, obedience to the Law, prayer, and expectation of the final coming of the Messiah) and also took part in pilgrimages to Jerusalem. From these scattered reports it is possible to gain some information about Jesus' background and theological education. The latter also comes to light in his teaching and in the frequently attested honorific form of address "rabbi" (teacher), which, in the language of the time, was not yet confined to members of the trained and ordained profession of the scribes. Nothing is precisely known, however, about Jesus' youth and inner development. What is known is contained in the sole narrative in Luke 2:40-52 (the boy Jesus in the Temple) and the legendary apocryphal gospels, which, after the manner of legend, sought to illumine the obscurity of Jesus' childhood.

The Gospel accounts of the appearance and activity of John the Baptist and of Jesus' Baptism at his hands first establish a historically safe basis for knowledge of Jesus' life and work. Significantly, the oldest Gospel writer calls these events "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ" (Mark 1:1), indicating that his would be a message about Christ, not a description of the contemporary background for Jesus' life. The Baptist is, therefore, represented exclusively from the Christian point of view. His place in the Christian history of salvation is that of a forerunner or pioneer; or he is a witness to Jesus, as in the Gospel According to John. But the tradition has nevertheless preserved unchallengeable information about John, especially in Q. Josephus characterizes him as a mere moral teacher and his Baptism as merely ritual washing. In reality, however, he made his appearance in the desert as a prophet of the imminent Last Judgment, calling all without exception to repentance in the eleventh hour, and baptized those who were ready to repent, in order to prepare them for the baptism of fire of the mightier one coming from heaven and to preserve them from his annihilating wrath (Matt. 3:7ff. and Luke 3:7ff.). His dress and diet as an ascetic nomad and, above all, the location of his ministry (the Judaean desert and the Jordan steppes), far away from the institutions and places of traditional religion and secularity, illustrate the earnestness of his eschatological preaching and his attack on all conventional piety; but they also correspond to the old prophetic promise that God would encounter his people in the Last Days, as he did once before, in the desert. Historically, all these features may not be understood immediately in Christian perspective; i.e., as pointing to Jesus as the Messiah. The tradition of the Gospels visibly and increasingly interpreted the history of the Baptist in retrospect, and not least for the reason that there still existed for a considerable time alongside the disciples of Jesus a rival body of disciples of the Baptist.

That Jesus was baptized by John, as all the Gospels record, indicates that in all probability Jesus initially belonged to John's movement. The account of Jesus' Baptism is styled in the Gospels as an "epiphany (or manifestation) story" and deals with Jesus' installation at this time as Messiah (Mark 1:9-11). The announcement of the Kingdom of God by John and his call to repentance retained decisive significance for Jesus. His high estimate of the Baptist emerges unambiguously from the fact that he placed John above the prophets and called him the greatest among men (Matt. 11:7-11). He saw the signs of the approaching Kingdom of God in the work of the Baptist as in his own work, and he recognized the authority given John as being from heaven (Mark 11:27-33). These words carry all the more weight historically, because the tendency of the context here is to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah and to place the Baptist, as the lesser, in Jesus' service. It is significant that John himself is nowhere attacked in the Synoptic texts, nor is he designated as a follower of Jesus. Wherever polemic can be recognized in the Gospels (especially in John), it is always directed against the false belief, doubtlessly held by the (later) Baptist disciples, that John was the promised Messiah. The extent to which the close connection between Jesus and John occupied the theological reflection, apologetics, and imagination of the Christian Church is shown by several passages and, above all, by the cycle of legends in the introduction to Luke (chapter 1). Regardless of the close relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, especially in their prophetic announcement of the approaching Kingdom of God and their call to repentance (cf. Matt. 3:2; 4:17), there are also radical differences.

At the latest, after the Baptist's imprisonment (as the Synoptics state), possibly even earlier (according to John), Jesus began as a grown man (Luke 3:23) an independent public ministry, but in the villages of his Galilean homeland and--sporadically--in the neighbouring countryside, rather than in the wilderness, as did John. The real area of his ministry was the district on the northwest bank of the Lake of Gennesaret (or Sea of Galilee; the towns of Beth-saida, Chorazin, and Capernaum). The change of scene is significant in itself. Jesus did not call the people into the desert. He sought men in their settlements and took part in their ordinary life, and not as an ascetic, like John the Baptist (Matt. 11:18). He worked among them as a wandering preacher (Matt. 8:20) and charismatic miracle worker, without, however, baptizing like John. But the image he presents is nonetheless highly peculiar. He taught not only in the synagogues but likewise in the open air, on the shore of the lake, and on the road. There also were strange people in the group surrounding him: women, children, and many who were viewed as godless or unclean. Further, the manner of his teaching is surprising. He did not derive it from the Holy Scriptures, although he was familiar with them, esteemed them, and appealed to them here and there. Instead, he constantly presented the reality of God and the validity of his will in an immediate way and made them comprehensible to his hearers without using the established structure of sacred texts and traditions and without presupposing a conventional, religious point of view. His metaphors, parables, and proverb-like utterances were not used to explain traditional teachings of biblical theology but, instead, appealed directly to the everyday experience and the understanding of his hearers, and they are therefore characterized by a unique self-evidence and a disarming simplicity.

This corresponds to the manner of his behaviour in his meetings with other people. The Gospels portray this in a large number of separate scenes. These persons vary considerably: pious and impious, rich and poor, respected and outcast, healthy and ill. In every encounter, Jesus' amazing sovereignty with which--free of all prejudices--he mastered the situation is made visible. He saw through his opponents' attempts to corner him in debate, disarmed their objections, saw the needs of the possessed and the sick who crowded around him, and associated with those who were avoided by others. Some of the scenes may only have been added or filled out in later popular tradition, but they clearly demonstrate the power with which Jesus helped people by word and deed, whether he grew passionately angry over the power of disease or over the pride and lovelessness of the "righteous" or whether he commanded the demons or blessed children and laid hands on the sick.

According to the unanimous witness of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus gave rise to a movement in Galilee and found numerous followers, although not without provoking rejection as well. This movement cannot yet be called a "church." (This concept first appears in the later tradition.) To spread his message and movement, he called on his disciples, for the sake of the approaching Kingdom of God, to resolutely surrender all ties of family and work (Mark 8:34ff.; Matt. 10:37ff.; Luke 14:26ff.) and to follow him and to become "fishers of men" (Mark 1:17; Luke 5:10). Many of his words are of extreme sharpness and do not conceal how difficult the disciples' road will be (Luke 14:25-33). But, at the same time, the patent immediacy of Jesus' sovereign power comes to light in these texts. In the scenes mentioned, it is Jesus who makes the decision. He calls, appoints, and selects particular men, without regard to their origin and previous training. There are fishermen (Andrew, Peter, James, and John), a tax collector (Matthew), and Zealots (Simon and, perhaps, Judas Iscariot) among them, perhaps also a few craftsmen and peasants. Whether it was a circle of 12 disciples from the start is questionable and under debate. It is clear, however, that he commissioned and authorized his disciples to preach and to drive out demons (Mark 3:14). Some of these disciples are well noted in the Synoptic tradition (e.g., Peter and Judas Iscariot). In the Gospel According to John, others come into the foreground, including some from among the followers of the Baptist. Of others, only their names are known (e.g., Thaddaeus). A characteristic of these companions of Jesus is that their discipleship is not, as with the rabbis, a transitional stage that ends with their "training." None of them moves up after sufficient study to the status of "master" (Matt. 23:8). Even if accounts of the calling of disciples have, in general, been styled in the later tradition as examples of what it means to be a Christian and individual scenes have been added to the original stock of stories, the recollection of incidents that occurred during Jesus' ministry in Galilee is doubtlessly preserved in the texts.

The loose and often differing order of the individual scenes only entitles scholars to speak of a rather ambiguous Galilean period of Jesus' activity: they cannot say with certainty how long it lasted. Because the Synoptic Gospels mention only one trip of Jesus to Judaea and Jerusalem, with the Passion following it, the impression is created that the period lasted no longer than one year. Editorial and theological considerations have, without question, also played a part in this presentation (e.g., Jesus' activity in Galilee and his sufferings in Jerusalem). Scholars offer several good reasons, however, to support the assumption that the Synoptic outline still deserves to be preferred to the widely differing one in John. In the latter, Jesus is in Jerusalem for three celebrations of the Passover (John 2:13-23; 6:4; 11:55), as well as for one Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles; John 7:2) and one Hanukka (Feast of Dedication; John 10:22). This involves a period of more than two full years. It is doubtful, however, that John is based on an independent tradition, because the indications of time referred to serve the Evangelist as a means of changing the scene of Jesus' ministry between Jerusalem and Galilee. (The centre here is Jerusalem.)

Jesus announced the approaching Kingdom of God and therefore called people to repentance. The first two Gospels have set this at the beginning in a programmatic saying as a summary of his preaching and have thus characterized the central and dominant theme of his mission as a whole (Mark 1:15; Matt. 4:17). Thus, the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of Heaven (a Jewish circumlocution for God preferred by Matthew), does not just denote a final chapter of his "system of doctrine" (a concept that cannot be applied to Jesus, in any case). The underlying Jewish word (malkhuta) means God's kingship, and not primarily his domain. This meaning prevails in the New Testament texts. But Kingdom of God or Heaven is also used in a spatial sense ("Enter . . ."). The burning expectation of the Kingdom of God was widely spread in contemporary Judaism in manifold form, based on the Old Testament faith in the God of the fathers, the Creator and Lord of the world, who had chosen Israel to be his people. But with this faith there had united itself the contradictory experience that the present condition of the world was ungodly, that Satanic powers reigned in it, and that God's kingship would only manifest itself in the future. In wide circles, this expectation had the form of a national, political hope in the Davidic Messiah, though it had expanded this hope in apocalyptic speculation to a universal expectation. In each case it was directed toward the Last Days. Likewise, in Jesus' message, the expression Kingdom of God has a purely eschatological--i.e., future--sense and means an event suddenly breaking into this world from the outside, through which the time of this present world is ended and overcome.

These traditional motifs of the end of the world, the Last Judgment, and the new world of God are not lacking in the sayings of Jesus preserved in the Gospel tradition. Thus, Jesus has not by any means changed the Kingdom of Heaven into a purely religious experience of the individual human soul or given the Jewish eschatological expectation the sense of an evolutionary process immanent in the world or of a goal attainable by human effort. Some of his parables have given rise to such misunderstanding (e.g., the stories of the seed and harvest, the leaven, and the mustard seed). In such cases, the modern thought of an organic process has been wrongly introduced into the texts. People of classical and biblical times, however, heard in them connotations of the surprising and the miraculous. The Kingdom of God, thus, is not yet here. Hence the prayer, "Thy kingdom come!" (Matt. 6:10; Luke 11:2), and the tenses, for example, in Jesus' Beatitudes and predictions of woe (Luke 6:21-26). The poor, the hungry, and the weeping are not yet in heaven. The petitions of the Lord's Prayer presuppose the deeply distressing circumstance that God's name and will are abused, that his Kingdom is not yet come, and that men are threatened by the temptation to fall away.

In regard to Jesus' preaching, one cannot, therefore, speak of a realized eschatology--i.e., the Last Times are now here (according to the view of C.H. Dodd, a British biblical scholar)--but of an eschatology "in process of realizing itself" (according to the view of Joachim Jeremias, a German biblical scholar); for God's Kingdom is very close. It is on the threshold, already casts its light into the present world, and is seen in Jesus' own ministry through word and deed. In this, his message differs from the eschatology of his time and breaks through all of its conceptions. He neither shared nor encouraged the hope in a national messiah from the family of David, let alone proclaimed himself as such a messiah, nor did he support the efforts of the Zealots to accelerate the coming of the Kingdom of God. He also did not tolerate turning the Kingdom of God into the preserve of the pious adherents of the Law (Pharisees; Qumran sect), and he did not participate in the fantastic attempts of the apocalyptic visionaries of his time to calculate and thus depict in detail the end of the present world and the dawn of the new "aeon," or age (Luke 12:56). Nor did he undertake a direct continuation of the Baptist's preaching.

All the ideas and images in Jesus' preaching converge with united force in the one thought, namely, that God himself as Lord is at hand and already making his appearance, in order to establish his rule. Jesus did not want to introduce a new idea of God and develop a new theory about the end of the world. It would therefore be incorrect to understand his preaching in the Jewish apocalyptic sense of immediate expectancy, coming, as it were, to a boiling point. The proximity of the Kingdom of God actually means that God himself is at hand in a liberating attack upon the world and in a saving approach to those in bondage in the world; he is coming and yet is already present in the midst of the still-existing world. In Jesus' message, God is no longer the prisoner of his own majesty in a sacral sphere into which pious tradition had exiled him. He breaks forth in sovereign power as Father, Helper, and Liberator and is already now at work, as is indicated by Jesus' proclaiming of his nearness and by Jesus' actions in entering the field of battle himself, to erect the signs of God's victory over Satan: "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Luke 11:20). For this reason, Jesus called out: the shift in the aeons is here; now is the hour of which the prophets' promises told (Matt. 11:5; Isa. 35:5). This "here and now" carries all the weight in Jesus' message: "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it" (Luke 10:23-24). In answer to the Pharisees' question about when the Kingdom of God is coming, Jesus therefore said, "The Kingdom of God does not come in an observable way, nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'There!' For look, the Kingdom of God is within your reach" (Luke 17:20-21; another translation: "in the midst of you").

The dominant feature of Jesus' preaching is the Heavenly Father's turning in mercy and love to the suffering, guilty, outcast, and to those who, according to the prejudices of the "pious," have no right to receive a share in the final salvation. Numerous parables described how God behaves toward them and shows himself as Lord and King (e.g., Luke 15; Matt. 18:23ff.; 20:1ff.). They all speak of God's action in images drawn from daily life, so that everyone can understand. They belong to the uncontestedly oldest stock of the Jesus tradition. But Jesus did not only teach this, he practiced and illustrated it himself by his own behaviour and thereby offended the pious, who claimed the Kingdom of Heaven for themselves.

In this message of the approaching Kingdom of God, Jesus' call to repentance is grounded. He called on all not to miss the hour of salvation (Luke 14:16ff.; 13:6ff.), to sacrifice everything for the Kingdom of God (Matt. 13:44ff.), and to receive it like a child (Mark 10:15), without the presumptuous and desperate conceit that one might win it and realize it by one's own works (Mark 4:26ff.; Matt. 13:24ff.). Jesus' summons to be wise, to be on the watch (Luke 16:1ff.; 12:35ff.; Mark 13:33ff.; Matt. 24:45ff.), and to surrender the fiction of one's own righteousness (Luke 18:10ff.) belongs here, too. In Jesus' preaching, repentance does not mean a prerequisite or precondition or even a penitent contemplation of oneself but, rather, a consequence of the proximity of the Kingdom of God (Matt. 4:17) and an opening of oneself for his future, a movement not backward, but forward. Jesus in this way binds future and present insolubly together. The apocalyptic's question about how much time still has to elapse before the new world of God is here is thus rendered meaningless. He who asks this only proves that he understands neither the future nor the present properly; namely, God's future as the salvation that is already dawning and one's own present in the light of the coming Kingdom of God.

According to the Synoptics, Jesus never made his "messiahship" the subject of his teaching or used it as legitimation for his message. It is significant that the "I am" sayings of John, which bear the stamp of Christology throughout, are not found in the Synoptic tradition. That does not in any way affect the fact that Jesus in a decisive way included his own person as eschatological prophet and charismatic miracle worker in the event of the Kingdom of God: "And blessed is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6).

In Jesus' teaching, the nearness of God is itself viewed as a moving force. It creates, as it were, a field of force and challenges the whole person to obey the will of God unconditionally ("Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning"; Luke 12:35). As little as Jesus tolerated attempts at calculating the time when the Kingdom of God should come, so much the more did he demand that men reckon with its coming. The relation between eschatology and ethics in Jesus' teaching, however, needs to be further clarified. His commandments nowhere have the character of prophetic sayings, and their content is not given an eschatological basis even where Jesus linked them with the promise of heavenly reward and, correspondingly, with the threat of damnation in the Last Judgment (e.g., Matt. 24:24ff.; Luke 19:11ff.). God's will is valid in itself, always and everywhere. For this reason, it is incorrect to characterize Jesus' demands as "interim ethics"; i.e., as exceptional emergency laws in the situation of the world that lies in the blaze of the cosmic catastrophes accompanying the shift of the aeons and the speedy dawn of the Kingdom of God (as did Albert Schweitzer, a great Alsatian theologian, medical missionary, and Nobel laureate). Jesus did not draw arguments for his ethical demands from the perishing order but, rather, from the existing world, the Old Testament commandments, the creation, and experiences known to everyone. Thus, he did not aim at forming a "holy remnant," which would escape the rejection awaiting others in the Last Judgment, on the basis of some kind of select monastic rule.

The certainty of God's nearness is, nevertheless, the open or concealed point of reference for Jesus' exposition of the will of God and explains his attitude to the Old Testament Law. Corresponding to the character of the Old Testament legal tradition, he refers to the will of God in single sayings and in comments in relation to individual commandments, and, it should be noted, he did not develop these into coherent "moral teaching." Rather, he took up quite different kinds of commandments as concrete examples, above all from the Decalogue and related texts, concerning one's behaviour toward one's fellow human beings (on murder and anger, adultery and divorce, oaths, retaliation, love for others; see Matt. 5:21ff.) and also ceremonial commandments (concerning the Sabbath, prayer, fasting, and defilement) and other cultic duties. Jesus always went to the root of these commandments, and he did not content himself with the mere letter of the Law but disclosed within the Law--sometimes even against the letter of the Law (Mark 10:1ff.)--the genuine will of God. Though Jesus respected the Law, it was no longer for him the only source of the knowledge of God's will and no longer the absolute intermediate authority that exclusively mediates people's relation to God. From this basis are to be understood both Jesus' exposition of the Law and also his criticism of all formalistic casuistry, which is for him only "human tradition."

Jesus thus brings about a confrontation between the reality of God, which is no longer disguised by holy letter and tradition, and the similarly undisguised reality of man. People also can no longer delude themselves into believing that their pious works would represent them before God and thus keep on piling them up, as it were, like the Pharisee (Luke 18:11ff.). What God wants from humanity is not something but humanity itself, unconditionally and undividedly. The classic passages for these thoughts are the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:21-48). They sharpen God's demands to the utmost extreme and leave no room for merely legalistic behaviour. Their leitmotiv is: "Not only, but even. . . ." Even anger, the lustful look, the "legal" divorce, retaliation that keeps within the limits prescribed, and love that excludes the enemy are against God's will.

These extreme demands are meant not so much to be paradoxically overdemanding as, rather, liberating. Firstly, they are formulated in a way that everyone can understand. They include numerous references to the natural, unperverted practices of people in their daily lives. Secondly, the demands do not describe an unattainable distant goal, which all human action must of necessity fail to meet. Rather, Jesus pointed again and again to what the heavenly Father has done, does, and will do with his children and to God's possibilities, which are unlimited, whereas a person might despair of his or her own limited possibilities and impotence (Mark 10:27). Jesus' sayings about faith (Mark 9:23ff.), prayer (Luke 11:1ff.; Matt. 6:1ff.), or worry (Matt. 6:25ff.) are examples of this. Wherever Jesus calls on people to decide for themselves for God, he bases the argument on the fact that God has already decided for humanity. The unlimited readiness to forgive that he calls for also has its motivation in the limitless mercy of God, which he demonstrates toward the guilty in unfathomable measure (Matt. 18:23ff.). Jesus draws his hearers into this relation to God and, therefore, does not engage in abstract reflections about whether his demands are capable of fulfillment. In this way, what a person loses is the characteristic of being able to attain meritorious achievements (Matt. 20:1ff.). On the other hand, Jesus certainly did not give up the thought of "reward." The reward, however, is not a material prize, although images of this kind are not lacking, but the confirmation and perfection of the relation to God (Matt. 25:14ff.). The idea that human beings could claim and charge payment from God is for Jesus completely excluded (Luke 17:10).

The nearness of God, the real God, also brings humanity, no longer graded and classified in traditional categories, into urgent and imperious proximity. How much Jesus was concerned with human beings is shown especially by his commandment of love, which he not only taught but also practiced to the point of offensiveness. In it is concentrated the "better righteousness" that he demands of his disciples (Matt. 5:20). Jesus has taken over the Old Testament dual commandment of love of God and one's neighbour (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), which is also in Judaism a summary of the whole Law. But it is characteristic of Jesus' preaching (1) that he consistently subordinated all other laws--e.g., the Sabbath commandment--to this highest critical standard (e.g., Mark 2:27; 3:4), and (2) that he extended and heightened love of one's neighbour to love of one's enemies (Luke 6:27ff.), and (3) that his commandment does not have the abstract ideal of a general philanthropy at its root. Rather, he directed his hearers into the situations--always eventful and concrete--where they encounter their enemy (Matt. 5:38ff.) and their fellows in need (Luke 10:25ff.). Behaviour toward one's fellow is so important for Jesus that it is all that is spoken of in many of his utterances, without any mention of the first commandments of the Decalogue concerning behaviour toward God (e.g., Matt. 5:25ff.; 7:12; 19:16ff.).

The distinction that modern moral philosophy makes between individual and social ethics has, in respect to Jesus' teaching, only limited application. To be sure, Jesus did not draw up a program for a new order for the world and the nations, he did not demand a more just distribution of property, did not fight against the differences existing between masters, slaves, and hired workers, and did not give any directives for a better administration of justice. The world he had before his eyes was the world as it was, within the horizon of Palestinian Jewish rural conditions, and not the world as it ought to be. His sayings, parables, and illustrations show how keenly he assessed everyday life and how clearly he described it in his graphic, vigorous way--not glorifying this world as an eternally valid, divinely willed order, and also not getting morally indignant about it. Rather, he calls on people to behave in this given world in conformity to the original will of God and his dawning Kingdom; e.g., to renounce the reign of mammon (Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:9ff.). Jesus did not, however, require a complete surrender of property from everyone. His followers were not to avail themselves of the legally regulated facilities for asserting one's own rights and were not to conform to the ways of customary behaviour in the world. The assertion that the world cannot be governed with the Sermon on the Mount is thus not to be denied. Jesus' sayings about retaliation and his commandment of love are not juristically practicable as they stand, because they can only serve as a guide for the one who has been wronged by someone else or who is required to divide his possessions with another person. Legislators and judges have to decide exclusively about the rights of others and must restrain evil for the sake of the general social order. But the truism about the impracticability of the Sermon on the Mount conceals the fact that Jesus' teaching contains strong impulses toward social criticism.

Jesus unmasks as hollow conventions many ostensibly valid standards, explaining the Law according to the norm of the commandment of love and applying it to concrete situations. For this reason he also resists egocentricity, not only of individuals but of entire religiously and socially privileged groups, and joins with discriminated-against people (e.g., heathens, Samaritans, tax collectors, and harlots). Thus, Jesus calls on people to live a life that corresponds to the proximity of God's Kingdom, although the validity and urgency of his commandments require no apocalyptic basis. The act of their proclamation, however, stands nonetheless close to Jesus' own mission (Luke 11:32ff.). Whether, and in what way, he expressed the fact of his mission by the use of Christological titles is not thereby decided. Jesus knew that he had been sent to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt. 15:24; 9:36). His ministry, seen as a whole, was confined to the sphere of his own people. Only a few significant words and scenes point forward to the inclusion of non-Jews, in a new, eschatological people of God (Matt. 8:11ff.). Jesus, however, did not organize a mission to the heathen (Matt. 10:5ff.) nor a worldwide "church." The only saying of this kind, spoken to Peter (Matt. 16:17ff.), has been placed in the mouth of the earthly Jesus by the later church and clearly reflects its situation, doctrine, and discipline. But Jesus certainly did call into existence a movement in Galilee and allowed at least the narrower circle of his disciples, if not all of his followers, to share in his wanderings and ministry. Later tradition first identified the latter group alone with the Apostles (authorized emissaries), the circle of whom was, however, not originally restricted to that group (cf. I Cor. 15:5ff.). The number 12 symbolizes the 12 tribes of Israel. If Jesus appointed these disciples himself, he thereby demonstrated his eschatological claim on the whole of Israel. According to the saying in Matt. 19:28 and Luke 22:30, which was probably not formulated until later, he conferred on them the office of ruling and judging the perfected Israel of the new aeon.

Jesus' decision to go to Jerusalem is the turning point in his story. The events it set in motion soon came to have decisive significance for the faith of his followers. It is not coincidental that the Gospels narrate this period of his life in disproportionate breadth. Despite the many points of agreement among the Gospels, there also are considerable discrepancies within the tradition of the Passion. Thus, one cannot expect the tradition of the Passion to provide historically accurate reports, for it has been formed from the viewpoint of the church and its faith in Christ. The most important theological motifs in the narratives include the intention of presenting Jesus' sufferings and death as the fulfillment of God's will, the decision, in conformity with the words of the Old Testament Prophets and Psalms, to proclaim him as Messiah and Son of God, despite his brutal end. Nevertheless, important historical facts may be inferred from the texts.

Jesus probably went to Jerusalem with his disciples for the Passover in order to call the people of Israel gathered there to a final decision in view of the dawning Kingdom of God. He must have been aware of the heavy conflicts with the Jewish rulers that lay ahead of him. The story of the cleansing of the Temple, in particular, shows that Jesus did not avoid these conflicts. The later tradition, stylizing the story, gives as Jesus' sole motive for going to Jerusalem his desire to die there and to rise again in accordance with the will of God (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:32ff.). The best clue for a reconstruction of the outward course of Jesus' Passion is given by his Crucifixion. It proves that he was condemned and executed under Roman law as a political rebel. All reports agree that he died on Friday (Mark 15:42; Matt. 27:62; Luke 23:54; John 19:31). They differ, however, in that, according to the Synoptics, this was the 15th of Nisan (March/April); i.e., the first day of the Passover. But, according to John, it was the previous day; i.e., the one on which the Passover lambs were slaughtered and on which the festival was begun in the evening (in accordance with the Jewish division of days) with a common meal. Thus, according to John, Jesus' last meal with the disciples was not itself a Passover meal but took place earlier. Each of these datings may be theologically motivated, whether it be that the Eucharist is to be represented as the Passover meal (Synoptics) or whether Jesus himself is to be shown as the true Passover lamb, who died at the hour when the lambs were slaughtered (John). Historically, the Johannine dating is to be preferred, and the 14th Nisan (April 7) is to be regarded as the day of Jesus' death. The question of the occasion for Jesus' execution and the role that the Jews played is thereby more difficult and more important.

The way the Gospels present the facts of the case, Jesus was actually condemned to death by the supreme Jewish tribunal (Mark 14:55ff.). Pilate, on the other hand, was convinced of Jesus' innocence and made vain attempts to release him but finally yielded to the Jews' pressure against his better judgment (Mark 15:22ff.). The historical reliability of this account has rightly been questioned. First, the Synoptic reports differ among themselves. According to Mark and Matthew, the Jewish supreme court had already gathered in the home of the High Priest after Jesus' arrest in the night of Holy Thursday to Friday and condemned him to death as a blasphemer at that point (Mark 14:64). Thereafter, they resolved to hand Jesus over to Pilate in a new session in the early morning (Mark 15:1). Luke knows of only one session and has the interrogation take place in the morning (Luke 22:66), but he says nothing about Jesus' condemnation (Luke 22:71). John deviates even more; here, only the high priests Annas and Caiaphas are involved in the interrogation of Jesus (John 18:13ff.). Secondly, with regard to all the Gospel accounts, the question arises, what earwitness can be supposed later to have given the disciples an exact report? Thirdly, the jurisdictional competency of the Jewish Sanhedrin is disputed. In the opinion of some scholars, the Jewish authorities were permitted to pronounce sentence of death and to carry it out by stoning in the case of serious religious offenses (blasphemy). In the opinion of others, though, this required the confirmation of the Roman procurator. Also, trials of this kind were not to be conducted during the period of the festival.

The strongest argument against the Synoptic presentation is, however, that it is styled throughout in a Christian, and not in a Jewish, way; i.e., on the basis of scriptural proof and the Christian confession to the messiahship and divine Sonship of Jesus. The High Priest's question, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" (Mark 14:61), is unthinkable from the viewpoint of Jewish premises, because Son of God was not a Jewish title for the Messiah. Thus, the account reflects the controversies of the later church with the Judaism of its day.

There also is in the Gospels a tendency to exonerate Pilate at the Jews' expense. His behaviour, however, does not match the picture that nonbiblical sources have handed down about him. But everything speaks for Jesus' having been arrested as a troublemaker, informally interrogated, and handed over to Pilate as the leader of a political revolt by the pro-Roman priestly and Sadducean members of the Sanhedrin, who were dominant in Jerusalem society in those days. The cleansing of the Temple and a prophetic, apocalyptic saying of Jesus (John 2:19; cf. Mark 14:58; Acts 6:14) about the destruction of the Temple may thereby have played a role. It can hardly be assumed that each and all of the Pharisees, who were without political influence at that time, were involved in the plot. Nor are they mentioned as a separate group in the Passion narratives alongside the priests, elders, and scribes.

The other scenes in the Passion story do not need to be listed here separately. They relate more to the theological meaning of Jesus' Passion and are, to a large measure, formed in an edifying cultic manner, even though they refer to events that are certainly historical; e.g., Judas' betrayal, Jesus' last meal with his disciples, and Peter's denial of Jesus. The traces of an eyewitness account are perhaps still recognizable at certain points (Mark 14:52; 15:21).

The accounts differ in their presentation of Jesus' death, especially in their rendering of his last words. It is only in Mark and Matthew that Jesus dies crying out the prayer from Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The distinction between the repentant and the defiant thief is only found in Luke. Jesus' last words are given differently in Luke ("Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!") and John ("It is finished"). Each of these accounts, as also the testimony of the Roman centurion ("Truly this man was the Son of God!"; Mark 15:39), gives expression to the significance of Jesus and his story.

Did Jesus' violent death render his mission and story meaningless? In other words, did he enter definitively into the past as a failure and thus in this sense become the "historical" Jesus? For Pilate and the Romans, as for Jesus' Jewish opponents, there was no longer any problem. The decision had been taken. But Jesus' disciples were faced with this pressing question all the more. Their hopes were bitterly disappointed (Luke 24:13ff.). According to the unanimous witness of the New Testament texts, they did not find the answer themselves but were given it soon after Jesus' death through the Easter (Resurrection) appearances of Jesus (I Cor. 15:3ff.; etc.) and the experience of his Presence in the Spirit. The faith of early Christianity, with all of its practical and theological manifestations, grew out of this. This faith was not the preserve of a few enthusiasts or the personal opinion of individual Apostles. Wherever there were early Christian witnesses and communities, they were all united in believing and acknowledging the risen Lord (I Cor. 15:11).

The forms and ideas in which this faith found expression were various. According to the oldest view, Jesus' Resurrection meant his exaltation to divine lordship and was not necessarily connected with the tradition of the finding of the empty tomb, as the Gospels variously relate it. The theory of the resurrected one's having walked on earth for 40 days and only subsequently ascending into heaven is found only in Acts (1:3). Thus, there exists an undeniable tension between the unequivocal nature of the Easter message, on the one hand, and the equivocal nature of the Easter accounts and the historical problems connected with them, on the other. But the phenomenon of the whole Gospel tradition, rightly understood, is an expression of the faith in the living Christ without which neither a single word or deed of Jesus nor his Passion would have been handed down at all. The New Testament tradition does not aim at preserving the memory of Jesus as a figure of the past and telling only who Jesus was, but it wants to proclaim who Jesus is.

It may seem surprising that the question of Jesus' awareness of being the Messiah has been scarcely discussed in this article, let alone been given a precise answer. Usually, decisive significance is assigned to this question. Many scholars believe that access to the historical Jesus is only to be gained through the fact that Jesus had such an awareness in association with particular titles, such as Son of God, Son of man, and Messiah. In just the same way, they believe that the rise of the early Christian faith can only be understood by the same means. In light of the fact that the Gospels portray Jesus as the Christ (Greek term for the Messiah) and that numerous other titles of a similar kind are also found in them, the importance of this question is not to be underestimated. But it must nevertheless be noted that the Gospels are interested in the fact that Jesus was and is the Messiah, but not in his "consciousness" and inner development in a modern sense. The stories of Jesus' Baptism, temptation, and Transfiguration, for example, are not reports of experiences. But the question of whether Jesus applied one or several of those titles to himself still needs to be examined carefully, for each of them implies thoughts and concepts that must be of considerable relevance for his preaching and ministry. On this question, the opinions of scholars diverge widely, but it is uncontested that Jesus related his mission and activity in a unique way to the dawn of the Kingdom of God. It is another--and doubtful--question, however, that he expressed this understanding of himself through any traditional title.

Three observations are important for the discussion of these problems. First, in the incontestably authentic texts in the Synoptics, Jesus never makes his own status a special topic of his teaching or the recognition of his rank a condition of salvation. Second, it is not only presumed but--by means of a comparison of the parallel texts and their modification from one Gospel to the next--often capable of proof and, in other cases, requiring to be assumed that the faith of the later church has had a major influence on the formation of the Christological texts. A third observation is also not without its importance. Wherever in such texts Jesus talks about the Messiah and the Son of David, the Son of man, the Son of God, and the Lord, there is never any indication that he is using these titles in a completely new sense. The meaning they have, however, is no longer congruent with the ideas that Jesus' contemporary hearers must have connected with the titles, to the extent that they were not completely unknown to them. Because the historical Jesus indubitably wanted to be understood, the critical question necessarily arises about texts of this kind reflecting the views of the later church and its environment.

Some of the traditional titles could not possibly have been used by Jesus with reference to himself. In those days his hearers could only have understood "Messiah" or "Son of David" in the political or national sense, which conflicted with Jesus' intentions. Also, the exclusive title "Son of God" must have been incomprehensible to the Jews of Palestine, although not to the later hearers of the Christian missionary preaching in the non-Jewish, Hellenistic world. The same applies to the expression "the (divine) Lord," which for Jews was reserved for God alone. Some scholars believe that Jesus understood himself to be the suffering servant of God, of whom Isaiah 53 speaks. But in the Gospels reference is hardly made to this important chapter. The sole passage (Mark 10:45) does not, at least in the form handed down, reproduce an authentic saying of the Lord but contains an interpretation of Jesus' death that goes back to the Greek-speaking Jewish Christian Church.

Thus, the problem is narrowed down to the question about Jesus' calling himself the "Son of man." This concept, which is frequently found in his statements about himself, is a title of sovereignty. It stems from Jewish apocalypticism and means not a normal human being but, rather, the mythical figure of the Judge of all the world, who will come on the clouds of heaven at the end of the days (Dan. 7:13ff.; etc.). An early group of Jesus' sayings (Mark 13:26; 14:62; Matt. 24:27) speaks of the Son of man in this eschatological, future sense and always in the third person, yet in some texts in such a way that Jesus does not explicitly identify himself with this Son of man (Mark 8:38; Luke 9:26; 12:8ff.). Two other groups of sayings speak of him quite differently. One speaks exclusively of his suffering, dying, and rising again in accordance with the will of God (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33ff.); the other, of his authoritative work and wanderings on earth (Mark 2:10-28; Matt. 8:20; 11:19), both without a view of the Last Judgment. No Jewish hearer of Jesus could have recognized the apocalyptic Son of man in these sayings. Loosed from the ideas traditionally linked with it, the concept has here been given completely new contents in a retrospective view of Jesus' ministry and end. Thus, both of these groups of sayings are only to be understood from the point of view of the later church. Therefore, only some sayings of Jesus of the first group probably come into question as authentic ones. If Jesus spoke of the coming Son of man, those sayings prove he was speaking in the apocalyptic language and concepts of his day in order to express the promise that his disciples' loyalty to him will be recognized and confirmed in the Last Judgment. The relation of his earthly person to the figure of the coming Judge is not thereby made the subject of reflection. The Jesus tradition has gone through a process of modification, and the faith of the later church has made a major contribution to the formation of the tradition, whatever its precise extent may be.

In the post-Easter message of salvation, the eschatological here and now belongs inseparably to Jesus' message of the Kingdom of God and was being realized in him. In the face of unbelief and doubt, the Gospels do not just offer an account of the history of Jesus as it transpired, but they interpret it as God's history with the world, as the decisive, redemptive, and ultimate act and word of God for the world. All titles of sovereignty that faith has assigned to Jesus express the fact that in him the turning point of the ages, the inauguration of salvation, and the nearness and presence of God have arrived. The special character of the Gospel tradition should therefore be understood in this sense. This tradition has not replaced the historical Jesus with a mythical Christ but has made explicit the Christology that was secretly implicit in Jesus' words, works, and way, although without titles of sovereignty and supernatural traits. The question appropriate to the Gospel tradition would, therefore, not be about what has happened to Jesus of Nazareth in the course of the development but, rather, why the first Christians held fast to him. To ask in this way and to accept the answer of the Gospels are matters for faith. It goes beyond the limits of historical research. (G.Bor.)