Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

While recent publications have explored the relationship between New Testament texts and early Roman imperial ideology, Ephesians has been underanalyzed in these conversations. In this study, Justin Winzenburg provides an original contribution to the field by assessing how matters of the disputed authorship, audience, and date of Ephesians have varied consequences for the imperial-critical status of the epistle. Previously underexplored elements of the Roman context of Ephesians, with a focus on maiestas [treason] charges, imperial cults, and Roman imperial eschatology are examined in light of the two major theories of the date of the epistle. The author concludes that, while there are limitations to an imperial-critical reading of the epistle, some of the epistle's speech acts can be understood as subversive of Roman imperial ideology.

Five times throughout the course of Luke's narrative in Acts, an individual character is identified as (a) god. Rarely have scholars read these deification scenes within their narrative and historical settings with sufficient care. With regard to the narrative setting, scholars working on the deification scenes tend to take one or another as normative and read the remaining acclamations in light of a particular interpretation of that one pericope. However, such reading strategies run aground when they arrive at the final acclamation (28:1-10), which breaks the exegetical bow of the interpretive ship. In this study, Daniel B. Glover evaluates the deification scenes in the Book of Acts by locating them within the broader ancient Mediterranean context of deification. He offers a fresh reading of Acts that situates each of the five scenes within a distinct literary pattern recognizable to its earliest readers.

In this study, Mikael Haxbyoffers a comprehensive reading of a little-studied ancient Christian text, making use of recently discovered manuscript evidence. This text was originally found in the Nag Hammadi Codices and has historically been classified as Gnostic or heretical. Using new manuscript evidence, the author shows that the First Apocalypse of James intervenes in ancient Christian debates about martyrdom, ritual practice, scriptural interpretation, and questions of gender in both theology and social order. By bringing the First Apocalypse of James back into dialogue with other Christian texts, whether later classified as heretical or not, this study offers new insights into how Christians responded to the threat of political violence, engaged with holy texts, and produced new social formations in which women might hold authoritative positions.