British New Testament Society

In recent years a prolific amount of books and articles on Paul have sought in their own way to bring his life and theology into new light. This paper is an investigation into an aspect of Paul's life which has remained surprisingly untouched in secondary scholarship - Paul's strategy of manual labour. It is aimed at balancing the work of Ronald Hock who argues that Paul is not drawing on his Jewish inheritance in his ideas about work, but rather his Greco-Roman context. I explore the way Paul used his manual labour in Corinth, examining how and why it caused him difficulty, how his work resonates with various aspects of his context, and the role it played in the Collection. I suggest that Paul was effecting a form of euergetism which I term 'reverse euergetism'. There is considerable debate in secondary literature about what 'euergetism' is. Using an inscription from Rhodes as a model, I propose that the Collection was aimed at building up the people and giving thanks to God. By not being a burden on his community financially, Paul is freeing up monies to be directed towards the Collection, hence a form of euergetic activity.

The phrase 'remember the poor' of Gal. 2:10 is virtually universally read with the spin 'the poor in Jerusalem' attached to it. The proposed paper would indicate the difficulties attending to this consensus view and would point to the merits of what might be called a 'materialist' reading of the phrase.

Respondent: Nicholas Taylor

This article seeks to address two main interpretive issues in the Epistle to the Philippians: 1) the function of verses 9-11 in Philippians 2:6-11 and the surrounding verses; and 2) the integrity of Philippians 2 and 3. Currently, scholarship favours the ethical interpretation (Fowl) of 2:6-11 over and against the kerygmatic interpretation (Käsemann and Martin); and the integrity of Philippians 2 and 3 over the compilation theory. The first section begins with a critique of the ethical interpretation of Philippians 2:6-11, particularly that of Fowl and explores another interpretive venue which relies on the themes of divine sovereignty, soteriology and divine identity by drawing upon Isaiah 45. In this manner, both notions of soteriology and ethics are maintained together in the interpretation of the text of 2:6-11 and the surrounding verses. Based on this interpretation of Philippians 2:6-11, the second section of the article seeks to draw conceptual parallels with Philippians 2:6-11 and 3:2-11. The final argument for coherence is made through the application of Isaiah 45:23 which portrays the notion of soteriology in terms of God's righteousness.

According to the ancient historian Suetonius, ‘Some astrologers forecast that, if forced to leave Rome, he (Nero) would find another throne in the East; one or two even particularized that of Jerusalem’ (The Twelve Caesars 6.40). This passage seems to have been disregarded in the interpretation of Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, even though it might offer an interesting parallel for the expectation that the adversary ‘enthrones himself in God’s temple’ (2.4). Moreover, the other characteristics of this adversary, his lawlessness, his infliction of destruction, his opposition against every so-called god or object of worship, and his claim to be a god (2.3-4), re-occur in the characterizations of Nero in Roman historians. In this paper, it will be argued that 2 Thess. is occasioned by the wide-spread fear for Nero’s return from the East, a return which would probably affect Thessalonica because it was positioned at the Via Egnatia, the main route from the East to Rome. Apocalyptic fear was therefore bound to inflame in Thessalonica, the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia. This fear seems also to be reflected in the Sibylline Oracles which also expect the ‘Nero Redivivus’ to return to the West via Macedonia: ‘Wrath will drip in the plains of Macedonia’ (5.361-396).

These verses seem to have a fairly transparent meaning, but the grammar is opaque. By re-examining the function of hina in the Koine of the first century CE we may recover some of the inferences which were clear to the original readers of this letter, but are not immediately apparent to a reader in the twenty first century. Was Paul making reference to some party in Corinth which was against the proposed collection for the church in Jerusalem? This paper attempts to apply the insights of a modern theory of cognition – Relevance Theory – to a grammatical problem.

Building on and qualifying the previous work of Dunn, Martyn, Walker and Das, I will argue that at least five considerations speak in favour of regarding Gal 2:16a ("because we know that someone is not justified on the basis of works of the Law but through the faith of Jesus Christ") as a quotation the content of which was known to, and perhaps even given its specific formulation by, the new preachers in Galatia. This conclusion has implications for the exegesis of the passage and for the interpretation of such terms as "to be justified," "works of the Law" and "the faith of Christ."