British New Testament Society

I The Evangelist and the Myth-Revisers
The version of events after Jesus' burial said by Matthew to be well known to Jews at the time of writing (28.15), is a sometimes described as a rationalisation. This paper will suggest that in Matthew's hands the rationalising intention of any original Jewish version is subverted by the use of the very arts of myth-revision.

According to Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho 108.2) emissaries from Jerusalem were sent over the whole civilised world spreading a story that Jesus' disciples had simply stolen his body and then claimed that he had risen and ascended to heaven; and that activity is presented by Justin as one of a series of offences in defiance of the signs of the truth of Jesus' claims, a series which continued even after the fall of Jerusalem (ibid.). That view of the resurrection would be readily understood as a rationalisation of the kind applied to myths by Greeks since the fifth century B.C.; and, already in Matthew's own time the techniques were well known, and were taught by rhetoricians. Such techniques, together with the Greek-educated public's familiarity with a sophisticated view of stories of apotheosis stretching back to Herodotus, evidently posed a threat to the resurrection story. However, in the course of his narrative Matthew revises away the Jewish revision in a highly sophisticated way. Moreover, If Jerusalem had already fallen when Matthew put out his Gospel, then, like the crucifixion itself, the spreading of that hostile version by the Chief Priests through the guards would be shown in the same light as the spreading of such a version by emissaries from Jerusalem is Justin's Dialogue with Trypho.

II The Evangelist and the Playwrights
One of the earlier authors who had familiarized the Greek public with myth-revision techniques was Euripides. That playwright is not always sympathetic to the approach, at any rate when ventured by his characters. The Bacchae, perhaps the best-known play in Antiquity up to Matthew's own day, tells of a hostile rationalisation of the origins of Dionysus put about by his dead mother's jealous sisters and later embraced by her nephew Pentheus and of the god's anger at this insult to his mother and rejection of his own divinity. A parallel is drawn by Origen between the diaspora of the Jewish people and the rending of Pentheus in a rebuttal of Celsus, in a passage of arms in which Origen had already sought to trump the anti-Christian Celsus' own use of the Bacchae with the miraculous rescues of Peter and, later, of Paul and Silas (Against Celsus 2.34) in Acts. Did Euripides' picture of a "new god" 's anger at the rejection of his divinity and cult and a clever rationalisation of his own origin give some shape and colour and emotional conviction to early audiences' reception of Matthew's Gospel, with its picture of a plausible rationalistic version of the resurrection being spread by the Chief Priests.

If some members of Matthew's public could make that connection, were they also reminded of another hostile rationalisation, one of Jesus' own origins, once they were reminded of the rationalisation of Dionysus' origins and the anger and vengeance of Semele's son?

Gospel and play are later brought into overt connection in the Christus Patiens, whose author quarried the Bacchae. Does that later work, in spite of its uncertain date, shed any light on these questions?

The phenomenon of the Greek historic present in biblical narratives has invited various speculations on its role and function. A study on the historic present in the Gospel of Mark reveals narrative-structuring and idea-correlating functions that ultimately serve a semantic function. Through two narrative portions of Mark, this paper will demonstrate the unit-delimiting and correlating roles of the episode- initial historic present, as well as the idea-correlating role of the mid-episodic historic present. It further demonstrates their ultimate semantic function of highlighting the author's message.

Since the historic presents play a part in terms of the semiotic signification of a text and its meaning. A reader who gives due consideration to the phenomenon would be aided in catching the subtle winks concerning the text's emphases.

Due to time constraints, it will not be possible to present a full set of support for the proposal, but only alert scholars to the possibility of the case through selected examples. For a systematic exposition of the function of the historic presents (especially episode-initial ones) in the whole Gospel, see S.N. Leong, 'Macro-structure of Mark in Light of the Historic Present and Other Structural Indicators' (M.Th. diss.; Singapore Bible College, 2004).

Even as the scholarly consensus has begun to turn towards the recognition of the canonical gospels as examples of Greco-Roman biography there has been less discussion by biblical scholars as to what type (sub-genre) of biography the gospels are. Taking into account some of the internal features of the gospels as well as comparisons with extra-biblical material (non-canonical gospels and patristic citations), this papers aims to argue that the gospels are examples of 'contemporary-indefinite' biographies.

Matthew's eschatological schema is notoriously difficult to piece together and interpret. To what extent is Matthew referring to the events of 70CE, and how imminent was his expectation of the final End Times and parousia? Added to this is the question of the relationship between his Son of Man sayings, Daniel 7, and the perplexing character of the conclusion (28:16-20) with its final enigmatic words "I am with you to the end of the age".

I will present a narrative approach to Matthew which takes his statements on presence, on the parousia, and on the coming of the Son of Man at full face value, and seeks to synthesise them in a self-consistent way. I will argue that Matthew's parousia is not a "second coming" so much as a more continuous statement of "presence" from the cross and resurrection onwards, but with a decisive heavenly revelation at the End. Likewise, it will be argued that Matthew's Son of Man is envisioned from the time of the cross and resurrection onwards to occupy a perpetual place of exaltation "coming on the clouds", only to be revealed openly as such at the End.