British New Testament Society

Le Parkour was developed in the Paris suburb of Lisses in the late 1980's. It is an extreme sport which involves moving through the urban landscape in original, daring and elegant ways. Typical techniques would include scaling walls, running along roofs and leaping from building to building. In the UK, the most publicised examples of the sport are the 'Rush Hour' film (BBC 1, 2002) and the 'Jump London' and 'Jump Britain' documentaries (Channel 4, 2003 and 2004).

The aim of this paper is to compare Parkour and Wirkungsgeschichte in order to reflect on the latter's characteristics, possibilities and drawbacks as an intellectual discipline. There are some interesting parallels: both the sport and the discipline claim to question what is self-evident; both could be accused of a postmodern irreverence for original intention; both are struggling with self-definition and so carry more than one name; both are undergirded by philosophical principles not immediately obvious to the casual observer. Describing Wirkungsgeschichte as a kind of intellectual Parkour could be construed as either a compliment or an insult. I hope that this paper will stimulate a discussion about both the pitfalls and possibilities of Wirkungsgeschichte within New Testament Studies.

The original ‘Markan community’ is inscrutable, and there are diverse scholarly reconstructions. The sayings and narrative features of the gospel that lead to them are nevertheless active in the politics of small communities today. This paper examines ways in which Mark is or could be used and ‘performed’ in small learning groups, activist organisations, local parishes and alternative religious communities. It focuses first on the absence of the Messiah (16:7; 13:32-27) and his insistence on diakonia (9:33-36; 10:37-44), with implications for the notion of ‘leadership’; then on the gospel’s ambiguous approach to power, combining the exercise of charismatic exousia with the practice of egalitarian living (11:22-24; 10:29-31); thirdly on the significance of boundaries crossed, abolished and re-drawn, especially in the practice of exorcism and table-fellowship (2:13-17; 9:38-40), suggesting a ‘community’ both distinctive and promiscuous. These three impulses are brought together through the lens of metanoia, interpreted as the catalyst of provisionality in both politics and liturgy.

This paper will compare and contrast Albrecht Dürer's and Lucas Cranach's approach to the Apocalypse through their woodcut images of 1498 and 1522 respectively. While Dürer's Apocalypse has been studied extensively by art historians and Cranach's by Reformation historians, very little has been written on the way in which their respective series of images function as interpretations of the Apocalypse. I will argue that Dürer's artistic interpretation belongs to the History of Exegesis of the Apocalypse. While his primary purpose was undoubtedly an aesthetic one, close reading of his dramatic images reveals a sophisticated understanding of the text as well as a concerted effort to allow the Apocalypse its own voice through the medium of the image. By contrast, Cranach's images, created especially for Luther's 1522 version of the New Testament, can be said to serve the Protestant requirements for literalism and anti-papalism first and the Apocalypse second: the voice of the Apocalypse is stifled. For these reasons I will argue that Cranach's images belong to a separate category of interpretation which we might call the History of the Use of the Apocalypse.