The topic of my paper is particularly suitable for a Presidential Address to our Society, because so many of you have contributed, in no inconsiderable way, to the elucidation of its problems. What I shall try to do is simply to bring together some of the results of your work and then to build upon them. We have, in our common research, reached a point where it makes sense to look back on what we have discovered and to put up some signposts to mark our future course. When I say so, it is not merely an act of politeness; it is rather the expression of my appreciation of so many contributions from you without which my understanding of the first Gospel would not have been possible.

The agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (as we usually describe it in English, in typically eclectic fashion, for the agony comes from Luke, the garden from John, and Gethsemane from Mark and Matthew) holds an important place within the Passion narrative. But what is that place? There are strong grounds for holding that the original Passion narrative which lies behind the Marcan and Matthean records began with the arrest of Jesus; the same is probably true of Luke, and very possibly of the Fourth Gospel also. The Gethsemane scene stands outside, or on the fringe of, such primitive Passion narratives, and in certain respects does not accord well with them; it may well be, as Bultmann,2 Kuhn3 and others have supposed, that it was adopted into the Passion narrative at a fairly late stage and inserted between the story of the Last Supper (itself not an integral part of the primitive Passion narrative) and the arrest, If this be so, we must ask to what extent, and in what way, the introduction of the Gethsemane scene into the Passion story and the handling of it within that context reflect the theologies of the evangelists of their immediate predecessors.

In giving their appraisal of the host of then unexamined minuscule codices of the Greek New Testament, Westcott and Hort wrote these intriguing words: ‘Valuable texts may lie hidden among them; many of them are doubtless sprinkled with relics of valuable texts now destroyed.’. 1 Beside this supposition should be set a well-attested fact, that ‘the Precedence of manuscripts depends, not on their age, but on their Pedigree’. 2 These two statements kept on recurring to the writer's mind as she concentrated on a group of six minuscule codices in the area of the Catholic Epistles: MSS 69, 1243, 1319, 1424, 1739, and 1874. 3 The Leicester Codex, MS 69, has long been known to Preserve an ancient lineage even though it was actually copied in the fifteenth century. Might not others of this group, less well known, also Perpetuate a rich heritage? It is the opinion of this writer that one of them does.4

This article is concerned to demonstrate the possibility that two texts in I Corinthians (xii. 3 and xvi. 22) were at a very early date misunderstood by a copyist unfamiliar with a formula which St Paul was using, and which he changed, perhaps unconsciously and certainly without tendentiousness, to the nearest lettering which would be known to him.

The present study continues and completes my retroversions of the Gothic Commentary on St John, which appeared in N.T.S. VIII, 43–56 (leaves I–IV), ibid. x, 368–73 (leaf VI), ibid. x, 499–504 (leaf VIII); see also Ibid IX, 39–55 (‘Notes on the Gothic Bible’).

Auf der Tagung der Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis Ende 1968 berichtete Irving A. Sparks/Claremont über die Entdeckung eines neuen Unzialfragments. Im Journal of Biblical Literature LVIII (1969), 201–2 veröoffentlichte er dann einen Bericht darüber mit näheren Angaben zum Fragment und mit einem Textabdruck. Danach handelt es sich dabei um einen schmalen Streifen, der bei l 852 (Sinai, Katharinenkloster Gr. 218) zwischen fol. 176 und 177 in den Bund geklebt ist und bei einer kollation von 11852 im Zusammenhang mit den Arbeiten für das International Project entdeckt wurde. Sparks beschreibt das Fragment folgendermaßen:

Recent analyses of the Prologue of John have to a large degree centred around two questions, (1) the question of poetic and prose forms of styles, and (2) the question of unity or disunity of thought, both within the Prologue itself and between the Prologue and the rest of the Gospel. Several scholars, such as R. Bultmann, E. Käsemann, R. Schnackenburg and R. E. Brown, have reached the conclusion that the Evangelist has used and partly reshaped and supplemented a hymn.1 This hyposthesis has drawn criticism from scholars who stress that this distinction between poetry and prose is impossible to maintain. Thus E. Haenchen and W. Eltester have characterized the style as hymnic prose.

Mark and Acts disagree, sometimes quite sharply, about Jesus' career, his teaching, and the faith of the young Church.