The events surrounding Paul's first visit to Philippi are dramatically told in Acts 16 and are also referred to by Paul (with some indignation) in 1 Thessalonians 2.2. Despite this violent beginning the Philippian church had evidently taken root and flourished; and although Paul was able to make it only one, or possibly two, subsequent visits (Acts 20.1–7; 2 Corinthians 2.13), it more than once provided him with generous financial support, and its record of faith and loyalty is apparent from this, the warmest and most affectionate of Paul's surviving letters.

The city of Philippi was the first on the Egnatian Way leading from Asia to the Adriatic (see the map on p. 449). It was not large, but had received the distinction of being re-founded by the emperor Augustus in 31 bce as a Roman colony, which meant that almost the entire upper class were Roman settlers, speaking Latin rather than Greek and enjoying a number of civic and financial privileges which made them enthusiastically loyal to Rome. Their culture and their religion dominated the city, even though it contained a substantial population of indigenous Greek-speaking inhabitants as well as a very small Jewish community – too small, certainly, to have built itself a synagogue (Acts 16.13), but possibly large enough to have exerted some pressure on the Christians.

Jesus' ancestry

An account of the genealogy. To the modern reader this may seem a daunting beginning. Even the most laboriously painstaking modern biography would hardly begin with a complete line of descent from a remote ancestor. But in the Jewish culture there were good reasons for doing so, and the reader would know what to look out for. Was Jesus of impeccably Jewish descent (a true son of Abraham) – and, if not (as the unexpected listing of four women, arguably all Gentiles, might suggest), what were the implications? Had he a mission for the world as well as for his own people? Was he of the tribe and family from which people (or at any rate most people, but there were rival views) expected a Messiah to come? Might there be some significance in the exact moment in history at which he had been born? (Counting by generations it was three times fourteen – a multiple of the symbolic number seven – from Abraham.)

These questions all arise from the title by which Jesus is introduced: the Messiah. This Hebrew term, meaning ‘the Anointed One’, was translated into Greek as Christos, and gave Jesus the name by which he was to become universally known. It was an old title, originally used of the first kings of Israel.

In its very first words this book announces itself as a ‘Revelation’ (apocalypsis), and within a hundred years of its composition this became the title by which it has been known ever since. The idea behind the word is as old as religion itself. There have always been certain men and women who have claimed that in the course of some supernatural experience divine mysteries were ‘revealed’ to them; and the religions of Greece and Rome, as of Egypt and the Middle East, produced numerous books of which the writers (whether under their own or assumed names) claimed to have fallen into a trance, to have seen inexpressible visions and to have been instructed by heavenly voices, apparitions or angels in the meaning of the mysteries they had seen or heard. To this extent there would have been nothing surprising in the appearance of such a book in a collection of the literature of the Christian religion. Nevertheless this book, though it was published and probably originally written in Greek, owed more to a particular Jewish tradition than it did to any precedents in the Greco-Roman world. To a Jewish thinker, the ultimate mystery to be revealed was not (as it might have been to a Greek philosopher or mystic) the reality lying behind the appearance of the physical world, or the destiny of the individual soul after death, or even (as was of great interest in an age much preoccupied with astrology) the pattern inexorably fixed on history by the movements of the stars.

This letter, like the letters to the Corinthians, was evoked by a particular crisis in the relations between Paul and one of the churches he had founded. Something had been going wrong for some time before the letter was written, and this was not the first time that Paul had intervened (4.13). There was pressure from outside the church and there were factions within it, and the atmosphere was such that charges of various kinds had been levelled at Paul. So much, at least, is evident from the letter; but since we have no other record of the various exchanges which took place, and since the narrative in Acts makes no mention of this crisis at all, a great deal remains mysterious and it is impossible to know exactly what was happening and what arguments and accusations Paul had to confront.

We cannot even be sure who the galatians were. Since the third century bce, when an invasion of Gauls from central Europe (in Greek: Galatai) had finally secured an area for settlement in the centre of Asia Minor, Galatia had been the name currently used for the territory of these invaders. But in 25 bce the Roman province of Galatia was created out of lands that included not only the original Galatian heartland but also (for political and administrative reasons) parts of Pisidia and Lycaonia to the south.

Both parts of this title raise questions. Is this really a ‘letter’? And who was ‘John’?

The first question arises from the opening, “We declare to you what was from the beginning”. This is not how one would expect any letter, ancient or modern, to begin; nor is there any greeting at the end to make up for the lack of one at the beginning (as there is in Hebrews, the only other New Testament ‘letter’ which begins so abruptly). The document is certainly not a ‘letter’ in the ordinary sense. Neither, apparently, is it a letter in the literary sense (which was widely accepted in the ancient world) of a piece of religious or philosophical writing dressed up in the form of a letter; for such ‘letters’ always had at least the conventional greetings at the beginning and the end. The writer starts straight in on his subject, and at first sight he appears to be writing a treatise or a sermon. Yet a few lines further down he begins a new paragraph with the words, “My little children, I am writing these things to you.” There is nothing conventional or literary about this: we are reading a real message written to a real congregation. A pastor is appealing to his flock; and for some reason unknown to us he does not make his appeal in person but writes it down and sends it to them.

Warnings from an elder

The elder to the elect lady. In form, this is exactly the way a letter was expected to begin: ‘From A to B, greetings.’ Indeed, unlike the First Letter of John, this and the Third Letter are more like the actual letters of their time than almost any other writing of the New Testament. They are both of the right length to fill one side of a sheet of papyrus, and they both have a beginning and an end typical of the conventions of letter-writing in the ancient world. Yet there is a difference between them. The Third Letter is evidently part of a personal correspondence between individuals; but the Second Letter, though it follows the same conventional form, puts it to a different use. It is not a private letter at all, but an open one. And the salutations and greetings (as in the letters of Paul) are adapted so as to carry a load of Christian meanings.

To this extent the writing has the form of a letter rather than the reality of one; and this may give the clue to the opening. The lady, if a real lady, would have a name. It is possible that there is a name concealed in the word elect: Eclecta (the Latin form of the Greek word) is a known first name.

A testimonial and its rejection

The elder to the beloved Gaius. The opening, the prayer for Gaius' physical and spiritual health, the expression of pleasure at news recently received: all these can be paralleled in numerous private letters in Greek which have been preserved on papyrus in the sands of Egypt. The author is writing exactly as people frequently wrote to their friends in the ancient world. At the same time he is the elder, a senior and distinguished Christian (see above on 2 John 1); and he is writing to one whom he calls one of his children, that is (if we may assume that he uses this figure of speech the way Paul does), to a man whom he converted to Christianity himself or who once belonged to his flock. He uses a term in his greeting which, as in English, may be entirely conventional (meaning ‘truly’) but which evidently has a particular Christian resonance for him: in truth.

The writer is in touch with some fellow Christians (friends) who have been making a missionary journey and who depend for their sustenance (as was normal in the church), not on the non-believers to whom they may have been preaching, but on the hospitality of other Christians. Gaius has been host to some of these, and has treated them so well that the report of it has come back to the elder.

Thessalonica was the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia. It stood, like Philippi, on the Via Egnatia, the great road across northern Greece which linked Rome with the east; and its population, though predominantly Greek, included a Jewish community (Acts 17.1).

Since much of the letter is inspired by Paul's personal recollections of his visit to Thessalonica, it is possible to reconstruct most of the circumstances from his own words. The account in Acts 17 adds little to our knowledge, and is not always consistent with what Paul says himself; but it does help us to decide the place and (within certain limits) the date of writing. According to Acts, the only time when Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy were all together was during Paul's eighteen-month stay in Corinth (Acts 18.5); and this period, since it followed soon after Paul's visit to Thessalonica, seems the most appropriate one for the writing of a letter that is full of vivid reminiscences. If this is correct, and if this letter was written while Paul was in Corinth (say in the year 50 or 51), then it has some claim to being the earliest of Paul's surviving letters, indeed the earliest complete writing in the New Testament.

Thanksgiving and prayer

The first three chapters conform, in effect, with the usual form of opening and consist of thanksgiving leading into prayer; but the sequence is broken by a long section of personal reminiscence and self-vindication, and the prayer itself is not reached until 3.11.

Author and recipients

James was a common name (it was the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew name Jacob), and there are at least five men who bear it in the New Testament alone. But this James writes with authority and has apparently no need to explain who he is: his mere name is enough to command attention. Only one of the men called James in the New Testament held such a prominent position in the church. This was James, the brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the church in Jerusalem.

Is this letter from his hand? No other James has ever been suggested, and it was as a document bearing the authority of the Lord's brother that the letter was given a place among the writings of the New Testament – though it was several centuries before it became firmly accepted. But in modern times serious doubts have been felt. Could a man of James' relatively humble Galilean background have written such sophisticated Greek? Is it likely that Jesus' own brother would have been content to write to the churches without mentioning any of the central beliefs of the Christian faith such as the crucifixion or the resurrection? Is the somewhat Hellenized Jewish culture displayed by the author what one would expect from one who had the reputation of maintaining an orthodox Jewish way of life in Jerusalem even after he was converted to Christianity?

We know nothing of a journey by Paul to Crete, nor of the founding of a church there, but we must assume that by the time this letter was written there was a settled Christian community on the island. The letter is addressed to Titus, whom we know from other letters and from Acts to have been one of Paul's principal assistants, and to have been entrusted with missions of some delicacy. Here, though he still seems to be regarded as quite young and inexperienced, he is in charge of the church in Crete, and the letter, though addressed to him, is clearly intended for the church as a whole. For the most part its tone is not personal but formal and authoritative.

Opening greetings

The formality is stressed at the outset by the long parenthesis, which interrupts the normal structure of the greeting (Paul … To Titus, see above on Romans 1.1), and rehearses the qualifications of the writer to give authoritative instructions to the church for the sake of its faith, its knowledge of the truth and its hope – this last resting on a promise made by God before the ages began (an idea developed in Ephesians, see above on Ephesians 1.4).

The greeting with which this letter begins is almost identical with that of 1 Thessalonians, and gives the impression that the two letters must have been written from the same place and within a short time of each other. And indeed, they are very similar in other respects also – so similar, in fact, that it has often been doubted whether they could originally have been intended for the same congregation, or even whether they could both have been written by the same author; for how, it is said, could anyone have written two letters within a short space of time to the same people and used whole sentences in the second letter which are taken almost verbatim from the first? At the same time there are notable differences between the two letters. The treatment of questions about the “coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” runs on different lines, and in the second letter the tone is somewhat more severe. The problem is to explain both the similarities and the differences.

Various explanations have been proposed. One is that Paul, soon after writing the first letter, received news from Thessalonica which caused him to write off again at once while phrases from the first letter were still running in his mind. Another is that the two letters were originally written to go by the same messenger to two different (though probably neighbouring) congregations.

A runaway slave, in the Greek world, might take refuge in the house of someone whom he had met at his master's and beg his new protector not to send him back. If he made a good impression, he might be a cause of some embarrassment to his protector, who would either have to keep the slave against the wishes of his former master or send him back to certain punishment; and if the two men were friends this might be a genuinely difficult decision. We happen to possess two letters of the Latin writer Pliny which are concerned with precisely this dilemma. Pliny solved it by sending back the culprit with a carefully worded letter in which he asked his friend to receive the slave kindly. This letter of Paul appears to be of exactly the same kind.

The culprit in question was certainly a slave. But what exactly had he done? It has traditionally been assumed that he had run away from his master Philemon and taken refuge with Paul, who had converted him to Christianity; but the only evidence for this is the sentence in which Paul says that he was formerly useless to Philemon – and he evidently chose this word, not because it described exactly how Onesimus had behaved, but because it was a pun on his name (onēsimus, ‘useful’).

In this Companion I have been concerned with questions which anyone may be expected to ask who approaches the New Testament in general, and the New English Bible translation of it in particular, without any previous introduction. These questions are not always the same as those which occupy professional scholars; yet it is mainly their research which has made it possible to attempt to answer them. All that I have learnt from them I gratefully acknowledge; and I am aware that there are countless things I have still failed to learn.

This book could not have been written at all had it not been for the generosity of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, which readily accepted that I should devote to this work the main part of my time as a Research Student of the House. It would also hardly have been completed had it not been for the stimulus of eight months spent in Jerusalem in 1966–7, which again I owe to the liberality of Christ Church, as well as to the hospitality of the Right Revd Campbell MacInnes, then Archbishop in Jerusalem, and of others in St George's Close, Jerusalem. I am also deeply indebted to the Ecole Biblique and its Director for permission to make use of its magnificent library during my stay in Jerusalem.

Like the First Letter of Peter, this letter claims to have been written by the apostle, in this case shortly before his death. But a number of factors makes it difficult to accept that Peter could really have been the author. For one thing, extensive use is made of phrases and ideas which appear in the Letter of Jude – would the historical Peter have borrowed from a fellow apostle? For another, there is a reference to the letters of Paul, which seems to presuppose that there already existed a collection of them bearing the authority of scripture (3.15–16) – and this is unlikely to have been the case in Peter's lifetime. In addition, the sophisticated style and Hellenistic character of the letter are not what one would have expected from a Galilean companion of Jesus. It seems therefore probable that the letter is one of those which appear to have been written after the death of their supposed authors and which supported their claim on the attention of Christians by invoking the authority of one of the apostles. In this case, if it was written from Rome, Peter's would have been the most appropriate name and authority to invoke. It can be plausibly dated to the last part of the first century ce. By the end of the third century it had been hesitantly accepted into the canon of the New Testament.

If science has a universal aspect underlying any and all its manifestations in human culture, then a reappraisal of the nature of scientific inquiry should pertain in some measure to modern and to Babylonian science alike. And even if no universal essence is to be found among the various attempts to understand the phenomena of nature, then certainly no cogent argument against inclusion of the attempts evidenced in cuneiform texts can be given as we would certainly want to know the extent of science's diversity. If our conception of science is necessarily grounded in evidence of both its results and its practice, then history has an important role to play, as was suggested in the opening statement of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said, “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.”

The rediscovery of the earliest evidence for the cultural and intellectual practice we term science is a relatively recent achievement in the history of scholarship. From the first readings of cuneiform astronomical texts in the late nineteenth century by J. Epping and J. N. Strassmaier to the publication of Astronomical Cuneiform Texts by O. Neugebauer in 1955 and the Astronomical Diaries by A. J. Sachs and H. Hunger from 1988 to 2001, it is clear that the process of decipherment and analysis of Babylonian astronomy has taken place over a span of time during which the idea of science itself has undergone significant changes.

Already more than 100 years since their decipherment and almost 50 years since their general availability in translation, the continued obscurity of Babylonian sources within the general history of science, as compared, for example, with those of ancient Greece, reflects a persistent historiography of science, influenced by a particular classification of knowledge and its implicit criteria. Although the argument for the legitimacy of Babylonian astronomy for the history of science has frequently been in terms of the degree to which it directly contributed to the European tradition, the classification and nature of Babylonian astronomy as “science” apart from its position in the patrimony of modern exact sciences still warrants discussion.

Largely through the work of Otto Neugebauer, efforts to reconstruct the history of science in ancient Mesopotamia have concentrated on the exact sciences. Neugebauer's focus on the relation between mathematics and astronomy, especially on the internal mathematical structures that distinguish the Late Babylonian astronomical texts, determined the tenor of research in Babylonian science for much of the twentieth century. His commitment to the recovery and detailed analysis of the Babylonian ephemerides stemmed from the belief that only specialization produces sound results. Indeed, the recovery of the contents of Babylonian mathematical astronomy and the subsequent work on this material by others, both before him (J. Epping and F. X. Kugler) and after (A. J. Sachs, A. Aaboe, B. L. van der Waerden, P. Huber, J. P. Britton, L. Brack-Bernsen, and N. M. Swerdlow), as well as the progress made in the study of what is sometimes referred to as the nonmathematical Babylonian astronomy by A. J. Sachs, H. Hunger, and D. Pingree, prove critical for our understanding of other aspects of Babylonian celestial inquiry, especially celestial divination and its relationship to astronomy.