The interaction between early Christianity and the Judaism from which it emerged took many and diverse forms, and Christians’ attitudes toward their Jewish heritage varied considerably. The Epistle to the Hebrews represents a particularly complex case of both the appropriation and the rejection of that heritage. This ambivalent attitude reaches its climax in the central expository section of the text, where the significance of the death of Christ is explored using primarily the analogy of the Yom Kippur sacrifice. This portion of Hebrews is replete with exegetical difficulties which cannot be resolved here. What this essay will attempt is an analysis of the literary techniques through which the model of the Yom Kippur ritual is appropriated.

It is a joy for me to contribute to a volume of essays dedicated to Krister Stendahl. I owe him a particular debt of gratitude. From the time that I—an immigrant from Holland—started to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1955 until today, Krister has been a model for me of what it means to be not only a conscientious scholar but also a Christian theologian. Through the turbulent years of the sixties and early seventies he always found time to counsel and guide me—however much we were geographically separated from each other.

In 1875 the collector and scholar Wilhelm Froehner published a short text incised on a gem of red jasper that had been offered to him in Nazareth for possible purchase. Of the six lines of this text only the first three have been much cited because they consist of three gods’ names, and reference has customarily been not to Froehner's original publication but to Louis Robert's quotation from it in his Collection Froehner of 1936. In making an apposite allusion to the Froehner gem in her excellent study of the cults of the Hawran in the Roman period, Dominique Sourdel was under the impression that the great nineteenth-century collector had actually acquired the piece; but Froehner himself reports unambiguously that he refused to pay the dealer's price. The object has therefore been lost to the world of scholarship. Nonetheless Froehner's transcription, entirely baffling to him in its second half, is worth resurrecting in the light of more recent discoveries in the Roman Near East. It bears upon several important cults among the inhabitants of provincia Arabia.

As a teacher, as a scholar, as a dean, and as a churchman, Krister Stendahl has worked for decades to further Jewish-Christian relations and to promote women's studies and women. It is out of gratitude to him that I present these theses, which I see as a continuation of his work.

Most early Christians perceived the world in which they lived as a world of Jews and Gentiles. Ephesians speaks most impressively about the unity of the two parts in the church, which is the body of Christ. Studies of Ephesians have very often concentrated on the idea of the church and the relationship between ecclesiology, christology, and soteriology. Some scholars have paid special attention to the relationship between the church and Israel, Christians and Jews. Statements about the Gentiles have received much less attention, but for reasons which will become apparent in the course of this article, I prefer to begin with them*.

When Paul deems conversion to imply a “new creation,” he is in line with the Jewish tenet—valid to this day—which assigns a convert the position of a “child just born.” One consequence is that a pagan family coming over en bloc is in principle unaffected by incest taboos: they are no longer related. Still, the Rabbis, lest the unthinking might conclude that incest was being taken lightly, impose a restriction, pragmatic and variable—banning such unions as are illicit in the surrounding culture. Along with the maxim, Paul also adopts this proviso: he tells the Corinthians that their pride in their novel state must not lead to marriage with a stepmother, “fornication not found among the gentiles” (1 Cor 5:1). No tenet, he urges, not even one so fundamental, so cherished, as that of re-creation, is to be turned into a fetish. Glory becomes vainglory when the resultant actions are the opposite of beneficial to the individual, the opposite of upbuilding for the church. I am going to suggest that some passages in his Epistle to Philemon may have to be read bearing in mind the same counterpointal interplay: on the one hand, a radical concept of conversion; on the other, moderation from considerateness as an individual as well as from dedication to the church's welfare.

This essay might seem inappropriate for this volume, but it is not. Krister Stendahl is particularly distinguished by a catholicity of mind and spirit which enables him to look with understanding, sympathy, and empathy on all sorts and conditions in what he once unpejoratively called “God's menagerie of religions.” That Mormons do not belong to the main bodies of Christians does not exclude them from his purview. But apart from this, the Mormons are in fact highly germane to the theme of this volume. Uniqueness is always hard to substantiate: Christians, Jews, and Gentiles have been related in many varied and complex ways. But there seems to be no parallel to the way in which Mormons—while claiming to be Christians—assert as well that they are genealogically connected with Jews and that they are therefore physically a rediscovered, restored, and reinterpreted “Israel.” As far as I am aware they constitute a very special, if not unique, case of Christians among Jews and Gentiles since by implication they have redefined all three of these terms. This is the justification for the inclusion of this essay in this volume. We here reflect on one aspect of Mormon life: their fixation of their own “canon.”

This article deals with Matthew's account of the rending of the temple veil. Matt 27:51 will be interpreted in its context: in vss 51–53 the incident is one of several taking place between Jesus' death and the centurion's confession. At the same time the verse under discussion will be considered against the background of the interpretations in early Christian literature which very often take Matt 27:51–53 as a starting point.

Judging from his relatively few surviving letters, Paul—whether as Jew or Christian—was a person with both outer and inner conflicts. We know much less than we would like about these external confrontations and inner struggles, but time and again his letters show evidence of his wrestling with one or another serious ambivalence. Actually, it is not often a present struggle that is portrayed or revealed, for Paul writes with a remarkable maturity and with the confidence of one who has moved well beyond the tossing and turning of a continuing inner struggle. Yet at times, most notably in Romans 9–11, Paul's simple statement of a mature judgment still evokes, in the very restating of his conclusions, the intensity of the original ambivalence and conflict. A further indication that Paul was this kind of person is found, if only incidentally, in his dialectical mode of thinking: if he mentions “death,” at once he thinks of “life”; if he refers to “flesh,” immediately “spirit” crosses his mind, or if he speaks of “slaves” or “slavery,” then “sons” or “freedom” is instantly present.

Modern criticism of the book of Acts began with a hyper-Cartesian decision to doubt everything simultaneously. The author was not to be trusted as a reliable reporter on any issue of significance—the character and fate of the believers in Jerusalem, the status and role of Peter, the teaching of Paul, and so on. Recently, a former student of Krister Stendahl, A. T. Kraabel, has proposed that we should extend our skepticism to yet another area of Acts, to wit, the presence of Gentiles in all of the synagogues visited by Paul on his missionary journeys.

Krister Stendahl and the colleagues assembled around him at Harvard Divinity School have contributed to the fact that the history-of-religion approach has taken a sure foothold in NT studies in the United States. In the countries of its origin this approach is in sad decline, even in the homeland of the “History-of-Religion School.” A major part of the heritage of that school has been the refusal further to abuse biblical studies for apologetic reasons lest one make the biblical environment merely a negative foil to the claim of superiority for the experience and message of Jesus and the primitive church. The attack on Christian triumphalism in exegesis and the insistence on the integrity of the historically particular, indeed of the peculiar, has been one of Krister Stendahl's hermeneutical contributions to the exegetical pursuit.

It seems suitable, when honoring a dean who has become a bishop, to write on an episcopal theologian who thought he could answer Gnostics by discussing curriculum. I doubt that in either office Krister Stendahl would ever have taken such a tack. It is odd to see Irenaeus doing so.

“My mother taught me that reading others' letters isn't nice.” Those, or something like them, were the words of Krister Stendahl when he once tried to open the eyes of his audience to some of the hermeneutical problems which pertain to the fact that Christians read Paul's letters as if they were addressed to themselves rather than to their original recipients. The following reflections deal with these problems, and they are meant as a humble tribute to my first teacher in New Testament exegesis. I begin by recalling a few facts that are intriguing once one puts them together. This will lead me to the suggestion that, when he wrote his letters, Paul had a wider usage in mind than we usually assume. Against such a background I shall discuss, in a rather unsophisticated way, some conditions that may apply to a rereading of the Pauline letters and some possible consequences for so-called historical exegesis.

Krister Stendahl taught his American students in many ways, none more important than by compelling to us to look at the way we look at the ancient texts.

5 Ezra is a curious and challenging little work, crying out for detailed examination. It exists only in Latin, which presumably was translated from Greek. The text has received minimal attention from modern scholarship, despite its presence on the fringes of the Christian canonical scriptures. 5 Ezra provides living proof that one need not wait for new manuscripts to be uncovered in graves or caves to engage in work on hitherto virtually unexamined materials, and its contents seem directly relevant to questions about early Christian use of Jewish materials.

When Paul is placed in his Greek context, it is generally his thought, vocabulary, and literary style that receive attention. This is to a degree at least also true when attention is given to the early church's interpretation of his letters. Greek influence can also be perceived in early Christian reflections on the physical appearance of Paul. Less well known to most students of early Christianity than the literary evidence are the artistic representations of Paul, but the curious literary portrait of Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which in some respects agrees with early Christian paintings, is well known. There, Onesiphorus sees Paul as “a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness; for now he appeared like a man, and now he had the face of an angel.”