The prospect of writing anything further about the prologue of John reminds one of the verdict quoted by W. C. van Unnik in a similar context some twenty years ago: ‘the new things he said were not true and the true things were not new’. The prudent course may, therefore, be to refine an already established position with the hope of being able to say something true, even if it is not altogether new. The thesis of this article is that the prologue is a chiasm with verse 12 b at its centre. That the prologue is chiastic is not a new thesis; that its centre is v. 12 b is. The first part of this paper attempts to establish this thesis. The second part studies the key phrase in v. 12 b, τέκνα Θεοũ, and the implications of its position in the prologue.

Scholars are gradually relinquishing the belief that the Corinthians were Gnostics. As a noted student of Gnosticism concludes, we find in Corinth ‘at most only the first tentative beginnings of what was later to develop into full-scale Gnosticism’. In fact, a kind of agnosticism has emerged with regard to the early Christian community in Corinth. ‘The position in Corinth cannot be reconstructed on the basis of the possibilities of the general history of religion.’ I suggest, however, that it is possible to determine with some degree of precision the nature and background of the ‘proto-Gnosticism’ in Corinth: Hellenistic Jewish religiosity focused on sophia and gnosis.

When Paul R. McReynolds and Frederik Wisse developed the Claremont Profile Method, they used as a point of departure the manuscript groups that had been formed in previous text critical studies, primarily the groups of Hermann von Soden. Although they were not satisfied with this approach, they saw no alternative. In an earlier study on the Greek text of I John, however, I showed that the use of predetermined groups proved to be a methodological weakness in the Claremont Profile Method (CPM) so far as I John is concerned, in that the ability of the method to correct von Soden's groupings was only partial. In the study on I John I used quantitative analysis to form tentative gropings rather than depend on the group formations of others.

Der Begriff ‘christliche Exegese’ ist in mancherlei Hinsicht problematisch, nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil er suggerieren könnte, die wissenschaftliche Disziplin der Exegese sei methodologisch differenzierbar in eine christliche und eine nicht- bzw. unchristliche Spielform. Eine derartige Annahme wird in den folgenden Überlegungen nicht gemacht.

Die Interpretation der neutestamentlichen Haustafeln ist bis heute bestimmt durch die von Martin Dibelius begründete und von seinem Schüler Karl Weidinger ausgeführte These, die Haustafeln seien in der Tradition der Pflichtentafeln vor allem der stoischen Philosophie zu interpretieren. Der klassische Text, der seither in kaum einer Äußerung zum Thema fehlt, ist Epiktet, diss. 17, 31: ‘Ich will als Frommer und als Philosoph und als umsichtiger Mensch wissen, was meine Pflicht gegenüber den Göttern ist, was gegenüber den Eltern, was gegenüber den Brüdern, was gegenüber dem Vaterland, was gegenüber Fremden.’ Wichtig ist hier auch das von K. Praechter aus verschiedenen Stobaios-Exzerpten rekonstruierte Werk des Stoikers Hierokies – spätere Textfunde haben Praechters Rekonstruktion glänzend bestätigt. Die Aufnahme solchen traditionellen ethischen Guts geschah nach Dibelius unter Vermittlung durch das hellenistische Judentum, was er und Weidinger mit Josephus, Philo und PsPhokylides belegen.