This paper examines a curious trope in classical Latin literature suggesting that Jews habitually fast on the Sabbath. After assessing various arguments to the effect that the rumor was grounded in an otherwise unknown custom peculiar to the Jewish community of ancient Rome, the author contends that the alleged Sabbath fast was a cultural misperception. The conspicuous weekly withdrawal of Rome’s Jews from the city’s food trade signaled to certain gentile observers that their Jewish neighbors did not eat or drink on their day of rest. Based on empirical reasoning, that mistaken inference managed to take hold among Rome’s literati because it reinforced a common nativist perception of the irredeemable strangeness of the city’s foreign residents. Nevertheless, the liveliness of the rumor as a cultural meme speaks to the vitality of the genuine Jewish practices that informed it, namely the predilection of Rome’s Jews for ritually clean or kosher food and their avoidance of commerce on the Sabbath.

This paper examines the history of the interpretation of the plural forms in Gen. 1.26, 3.5 and 3.22 which might appertain to the Divine and which were discussed by both Jewish expositors and Christian theologians in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The interpretation of these forms coincided with the process through which Christianity emerged from Judaism as a distinct theological phenomenon. Although the Christian Scriptures put no Trinitarian construction upon the plural forms, the interpretation of these forms in Gen. 1.26 and 3.22 became a litmus test of Christian orthodoxy, and it was regarded as an integral part of the Christian identity of the ancient and mediaeval church.

This study examines the Corpus Paulinum and Plutarch’s Moralia in regards to ‘wifely submission’ and ‘husbandly authority’. Both corpora are scrutinized regarding what they say about a wife’s submission in the marriage relationship in order to see what implications such submission had for the daily life of a wife in the first century ce. There are considerable similarities as well as stark differences between the two corpora. Plutarch and (deutero-)Paul could be described as having similar outlooks on wives’ submission in general. But when one looks at the specifics involved, one finds that Plutarch demands more accommodations to be made by the wife than does (deutero-)Paul.  Stark contrasts can be seen in the areas of sexual ethics, reclusiveness and silence of wives, education, religion and emotions.

Three significant and diverse contributions to New Testament textual criticism have appeared in the last few years. One deals with conjectural emendation, draws upon principles of classical textual criticism, and calls for a reconsideration of the practice among New Testament scholars (R. Wettlaufer). The second provides a detailed introduction to the Latin New Testament with a history of both the Old Latin and the Vulgate, along with an up-to-date catalogue of manuscripts, and it provides the key basics to anyone wishing to enter this field (H. Houghton). The third is the new edition of the Greek New Testament that originates from Tyndale House at Cambridge (D. Jongkind, with assistance from P. Williams). Each work is reviewed separately with occasional cross-references.

This article will explain what allegory, allegoresis and metaphor are, how these were used in the literature of the Greco-Roman world, and the function they had in philosophical literature, especially Stoic (and also Platonic, but only after the New Testament), as applied to religious narratives. Within the wider Greco-Roman literature, a special place is reserved for the Hellenistic-Jewish biblical allegoresis of Philo—a contemporary of Paul. I will indicate how allegory, allegoresis and metaphors are present in the New Testament, especially in Paul (concerning allegoresis) and in the Gospels (as for parables and metaphors). My particular New Testament text example, on which I will elaborate, is Paul’s own application of allegoresis to Old Testament figures in Galatians 4.

In contrast to the scholarly consensus, this article argues that utilizing the Aramaic Hypothesis to characterize Peter as an Aramaic-speaking Galilean is less accurate than using sociolinguistic approaches, which characterize Peter as a multilingual speaker who was able to speak Greek fluently. The lack of attention given by traditional methods to the complex mechanisms of sociolinguistic dynamics has resulted in an incomplete understanding of Peter’s linguistic ability. Thus, it is the aim of this article to reevaluate Peter’s linguistic ability and offer a new perspective that is more congruent with his personal sociolinguistic domains (i.e., his birthplace, occupational area, and mission territories).

In his revised translation of the Gospels, Jerome rendered ἐπιούσιος in Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer as supersubstantialis. He did not intend the equivalent of the modern English ‘supersubstantial’. Regarding ἐπιούσιος as a synonym for περιούσιος, he philologically defined ἐπιούσιος as praecipuus, egregius, peculiaris (‘exceptional, outstanding, special’). On the other hand—influenced especially by Marius Victorinus, who defended the use of ὁμοούσιος in the Nicene Creed against Arianism and who understood -ούσιος to have the same meaning in ἐπιούσιος—Jerome seems to have believed that he should use substantialis (-ούσιος) in translating ἐπιούσιος. Since he needed a translation that communicated both ‘exceptional’ and ‘of God’s substance’, he took the prefix super, probably from supersum (‘be superior’), the Latin word for περίειμι (> περιούσιος), and placed it before substantialis, thus coining the term supersubstantialis (‘of the outstanding substance of God’). Jerome thought that ἐπιούσιος also meant ‘of the future’.

This article introduces two translated articles written by the Italian historian and philologian, Raimondo Bacchisio Motzo, who specialized in the study of Hellenistic Judaism, including Josephus.

This article critiques the source-critical views of Richard Laqueur regarding the possible compositional layers of Josephus’s Life and War.

This article critiques Hugo Willrich’s contention that the Roman documents Josephus cites in the Antiquities are false.