Hans Urs von Balthasar's kenotic trinitarianism and theodramatic Christology is designed to dramatise the triune God's kenotic engagement with the world without introducing a change in God. It continues to be disputed whether Balthasar ends up divinising suffering and making God into a tragic deity or succeeds in redefining and complexifying divine immutability. To engage with this question, this article critically examines Balthasar's theological use of the image of ‘the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world’, which plays a pivotal role in his kenotic and theodramatic soteriology. I will argue that his kenosis-driven understanding of John's Gospel is untenable, and his rich theological use of Revelation's image of the Lamb slain, intensified by his questionable exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, renders super-temporal suffering and death real in the life of God.

Many Christian groups and churches have been forced to recognize that they have been complicit in behaviour which has betrayed the gospel. How then is the church to address the historical reality of being an abusive healer? The image of the bronze serpent (Num. 21.4-9; 2 Kgs 18.4; Jn 3.14) offers an ambiguous image which may reveal the reality of the church as both a source of abuse and trauma as well as an instrument of healing within a pattern of restorative justice.

This article questions the value of the categories ‘the school of Antioch’ and ‘Antiochene christology’ on the basis of the significant theological differences between the two central figures in the school: John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia, both of whom studied together at the school of Diodore of Tarsus in the late fourth century. Drawing on scholarship which has pointed to the coherence of Theodore's exegesis and christology, I show that Chrysostom's exegesis and christology are also coherent, but in a way which is at odds with those of Theodore. As opposed to Theodore's distinctions between the two testaments and between the human and the divine in Christ, Chrysostom has a strongly unitive reading of scripture's two testaments and of the person of Christ. In my argument I especially employ Theodore's and Chrysostom's respective exegetical works on the Gospel of John.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus declares himself to be the way to the Father; in the First Apocalypse of James, Jesus explains exactly what this way entails. This article analyzes how 1 Apoc. Jas. uses the Johannine christological themes of identity, death and ascension and makes them applicable for human salvation. The identity of Jesus as a son of the Father, as opposed to the inhabitants of the world/cosmos, his autonomous death that conquers cosmic evils, and his immediate ascension and fleshly return are all Johannine motifs that are reformulated in 1 Apoc. Jas. Jesus reveals to James that he too is a son of the Father, and James must declare this identity during his postmortem journey through the celestial toll-collectors. He must not fear his impending stoning as, like other martyrdom literature, the martyr is immune to earthly concerns, and the real challenge lies in the cosmic sphere.

For centuries, the lost Jewish-Christian dialogue Jason and Papiscus was known only through various quotations and summaries from Patristic sources. This changed in 2011 with the publication of a newly discovered, large fragment of Jason and Papiscus known as the Sinaiticus fragment. The current article examines the Sinaiticus fragment, compares it to the previously known remnants of Jason and Papiscus and examines the information from the fragment in relation to other texts. Several important new observations are obtained as a result. This article—for the first time—unites the Sinaiticus fragment with all of the Patristic material related to Jason and Papiscus in one appendix, with all entries newly translated by the author with updated notes. This article also contains new digital images of the Sinaiticus fragment.

P.Ryl.iii.457, a papyrus fragment of the gospel of John known to New Testament scholars as P52, is regularly publicised as the earliest extant Christian manuscript and forms a central part of the Rylands collection. Yet the date generally assigned to the fragment (‘about 125 ad’) is based entirely on palaeography, or analysis of handwriting, which cannot provide such a precise date. The present article introduces new details about the acquisition of P52, engages the most recent scholarship on the date of the fragment and argues that the range of possible palaeographic dates for P52 extends into the third century.

In History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, Martyn argued that John 9.22 concerns the formal expulsion from the synagogue of Jews who were confessing Jesus as the Messiah of Jewish expectation. Johannine scholars following Martyn have often claimed that a ‘high’ Christology must have provided the catalyst for this trauma, not the ‘low’ Christology posited by Martyn. For Martyn, however, a ‘high’ Christology was a subsequent development, leading to a second trauma, that of execution for blasphemously claiming that Jesus was somehow equal to God. Accepting Martyn's argument on 9.22 with respect to this issue, and leaving aside the debate about the relevance of the Birkat ha-Minim, this article seeks to determine why local synagogue authorities, evidently represented in John's narrative by the Pharisees, would have found the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah so offensive that they formulated a decree to expel fellow Jews espousing this new messianic faith. Analysis of John 5, 7 and 9 demonstrates that the Pharisees in the Johannine setting found this confession offensive because they regarded the behaviour of Johannine disciples on the Sabbath as thoroughly inconsistent with their own understanding of the Sabbath commandment and as significantly hindering their desire to play an authoritative role in determining what counted as acceptable behaviour on the Sabbath and what did not. In short, the specific catalyst for expelling Jews confessing Jesus as Messiah from the synagogue was their Sabbath observance, which the Pharisees in the Johannine setting came to regard as an unacceptable deviation from their own developing views on the matter in the period after 70 ce.

In the Gospel of John, the apostles Andrew and Philip enjoy a privileged position right from the beginning. The reason seems to lie in the fact that they, being from Bethsaida in Galilee and probably fluent in Greek, could serve as intermediaries between ‘Greeks’ and Jesus, whom they wanted to ‘see’. Such an encounter happens in John 12.20–2. According to John, Jesus called Andrew before his brother Peter, whom Andrew then led to Jesus. Philip is the second person directly called by Jesus, himself leading another future disciple to Jesus: Nathanael (John 1.35–46). James and John are completely missing not only in the Johannine scene of the calling of disciples but also in the whole of the Fourth Gospel. The importance of Andrew and Philip follows also from the rest of the Gospel of John. The evangelist seems to depend on an early tradition attested in Asia Minor and to modify the synoptic tradition on its basis.

The dispute ‘about purification’ between the disciples of John the Baptist and a Jew (John 3.25) has to do with the priority of ethical purity as effected through baptism over the ritual washing prescribed by the Torah, e.g. before entering the Jerusalem temple. This issue is referred to in John 13.10 and 15.3, and also in P.Oxy. 840. It is presupposed here that the circle of Jesus’ disciples received John's baptism of repentance either from John the Baptist or from Jesus (John 3.22, 26; 4.1). The Gospel of John thus engages with an ongoing debate within Jewish Christianity about the obligatory nature of ritual washing.

This article examines Albert the Great's interpretation of John 1:7 concerning John the Baptist: “He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him.” Commenting on this verse, Albert develops the idea that the metaphysical approach to God, according to which the notion of God is purified of all sensory images, must be completed by a method that is more connatural to the human being: testimonial knowledge, that is, relying on the senses and imagination, using the metaphors that God himself has suggested through his revelation. Albert's reading of John 1:7 is found to be in continuity with key ideas elsewhere in his oeuvre.

While the locus classicus for early Christian arguments concerning resurrection of the flesh is Paul's first Corinthian letter, the statement in 15.50 that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’ complicates early Christian understandings of resurrection and its form. Such explicit denial of fleshly inheritance and resurrection within Paul's writings leads to widely conflicting interpretations of this Corinthian passage. Consequently, early Christian writers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Augustine engaged other New Testament texts such as John 11 in order to subvert the claim of 1 Cor 15.50 and develop their argument for fleshly resurrection.

Biblical proof-texts for the prophethood of Muḥammad play a prominent role in early Muslim interest in the Bible. This study re-examines the earliest known attempt by Muslims to find such a biblical proof-text in the New Testament – the Arabic version of Jesus's sermon on the “advocate/comforter” (Gk. paráklētos) in John 15: 23–16 found in Ibn Isḥāq's Kitāb al-Maghāzī. Key to understanding Ibn Isḥāq's adaptation of the Johannine text, this study argues, is the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Gospel behind it as well as the climate of Late Antique apocalypticism and messianism out of which Ibn Isḥāq's distinctively Islamic version emerged. This study concludes with an interpretation of Quran 61: 6, which appears to claim that Jesus prophesied a future prophet named Aḥmad.