This study poses and answers two questions: 1. What is the basis in the tradition for the Acts 13 and 14 narrative about Paul's and Barnabas' mission on Cyprus and in southern Galatia? 2. Who are the addressees of the letter to the Galatians?
Using the extant inscriptions and literary sources that relate to the provinces of Cyprus and Galatia in the early Roman Empire, the above questions are addressed to Acts and Galatians, and answered as follows: 1 Acts 13-14 contains so much local colour as to rule out the thesis that the so-called first missionary journey is fictional. 2. Paul's...

This volume deals with the encounter of Early Christianity with Hellenistic culture, particularly with the question of ancient rhetorical influence on the First Letter of Clement. It contains reprints of two classical studies by A. von Harnack and W. Jaeger, which were seminal for the understanding the letter against a Hellenistic background, furthermore it makes an important essay of the Dutch scholar W.C. van Unnik on the literary and rhetorical genre of First Clement (genos symbouleutikon) for the first time available in English. The editors also present two new studies: Breytenbach...

This volume contains a collection of essays in honour of Bernard C. Lategan, a renowned specialist on the modern reception of the New Testament. Besides offering anayses of Lategan's own contribution to New Testament scholarship, the essays present and discuss interpretations of the New Testament from antiquity through contemporary critical scholarship. Topics covered include hermeneutical issues of historical Jesus research, intertextuality in antiquity, the interpretation of the New Testament in Africa, and the New Testament as literature. The collection thus provides a representative...

How did the first Christians interpret the death of Christ? The answer lies within the earliest Christian documents, primarily within the Pauline letters. Before the users of a modern language could hope to come near an adequate description of what was expressed in these Greek texts of the first Christians, they have to deconstruct layers of later dogmatic interpretation. They need to keep to descriptive terminology reflecting the Greek of the sources and to trace the origin of the metaphoric language early Christians like Paul used. This volume sets out to construct some of the Jewish and...

Between 1973 and 1983 three volumes of collected essays by Willem C. van Unnik appeared under the title Sparsa Collecta. All the essays in these volumes had been published between 1930 and 1970. The editors of the present volume decided to publish a fourth volume with a selection of his later papers, some of which appear here for the first time in English (they were originally published in Dutch).