‘Think before you speak’: The power of the tongue by Philo and James. It is appropriate to reflect on the ability of language in pursuing and establishing peace. This contribution briefly explores the Jewish Wisdom literature, the Jewish-Hellenistic philosophy of the corpus Philonicum and the wisdom genre of James 3 as valuable sources on the power of the tongue. At least five practical guidelines regarding speech and its role in the creation of peace are deduced from these three collections of (...) literature: the tongue might be small, but its effects are powerful; believers’ speech should be characterised by truth and honesty; there are times when one needs to speak up and openly; but there are also times that one should be cautious and rather keep quiet; wisdom is needed in exercising the ability to differentiate when to speak and when to keep quiet. It is important, however, to develop the ability to distinguish when to speak and when to keep quiet. (shrink)

The important contribution that the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) hold for New Testament studies is probably most evident in Ad Hebraeos. This contribution seeks to present an overview of relevant extant DSS fragments available for an investigation of the Old Testament explicit quotations and motifs in the book of Hebrews. A large number of the explicit quotations in Hebrews were already alluded to, or even quoted, in some of the DSS. The DSS are of great importance for the study of (...) the explicit quotations in Ad Hebraeos in at least four areas, namely in terms of its text-critical value, the hermeneutical methods employed in both the DSS and Hebrews, theological themes and motifs that surface in both works, and the socio-religious background in which these quotations are embedded. After these four areas are briefly explored, this contribution concludes, among others, that one can cautiously imagine a similar Jewish sectarian matrix from which certain Christian converts might have come – such as the author of Hebrews himself. (shrink)

The fact that the New Testament authors often referred or alluded to, or quoted from their Scriptures, and then very often linked those quotations, references, and allusions from their Jewish Scriptures to the Christ-event, has led to the viewpoint of some that ‘Christ is found in the OT’ – that is, that the OT prophesised about the events that took place regarding the person, Jesus of Nazareth. It is the intention of this contribution to confirm the position of mainstream biblical (...) scholarship that the Old Testament does not predict the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, but that the New Testament writers interpreted the Jesus-events in hindsight in the light of the Scriptures of Israel. The current study attempts to firstly unfold the meta-narrative of the New Testament in five acts. Against the backdrop of the last of these acts, the case of the crucifixion of Jesus as interpreted by Paul to the early Christians in Galatia receives particular attention. It is argued that Paul’s presentation of the crucifixion in Galatians – as based on Deuteronomy 21:23 – is done retrodictively to portray Yehoshua ben Yoseph as liberator of the law in Asia Minor. This study proposes the coinage of a new term in canonical biblical scholarship, namely the term ‘retrodiction’ – in opposition to the term ‘prediction’. (shrink)