Included among the lines of the Priestly Blessing is the prayer that ‘the LORD [would] cause his face to shine upon you’ (Numbers 6:25), at least as it is often translated. This prayer has a small number of echoes in the rest of the Hebrew Bible with sufficient similarity to suggest something like a formulaic usage, and enough difference to raise questions about the meaning of the saying in each of its contexts. Beyond this, how should this anthropomorphism be understood? What does it mean for God’s ‘face’ to ‘shine’: is this a simple, transparent metaphor? Or does its elucidation require some deeper investigation? This exploration of the ‘shining face’ of the Deity further attempts to make a contribution to a (Christian) theology of ‘divine light’, for which previous accounts have tended to ignore this potentially illuminating set of texts.

This article considers the parable of the Good Samaritan within the framework of Luke’s concern with the restoration of a united kingdom of Israel. This long-anticipated reintegration of North and South, Samaritan and Jew, through the exercise of God’s compassion, parabolically demonstrated in the actions of a merciful Samaritan, and evidenced in the Samaritan responses to Jesus and the apostolic proclamation in Luke-Acts, is to be reflected in the brotherly compassion to which God’s one people are called.

By my calculations, the apostle Paul travelled over 12,000 kilometres by land and over 8,000 kilometres by sea just on the journeys that he made in the latter half of his life that happen to be recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The modern reader cannot help but be astonished by these long distances. But what would have astonished an ancient Greek or Roman reader was not the sum total of the distances of Paul’s journeys but rather the ratio of land to sea travel. Most ancients who lived, like Paul, along the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘like frogs around a pond’ as Plato quips (Phaed. 109b), preferred to take the much easier, faster, and more efficient routes by sea, and the ratio of their land to sea travel would have been the reverse of Paul’s. Paul is depicted in the Acts of the Apostles as someone who shunned sea travel whenever possible and preferred to travel by foot rather than by ship in almost every instance in which this option was open to him.

The idea of a heavenly temple is widespread in the ancient world, including in the New Testament. Yet it has been a neglected theme in New Testament scholarship, certainly by comparison with the related yet less prominent themes of Christ as temple and community as temple. This article first outlines the extent of the theme in the New Testament. It then outlines reasons for this neglect before focusing on one: the mismatch between ancient conceptualisations of the universe and modern scientific cosmology. It explores and critiques a number of attempts to account for this gulf, a debate which continues to be influenced by Bultmann’s category of demythologisation. It finally argues that, even on a ‘mythological’ construal of the New Testament writers’ cosmology, the connection of temple with heaven speaks eloquently of the nature of God’s abode.

Jesus’s use of the language of the Kingdom assumes that his audience was familiar with the concept. The most obvious place to seek a background for it is therefore in the Old Testament. Although the term itself is found only infrequently there, it does occur at a few points. By far the richest Old Testament source for understanding the Kingdom is the Book of Psalms because of its consistent emphasis on the theme of God as king. This motif comes to particular prominence in Book 4. Previous studies of this book have struggled to connect the language here to the Kingdom because of the dominance of form critical models, but newer canonical approaches allow us to understand more clearly how the language of God’s reign is here applied to the particular needs of the community addressed by that book. This is particularly important in Psalms 93, 97, and 99, which speak of YHWH’s reign. Although not explicitly cited in the New Testament, these psalms provide important background to the presentation of the Kingdom in the book of Revelation, which likewise uses the language of the Kingdom to provide hope for those who struggle. The good news of the Kingdom in Jesus’s proclamation is therefore not an abstract statement about God’s reign but a message that addressed the needs of the community who heard him.

Is there internal evidence to support the early church tradition that Luke was a physician? Scholars throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century gravitated toward this position, but due to the refutations brought against it by Henry Cadbury, it has largely been abandoned. This paper argues that the case deserves new consideration. It delineates the three main pillars of Cadbury’s counterargument, discussing new scholarship and academic resources that undermine the strength of each of his points against the internal evidence.

The temperature metaphor in Revelation chapter 3 is used by Jesus to admonish the Laodiceans regarding their spiritual condition. The prevailing understanding of the metaphor centres around the city’s deficient water system, an interpretation no longer tenable because of recent archaeological discoveries. A subsequent interpretation of the metaphor was proposed, but this too is not persuasive. After briefly reviewing the archaeological finds related to Laodicea’s hydrological situation and critiquing the alternate proposal, a fresh hypothesis is introduced for interpreting the temperature metaphor by setting it amidst the material culture of Laodicea and the other six cities in Asia, specifically bathing in a Roman bathhouse.

Observing similarities between some Amorite and Patriarchal names, scholars suggested that they indicated that the patriarchal narratives themselves reflect the Middle Bronze Age. Others observed names of the same form were current in later times, so could not point to any specific period for the Patriarchs’ life setting. Further study of Amorite names can strengthen the case for the early date for the Patriarchal names.