NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 53, Issue 4, 1999

The recently published Qumran text 4Q448 has already generated much discussion: who is the ‘Jonathan’ mentioned in the text, and what is the Qumran community’s relation to him? Two key problems must be resolved, one paleographical, the other syntactical. The author proposes a new combination of solutions (concluding that the text is directed against Jonathan Maccabaeus), which situates the text easily and without forcing in the history and thinking of the Qumran community.

In the middle of the sixth century CE the Greek monk Cyril of Scythopolis withdrew to the famous monastery of Sabas in the Kidron Valley to the south-east of Jerusalem in order to write biographies of the most influential Palestinian desert fathers. In this article the author investigates the formative role the Bible played in the way Cyril pictured these Christian heroes of ascetism and the crucial role his desert hermeneutics played in the way he reads Scripture.

The classical Protestant view on Christ’s role in reconciliation (especially as formulated by the Catechism of Heidelberg) is often considered to be, basically, that of Anselm’s Cur deus homo. This article offers a systematic-theological reconstruction of Anselm’s thoughts on this theme showing that this is not true. According to Anselm Christ did not have to restore God’s loss of honour, nor did he have to die as someone punished instead of others. Yet human beings do need Christ in their place; for human nature needs to regain its integrity and this cannot be done by God’s forgiveness only, nor by human persons themselves moved by Christ’s life and death.