NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 54, Issue 3, 2000

This article critically reviews the Dutch translation of the book of Neil Douglas-Klotz, The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus (1999). Douglas-Klotz with the help of the Peshitta searches for the Aramaic words of Jesus in order to find Jesus’ original spiritual message. Through a comparison of Matth. 7:17, the Lord’s Prayer, John 4:24 and their reconstructed original ‘Aramaic’ wordings it is demonstrated that Douglas-Klotz only shows his own spiritual thoughts with regard to the texts, but not the spirituality of Jesus. The suggested scientific basis for the hidden words of Jesus appears to be a rather pseudo-scientific one.

The essay offers a bibliographical review of recent developments in the psychology of religion. In the first part, an outline of the field is provided; in the second part a number of selected themes are discussed briefly.

Western missiology is nowadays mainly concerned with the new theologies from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ecumenical studies sees itself increasingly as the discipline that describes the content and the rules of the religious communication between North and South in Christianity. In this World Wide field of study the Internet has become an indispensable source of information. In describing a few searches, e.g. for ecumenical dialogues, for material for a bibliography, our goal is twofold: we want to find relevant websites and in doing so clarify a number of peculiarities with regard to searching on the Internet.

This article gives a survey of interesting sites on the World Wide Web, relevant for research of church history, especially in the Netherlands. The conclusion is that the virtual library offers only a reference collection, with encyclopedia’s and text editions that are far inferior to those that are published in print. The author gives three reasons for the disappointing electronic collection: there is a lack of staff to make electronic versions of printed books etc., free electronic versions are not possible when there are copyright-restrictions, and, last but not least, many scholars still want to publish on paper.