Faith is an important concept in early Christianity. But what did the word pistis (and its Latin equivalent fides) mean in the everyday language of Greeks and Romans? In her important study, Teresa Morgan rightly insists that we need to pay as much attention to the way words worked in the mentalité of the wider social world with which Christians were seeking to communicate as we do to the ways they are used in the New Testament. This article seeks to summarize Morgan’s understanding of pistis in the classical world and its impact on NT texts, focusing on the two major themes of pistis as relationship ( believing/trusting in) and pistis as propositional belief ( believing that).
Death features as an important concept in the Pauline writings in the New Testament for a number of reasons. However, the intriguing way in which the apostle at times addressed death as positive notion in itself, was traditionally related to Paul�s theological convictions and his understanding of the death of Christ in particular. The remarkably pointed way in which Paul positively celebrated death in Philippians 1:21 borders on invoking a martyrological paradigm, and raises questions about his convictions regarding life, and bodily existence in particular. Interesting analogies emerge when Paul�s celebration of death is compared in a concluding section with contemporary, popular instances where death is � even if for different reasons � presented as �gain�.
Erasmus, after the dry philological task of editing the Greek text of the New Testament with annotations and a new translation, turned to his paraphrases with a sense of great freedom, bath literary and pastoral. Thomas More’s debt to his friend’s Biblical labors has been demonstrated but never systematically assessed. The faithful translation and annotation provided by Toronto provides an opportunity for examining a number of passages from St. Paul and St. James in the light of bath Erasmus’ exegesis and More’s apologetics.
A biblical death-wish: Paul celebrating dying in Phil 1:21
