New Testament

The new ecumenical Hungarian Bible translation project began in 2017, following guidelines established by the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the Bible Societies. This translation effort involves both Catholic and Reformed experts and has received approval from the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The project is characterised by a novel approach, where biblical scholars from philological, exegetical, and theological perspectives refine the base text prepared by the stylist.

The emergence of new manuscripts often raises the question of whether they contain authentic sayings of Jesus. What criteria can we use to determine if the Gospel of Thomas includes similar logia? This paper argues that ancient authors considered reports authentic in ways different from our modern judgments. Methodologically, this article first attempts to filter out non-authentic sayings. Approximately half of the logia in the Gospel of Thomas are presumably authentic, paralleling sayings preserved in the Synoptic Gospels.

This study examines the Egyptian vision of resurrection, initially developed in the cults of the gods Isis and Osiris. In this belief system, the deceased could unite with Osiris and find eternal rest in him. Initiates of Isis could escape the cruel power of fate, and Serapis, a near-human deity, offered a connection to mortal man. The mysteries were relatively easy to join and accessible to all, which sometimes led to confusion in the early Christian churches. The cult of Isis and Osiris spread rapidly throughout the Mediterranean.

The mission of our churches is to proclaim the good news of the Bible amidst the belligerent atmosphere of the 21st century. According to the teachings of the New Testament, peace cannot be achieved through diplomatic procedures or military tactics, but only through God’s grace. The author of the Epistle, a disciple of Paul, emphasises both aspects of peace: reconciliation among people and between humanity and God.

In the editorial-theological concept of Luke, his message is not always formulated as a finalising conclusion. Often, he reports on certain events as a starting point. Thus, the events described follow one another in a vague or artificial chronological order. These descriptions often also implicitly determine the events and descriptions that follow them in canonical, or even in chronological order.

In our study, we examined the ancient Greco-Roman liberality-ethos from the Hellenistic to the early imperial period. By examining the terminology of gift-giving and liberality in the ancient Greek world and the New Testament, we can discover quite a lot of analogies between the Greco-Roman philosophical ideals of liberality and the theological basis of giving in the New Testament.

The Second Epistle of Peter makes an important, and in some ways unconventional con-tribution to our understanding of biblical eschatology. The main message of the Epistle is clear: this world must be destroyed by fire so that “new heavens and a new earth may take its place”. In the New Testament, only Revelation speaks so clearly about the cosmic consequences of the Day of the Lord. However, the statement about the great final conflagration raises literary, text-critical and theological questions.