Few men have better deserved the double title of scholar and saint than James Hope Moulton, with five doctorates, and the first Wesleyan minister to win a Cambridge Fellowship. His fame and learning (notably in Greek and Zoroastrianism) were everywhere celebrated. To learning he added a passion for social righteousness, and his church counted him a paragon. He died in an open boat (1917) in the middle of the Mediterranean when his vessel, homeward bound from India, was torpedoed—his last days and hours being perhaps his supreme example of Christian living. This book celebrated the centenary of his birth; those who knew him will be thankful for this tribute—and those who learn of him from these pages will be thankful to God for such a life.
Did Paul ever meet Jesus and hear him teach? A century ago, a curious assortment of scholars - William Ramsay, Johannes Weiss, and James Hope Moulton - thought that he had. Since then, their idea has virtually disappeared from New Testament scholarship, to be revived in this monograph. When Paul Met Jesus is an exercise in both biblical exegesis and intellectual history. After examining the positive arguments raised, it considers the negative influence of Ferdinand Christian Baur, William Wrede, and Rudolf Bultmann on such an idea, as they drove a growing wedge between Jesus and Paul. In response, Stanley E. Porter analyzes three passages in the New Testament - Acts 9:1-9 and its parallels, 1 Corinthians 9:1, and 2 Corinthians 5:16 - to confirm that there is New Testament evidence that Paul encountered Jesus. The implications of this discovery are then explored in important Pauline passages that draw Jesus and Paul back together again.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, large numbers of Greek papyri dating to the early Christian period were discovered in Egypt. Some of these contain biblical texts or fragments of Hellenistic literature, but many others are nonliterary: private letters, records of business transactions and civil proceedings, etc. New Testament scholars soon recognized that this corpus of new material could in many cases illuminate usages in the Greek New Testament for which exact parallels had never been located in classical Greek literature. For the first time it was possible to recognize that "New Testament Greek" was not a peculiar Hebraic-Greek dialect but an expression of the "Koine" Greek commonly used in everyday life throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. In the first decade of the 1900s, James Hope Moulton asked George Milligan to join him in assembling data from the papyri regarding particular New Testament words. After Moulton's death in 1915, Milligan continued the work. The result was the publication of The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament in fascicles between 1914 and 1929 and in a single-volume edition in 1930. This work has been reprinted a number of times, and New Testament scholars still consider it a standard reference. Milligan's 14-page introduction describes the papyri and their significance for our understanding of the language of the New Testament. Then, after a table of abbreviations, follow 705 pages of entries in alphabetical order. The entries are given in Greek script, but in this new reprint Strong's numbers have been added to make the work more accessible to those with limited knowledge of Greek. Another important new addition is an index of New Testament passages. This thorough index, meticulously prepared under the direction of Professor Daniel B. Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, will greatly enhance the usefulness of this classic work for scholars, pastors, and all who wish to delve more deeply into the meanings of New Testament words.
