Fortress Press

"Joachim Jeremias was the acknowledged twentieth-century specialist on the Semitic language of the Jesus traditions. His work on Jesus' parables, prayers, and eucharistic words, as well as Jesus' social contexts, are still much consulted. The shorter essays collected here are excellent distillations of his key ideas. They are models of simplicity and clarity and deserve to be read and re-read by scholar and student alike."
— Dennis Duling, Canisius College

Few biblical scholars have had the impact on their era as Joachim Jeremias did over the course of the twentieth century. His numerous works spanned every aspect of the discipline, covering New Testament exegesis and theology, archaeology, Greek and Aramaic linguistics, textual criticism, Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic studies, and the history of early Christianity. Not only a major academic figure, Jeremias confronted the political and social issues of his day. During World War II, Jeremias was a member of the Confessing Church along with such figures as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the movement that refused to cooperate with the Third Reich and state control of the churches. After the war, he played a significant role in reorganizing the University of Göttingen.

Jeremias was born in Dresden, Germany, on September 20, 1900, as the new century dawned. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Dr. Friedrich Jeremias, he was also the nephew of the Semitist and ancient Near Eastern scholar, Dr. Alfred Jeremias. From the ages of ten to fifteen, Jeremias lived in Jerusalem, where his father was the pastor/dean (Propst) of the German congregation of the Erlöserkirche (Church of the Redeemer). He completed his Dr.phil. in 1922 and his Dr.theol. in 1923, both at the University of Leipzig. His mentor (Doktorvater) was Gustaf Dalman, the renowned scholar of ancient Palestinian culture. He began his teaching career in 1922 at the Theological Seminary of the Brudergemeinde in Herrnhut, near Dresden. In 1924 he became a lecturer (Dozent) in Riga, Latvia, at the Herder Institute. He completed his Habilitationschrift at Leipzig in 1925, where he was also made Dozent. He went to the University of Berlin as an assistant professor (ausserordentlicher Professor) in 1928, where he was also appointed director of the Institutum Judaicum. And in 1929 he was appointed full professor at the University of Griefswald. After five years at Griefswald, he took an appointment at the University of Göttingen, where he spent the rest of his career. From 1948 he was a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, and from 1956 he convened the Septuagint Commission in Göttingen.

Internationally respected by the academy, Jeremias was highly honored for his work. He was awarded the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies by the British Academy, and he received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leipzig, St. Andrews, Uppsala, and Oxford. Furthermore, he was made a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the British Academy. And in 1970 he was made an honorary fellow of Deutsche Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas (German Society for Palestinian Research). His colleagues and students produced volumes of essays in his honor (Festschriften) to celebrate both his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays: Judentum, Urchristentum, Kirche (1960), and Der Ruf Jesu und die Antwort der Gemeinde (1970).

Jeremias's work was driven by several important issues. He attempted to reconstruct the Aramaic substratum of Jesus' sayings to reach Jesus' actual voice (ipsissima vox). This is evident in the chapters in this book, as well as fundamental in The Parables of Jesus, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, and The Prayers of Jesus. He researched the Hebrew Bible, Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic works for comparisons and contrasts to the teachings of Jesus and the earliest churches, and this is especially evident in his twenty-eight articles in The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich). This also led him to research the noncanonical sayings of Jesus in Unknown Sayings of Jesus. Unlike many of his contemporaries (notably Bultmann), he argued strongly for the recovery of Jesus' teachings as foundational for theology.

Both the social world and archaeology of the first century intensely interested Jeremias. This was no doubt the result of having lived in Jerusalem as a boy, as well as a product of his research while a fellow of the Deutschen Evangelischen Institut für Altertumswissenschaft des Heiligen Landes (German Evangelical Institute for Research in Antiquity of the Holy Land) in 1931–32. These experiences informed one of his most enduring works, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, but also in his studies of Golgotha, the pool of Bethesda, Caesarea, and Megiddo.

An active professor as well as scholar, he mentored many students through their doctorates. His most famous student in Britain and the U.S. was Norman Perrin, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago. Among his Continental doctoral students, the names of Eduard Lohse, Bernhard Lohse, Eduard Schweizer, Christoph Burchard, and Elias Bickerman stand out. Although not his student, Martin Hengel was profoundly influenced by Jeremias's work as well. Jeremias's three sons also went into biblical studies: Jörg, Christian, and Gert. After his retirement in 1968, Jeremias moved to Tübingen, where he died September 6, 1979. More than twenty years after his death, his work continues to inform and challenge us.

— K. C. Hanson, editor

Acknowledgments
Editor's Foreword

1. Searching for the Historical Jesus
The Theology of the Kerygma
The Crucial Significance of the Historical Jesus
The Good News of Jesus and the Proclamation of the Early Church

2. The Sermon on the Mount
The Problem
The Origins of the Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount as an Early Christian Catechism
The Individual Sayings of Jesus
Not Law, but Gospel

3. The Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer in the Ancient Church
The Earliest Text of the Lord's Prayer
The Meaning of the Lord's Prayer


4. The Central Message of the New Testament
'Abba'
The Sacrificial Death
Justification by Faith
The Revealing Word


Abbreviations
Notes
Index of Ancient Sources
Index of Authors
Index of Terms
Bibliography of Joachim Jeremias's Works