The Jerusalem temple played a significant role in the life of ancient Judaism. It was believed to be the dwelling place of God on earth, a sole place of sacrificial worship and sacrificial priesthood. As such it was inseparably connected with the Jewish priesthood. It was through the cultic ministry of the priests in the Jerusalem temple the atonement for the sins of Israel was made. Seen from the Jewish context of the first century any study of Jesus’ relationship to the ancient Jewish temple involves also the study of his relationship to the ancient Jewish priesthood. In the cleansing of the temple (Jn 2:13-22) the fourth evangelist presents Jesus not only as the new temple and the new paschal sacrifice, but also as the new high priest, who offers himself as an ultimate sacrifice. Thus, the Johannine Jesus purifies, fulfills in him and supersedes all these Jewish cultic institutions and becomes the new temple, the new sacrifice and the new high priest. He further confers his ‘templeness’ and priesthood upon his disciples making them the locus of God’s presence on earth and the priests to minister in the eschatological temple, Jesus Christ.

The word resurrection (ἀνάστασις) occurs only twice in the Book of Revelation. This prompted several scholars to either deny or overlook the resurrection motif of this biblical book. On the other side, like a single thread running from the beginning till the end, the resurrection motif used in various images, metaphors and contexts can be found permeating the entire book. Based on these images, metaphors and contexts pointing to resurrection, this study has the guiding hypotheses that Revelation is a book with a resurrection motif, and that the apocalyptic woman is the mother of resurrection. She is the mother of mankind redeemed through the birth of Christ event and her birth pang is a groaning for redemption, which is the birth of the new heavenly Jerusalem; an anthropological imagination of a space devoid of evil and everything that has to do with the culture of death, because God, the Ultimate Source of life, dwells in it. Such a hermeneutics will change some peoples’ vision of Revelation as a “horror book” to a book of hope and consolation.

The Priestly tradition (P) has been recognized for more than a century by Old Testament scholars as one of the major literary strata in the formation of the Pentateuch. Its nature, namely its original literary character, is significant to understand the formation history of the Pentateuch, but remains also one of its major problems. The present study investigates the nature of P by taking the flood narrative (Gn 6,5‒9,17), one of the important texts in the Old Testament, as a test case. On the basis of serious methodological reflections on the relationship between redaction criticism and source criticism on the one hand, and between redaction criticism and textual criticism on the other, followed by a comprehensive survey of the history of research on the nature of P in the Pentateuch and in the flood narrative, the author offers her own detailed redaction-historical and text-critical study of the flood narrative, with a specific focus on the nature of P therein. The study leads to a critical conclusion on the nature of P in the flood narrative, which further serves as a good case for the study of the nature of P in the Pentateuch.