Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Vol. 4.2 pp. 125-126 DOI: 10.

1177/1476869006064868 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi http://JSHJ.sagepub.com

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

I wish to draw to our readers attention to two services provided by SAGE Publications, the publisher of JSHJ, which are designed to serve you better. First, you can sign up for a free service that will notify you by email when your favourite SAGE journal (which would be JSHJ of course!) has a new issue, and you will be sent a table of contents. In addition, you can register to receive an email alert for particular key words, authors, or citations. For further information, please go to http://online.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts. Secondly, JSHJ has its own area on the SAGE website, where you can get further information about the journal as well as download particular essays. Downloads have a small charge associated with them, unless you or your library has an electronic subscription to the journal. For further information, please go to http://jshj.sagepub.com. The rst essay, by John C. Poirier, Seeing What Is There in Spite of Ourselves: George Tyrrell, John Dominic Crossan, and Robert Frost on Faces in Deep Wells, is an exploration of the role that epistemology plays in historical Jesus studies. He picks up on Tyrrells now famous metaphor about only seeing ones own reection as one gazes down the deep well of history to explore how Crossan has misread a poem by Robert Frost. The implications Poirier draws with reference to the epistemologies of historical Jesus scholars are most intriguing. William John Lyons essay, The Hermeneutics of Fictional Black and Factual Red: The Markan Simon of Cyrene and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, uses the variety of scholarly opinions concerning the historicity of Simon of Cyrenes carrying of Jesus cross to explore the hermeneutical presuppositions that the scholars bring to the text and that inuence the decisions they make with reference to an issue like the historicity of Simon of Cyrene. Lyons concludes with some reections on his own views and his hermeneutical presuppositions. The third essay, by Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis, Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah, is actually the rst half of a two-part essay that explores the evidence that Jesus not only thought that he would ultimately be Israels king, but that he would also be their high priest after the order of Melchizedek. This essay considers a variety of high-priestly themes, particularly as they are represented in the early chapters of Marks Gospel.

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The fourth essay by myself, Robert L. Webb, is Jesus Heals a Leper: Mark 1.40-45 and Egerton Gospel 35-47. All editorial board members are invited to contribute an essay when they join the board. The task of editing the journal has meant that I have been somewhat remiss in not submitting my own inaugural essay. The essay argues for the historicity of Jesus healing a leper and explores the signicant role that the Egerton Gospels account of this event plays in such an investigation. The nal essay by John S. Kloppenborg, Holtzmanns Life of Jesus according to the A Source, is the second half of the essay that began in the preceding issue of this journal. While known for establishing Markan priority and the twosource hypothesis, H.J. Holtzmanns volume, Die synoptischen Evangelien, also includes a discussion of the life of Jesus based on an early Mark-like source. This latter element in Holtzmanns work has been neglected. Kloppenborg not only sets this work into its context, he also provides readers with an annotated English translation. Robert L. Webb Executive Editor, JSHJ