In recent years much literature has been devoted to this topic. If still another discussion can be justified, it is on the grounds that many of the best insights have not been brought together and that perhaps now we may be in a position to draw a larger picture that will represent a certain consensus.

Das auf den Prolog folgende Fragment des Evangeliums nach Johannes spricht über Johannes den Täufer. Dieses Fragment besteht aus zwei Teilen. Der erste dessen Inhalt uns die Person Johannes des Täufers vorstellt, erzählt von seinem Zeugnis vor den Abgesandten des Hohen Rates. Der zweite Teil des Fragments enthält das Zeugnis seinen Schülern gegenüber, und den Bericht von der Berufung der Schüler Christi. Hier wird auch definiert, wer Christus eigentlich ist.

The term ‘Heilsgeschichte’ reminds one a little of the state of affairs in Israel when there was no king: everyone understands it ‘as seems right in his own eyes’. In part this variety of understandings arises because the Bible itself has varied views and emphases about history and salvation, but also in part because scholars have a variety of emotional responses and intellectual understandings with regard to the term ‘Heilsgeschichte’, itself a word which has been with us as a technical term for roughly a century and a half—that is, during the whole period of modern critical Bible study. To complicate matters, there are related concepts which often colour our understandings of the term—for example, ‘stewardship’ and ‘dispensationalism’, particularly in the English-speaking world; and the notion of an ‘economy of God’, wherever the patristic tradition weighs heavily in biblical studies.