By the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th “Introductions” became the vehicle for conflicting speculations about the history of early Christianity, as scholars attributed various NT books to different schools of 1st- and 2d-century thought. To some extent this tendency has been continued on the contemporary American scene by the NT Introductions of Norman Perrin (1st ed.) and Helmut Koester. Yet as the Bibliography at the end of this Chapter indicates, today there is a wide variety of