Diakonia Studies

Diakonia Studies closes the account on John N. Collinss 40 years of involvement in groundbreaking linguistic research and argumentation concerning the nature and functioning of Christian ministry. Dispute has swirled around the Greek term diakonia for 50 years. Once seen as enshrining the New Testament value of loving Christian servicewhat Jerome Murphy-O'Connor called "one of the dogmas of New Testament scholarship"the word was exposed by Dieter Georgi in 1964 as arguably meaning something quite different. In 1974 John N. Collins published his first paper on the issue, pointing to inadequacies in Georgi's brief account. Then in 1990 Collins published his exhaustive semantic survey, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources. His re-interpretation was variously hailed as "devastating," "provocative," "unfashionable," and "a scholarly avalanche whose conclusions are inescapable." Since then, the book has stood at the center of the Collins-Debate. Meanwhile Collins's findings have