The issue of Origen's relations with contemporary Judaism has attracted considerable attention, particularly in the past decade. There seems to be little question that Origen produced the bulk of his extensive exegetical work during the years he lived, taught, and preached in the Palestinian coastal city of Caesarea, from about 232 to his death between 251 and 255, and that Caesarea was a major intellectual center of rabbinic Judaism at that time. It is also generally agreed that Origen had frequent exchanges with Jews, friendly consultations as well as public debates; that Origen's writings suggest reasonable acquaintance with contemporary Jewish belief and practice; and that biblical exegeses known to us from rabbinic sources appear in the commentaries and homilies of Origen.

One of the most significant events in recent Anabaptist studies has been the entry of secular historians into a field traditionally populated by confessional apologists.The result has been a striking change in historical perspective, particularly concerning the origin and nature of the early Swiss Anabaptist movement. Whereas Harold Bender saw Anabaptism as an emphatically religious movement which emerged directly from Zwingli's reformation and continued on the original path even after Zwingli had abandoned his original vision, the new view suggests that Swiss Anabaptism grew out of the social, economic, and religious ferment of Zürich and the outlying rural districts.But the revision does not stop there.

On the fIfth day of August in 1603, the mayor of Norwich and “a great multitude of people” crowded into Saint Andrew's parish church to hear John Robinson preach an afternoon sermon celebrating the third anniversary of James I's deliverance from the Gowrie Plot. In the congregation were two of Bishop John Jegon's lay informers, Michaell Peade and Frances Dawes. As Robinson began, the two informants turned a critical ear, intent on sifting the sermon for hints of the kind of ecclesiastical radicalism that establishment prelates recently had found so exasperatingly disruptive to the ministerial machinery. They had good cause for concern since the young Robinson, fresh from Cambridge University where a generation earlier the new wave of religious dissent had first flourished, was now in Norwich seeking a license from Jegon to preach in his diocese.

In his book, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, Robert T. Handy stresses “the important role that the idea of civilization has played in the evangelical Protestant denominations that together made up the dominant religious subculture of nineteeth-century America.” Handy contends that the English-speaking evangelical Protestant denominations—he includes the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, United Brethren, and the evangelical wing in the Protestant Episcopal Church—thought of themselves as making up the “religious mainstream of the nation” and were motivated by the vision of a Christian America. They saw it as their task to work for the creation of a nation based on Christian principles, and they sought to utilize a number of institutions, voluntary organizations, and techniques to achieve that goal.

Historians of the development of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century have normally treated this aspect of intellectual history as a preserve of the university don and the ambitious cleric. However, further study points to a movement of considerable magnitude and momentum beginning in the last decades of that century which aimed at popularizing the methods and results of the higher criticism of the Old Testament. Widespread popular recognition of a critical approach to the Old Testament and its implications began in the 1860s in response to the work of J. W. Colenso and the contributors to Essays and Reviews.