It seems paradoxical that the event which has divided our reckoning of time into years B.C. and A.D. should itself seem largely undatable. The birth of Christ is variously assigned to the years ranging from 7 to 2 B.C. The terminus ad quem must certainly be the death of Herod the Great, since the king was very much alive during the visit of the Magi in the Christmas story. According to Josephus, Herod died soon after an eclipse of the moon and not long before a Passover. Emil Schürer's chronology of Herod's reign from the accounts of Josephus, which has long been standard, identifies this as the lunar eclipse which took place on the night of March 12/13, 4 B.C., and which would have been visible in Judea. It also occurred one month before the Passover that year. On this basis, the birth of Jesus could not have been later than the spring of 4 B.C., and most likely took place in the winter of 5/4 B.C.

Liturgical questions have never aroused wider public interest and more intense emotions in the history of Sweden and Finland than they did during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Reformation movement was fully seventy years old in Sweden before that nation became definitely and officially committed to the Confessional Standard of Lutheranism. The Augsburg Confession was accepted by the Church and State in Sweden and Finland in 1593 as a binding religious symbol. The developments which led to this final settlement in Sweden need a brief presentation since they are in many ways related to liturgical matters.

The French Reformed Church merged from the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon stengthened by government recognition and support but weakened by the ideological offensive of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Although it enjoyed a secure official and financial position, it had yet to reconcile itself intellectually with the contrasting currents of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism. This process of assimilation and reconciliation took place after 1815 and culminated, during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, in a theological awakening and renewal.

Since the very beginnings of Mormon history, non-Mormon historians (and “anti-Mormon” polemicists) have traced the sources of the religion in one way or another to some conception of New England. The conceptions have been as varied as the writers themselves: New England has been the land of both enthusiasm and rational religion; of educated, enlightened Yankees and of credulous, antiintellectual Yankees; of a culture east of the Hudson and of a culture extending across the northern half of the United States; a region of people with great civic and religious virtue but also a people noted for deception, cunning, and hypocrisy. The problem of the New England Mind has never been settled, but all writers have assumed that at one time or another western New York, the supposed birthplace of Mormonism, was a “frontier” of New England.

Papers on historiography, reviewing and assessing recent literature in a particular field, have become commonplace and no one questions their value or utility. A report of this sort would be useful today on the subject of American Catholicism for, in the ten years since Henry J. Browne last surveyed the field, a number of high quality monographs have appeared. Nevertheless there is a second type of historiographical analysis more relevant today. Historiography can be seen as a category of intellectual history which relates historical works to the periods in which they were written and attempts to uncover their basic assumptions, revealing more immediately the limitations of the historical discipline, suggesting new questions to be asked, new avenues to be explored, new techniques, new metaphors, new models to be utilized. Bernard Weisberger's well known article, “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography,” for example, pointed out the influence of changing social conditions and intellectual fashions on historical views of the reconstruction period and suggested new questions and modes of interpretation arising quite self-consciously out of the needs and anxieties of the present.

Thirty-five years ago Lewis Vander Velde criticized his fellow historians for not having written more on the American churches. He charged that lay historians, “whose point of view is detached and objective,” had left the study of organized religion in the United States to “clergymen whose primary interest is religious” American historians recognized “the importance of the Church in colonial times,” but they had “too frequently assumed that its influence as a force in public affairs disappeared with the American Revolution”—even though the nation's recent experience with Prohibition ought to have taught them otherwise:

Writers in an age when the Church is on the defensive fail to realize that the transformation which has put it in this position is much more a product of the last seventy years [i.e., 1862–1932] than of the previous seventy [i.e, presumably, 1792–1862]. In the time of our grandfathers, the Church was still a strong factor in the life of the nation; an institution led by intellectual giants, attended regularly by a large portion of the people, it exerted an important influence upon American life. … In 1860 politics and the Church still offered the greatest professional opportunities, and … in consequence the best minds were to be found there.