The older and younger contemporaries of Gamaliel II and their disciples and successors in the next generation are the fundamental authorities of normative Judaism as we know it in the literature which it has always esteemed authentic. One main division of their learned labors was the definition and exact formulation of the rules of the unwritten law (Halakah), as they had been received through tradition, or were adapted to meet new conditions, or were developed by biblical exegesis or casuistic discussion. Along with this ran the minute study, in course, of the written law in the Pentateuch from Exodus to Deuteronomy, in primary intention a juristic exegesis with constant reference to the Halakah.

One of the most fruitful branches of recent patristic study has been the effort to determine the relation between early Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Starting from the assumption that the affinities between the two were many and close, scholars have found themselves able to draw detailed inferences of literary and intellectual dependence, and in the case of many Christian authors to discover the exact sources from which they drew their philosophic ideas, or at least to assign these to some contemporary school. Without such work an accurate estimate of the fathers' views and ways of thinking is impossible, but it must be remembered that an author is not explained, or even fairly represented, by showing how much he may have derived from others, for in the last analysis his finished thought is his own, however extensive the foreign material employed in its construction. It is not, therefore, at the end but at the beginning of his work that the historian of thought can expect most help from the investigation of sources, since even an author who differs from his contemporaries in his answers to current problems must usually begin by seeing them as they do. The background of an author's thought must have supplied the starting point for many of his ideas.

Vogels, in his new “Handbook to New Testament Criticism,” has started some interesting and important enquiries, by a consideration of the changes that can be marked in the copies and versions of the New Testament by an investigator who understands not only how to register various readings but also how to detect the causes of such differences. The evangelical stream is demonstrably discolored by the media through which it passes. The Bible of any given church becomes affected by the church in which it circulates. The people who handle the text leave their finger-prints on the pages, and the trained detective can identify the criminal who made the marks.

Aristides 15, 1–16, 1 has been recovered from the British Museum Papyrus 2486, and was published by H. J. M. Milne in the Journal of Theological Studies, October 1923, pp. 73–77. Some conclusions may be arrived at by comparing J. R. Harris's translation of the Syriac into Greek, as found in Text and Studies, vol. i, p. 25, with the Greek of the papyrus.

In the Harvard Theological Review, July 1923, pp. 280–283, Professors Lake and Blake have again drawn attention to a certain scrawl on the inner side of the back cover of the Koridethi Codex. I may be allowed to quote Blake's remarks in order to controvert them:

The extreme importance of the picaresque inscription on the inner side of the back cover has not been sufficiently appreciated. We have here a mélange of Georgian and Coptic letters, and one Coptic word, viz. ḥêppe (ἰδού). Oscar von Lemm is right in holding that Armenian letters are not present. Now the very appearance of Coptic letters is an important and significant fact.

Professor de Zwaan in challenging the reading of the inscription on the cover of the Koridethi codex as interpreted by von Lemm makes an ingenious plea for recognizing in the Coptic exclamation ḫêppe the Georgian word tsignthasa, which would restore the usual text of the quotation from Ps. 40, 7. (Hebrews 10, 7). The argumentation is plausible, but breaks down at one fundamental point. The word tsigni ‘book,’ ‘letter,’ is written in Georgian with initial tsil (the 32nd letter of the alphabet, ṭ), and not with tsan (the 30th, ṭ'). Furthermore tsil is used in the normal uncial form in the next word tseril.