Karl Barth's concept of the divinity of Jesus Christ is subject to two opposing interpretations. According to one, Barth maintains that Jesus Christ is a complete, human person who is distinct from God but who can be said to be divine because of God's unique presence in and with him. In this view, divinity in the strictest sense belongs only to God, but it can be attributed to Jesus because of his relation to God and his role as the special medium of God's revelation. If this interpretation were correct, Barth would stand in the Antiochian theological tradition.

E. H. Carr's injunction that “when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it” is well justified by the current state of research in the field of Iberian cryptojudaism and its subsequent development outside the peninsula. As in the study of Iberian history itself, vested interests, strong personal biases, and allegiances to national or partisan schools of historiography have frequently stood in the way of dispassionate inquiry into the subject and led to polarizaton and obfuscation. Over and above this, fruitful study has been impeded by the “blind-men-and-the-elephant” fallacy.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is a book of puzzles. Worried lest his radically intellectualist teachings harm the unschooled reader incapable of replacing naive faith with reasoned conviction, Maimonides took extraordinary precautions to conceal them from him. He cut up his arguments as with a jig saw, placed the pieces in careful disarray, and tossed in a goodly number of extra pieces which seemingly fit but do not. His presupposition, of course, was that any reader keen enough to piece together his puzzles would be intellectually prepared to cope with his teachings. No one will gainsay that Maimonides did a superb job of concealment. After almost eight centuries, students of the Guide are still trying to figure out how to solve its puzzles.

One of the most important questions to ask when one is beginning to reformulate the views of a historic author on the human body is the question of what role his discussion of the body plays in his theology. Does his theology require and depend on his evaluation of the meaning and value of the body? Do pressing polemical or cultural discussions demand the author's interest in describing the role of the body in human life? These questions are consistently useful in illuminating the author's intent in writing about the body. Placing ideas of the body in the theological and anthropological context in which they appear is essential if we are to avoid the inevitable distortion of an author's ideas, which is the result of “proof-texting” the author's statements about the body.

A fourth-century inscription from Thessalonica includes an enigmatic symbol for which no explanation has been offered. The symbol appears on a stone marking the graves of a certain Σαμβάτιϛ and, presumably, his wife, Mαξήμα, and represents three intersecting staffs.