The belief in miracles has played a very important part in all the great historical religions. In primitive religions the intervention of powers supposed to be beyond ordinary human control and acting for purposes of their own did not assume the character of supernatural events, for natural and supernatural were not two distinct categories in the primitive religious experience of mankind. It was the process of moralization of religions and the growing knowledge of the consistent working of natural laws that gradually led to a classification of phenomena into the two great divisions of those which were natural and those above nature, a distinction that very soon became an opposition and gave rise to that dualistic conception of life and of the universe which we find at the basis of all the great historical religions.

It is a common fallacy to regard great movements in history as the work of one great prophet, to think that he alone changed the current of human events by the force of a single dynamic personality. As a matter of fact, great movements, such as the Reformation, have been produced because an unusually large number of prophets arose at the same time. Though the names of only a few have been illumined by fame, the deeds of the rest were just as necessary for the success of the movement.

The Armenian version of the works of Athanasius is known to European scholars from four sources: (1) the list in Karekin's catalogue of early Armenian translations, (2) Conybeare's edition of the pseudo-athanasian “Dialogue between Athanasius and Zacchaeus,” (3) an article by the same scholar, ‘On the Sources of the Text of St. Athanasius,’ with accompanying collations of the Armenian of De Incarnatione et contra Arianos and Qvod unus sit Christus, and (4) the Venice edition of Armenian Athanasiana made by E. Tajezi and published with Conybeare's help at the Mechitarist press in 1899. This edition contains all the material then available in the Mechitarists' library at Venice but is not based on a complete survey of the sources. Furthermore, the manuscripts employed are (with the one exception of Cod. Venet. 818) collections of various patristic writings, and do not contain corpora of Athanasius's works such as are commonly found in Greek.

In the last number of the Harvard Theological Review I gave what I believe to be a definitive identification of the Gothenburg Papyrus 21. By way of demonstration I reproduced the text of the papyrus as reported by Frisk, with textual corrections and illustrative restorations of my own. I appended to the text a discussion in which I sought to establish its relations to other Greek versions of the Letter to Abgar. In my desire to bring to the attention of scholars a new Greek version of the Letter, the text of which presents remarkable departures from the traditional Eusebian version, my examination was restricted to the better known Greek sources. A subsequent examination of four additional Greek specimens of the Letter and of all the copies of the Coptic version, while necessitating no essential modification of my conclusions, has revealed in the Gothenburg papyrus important textual filiations which I did not then suspect.