The student of present-day German religious thought cannot fail to be impressed by the diversity of the attitudes which it expresses. German religious belief runs the entire gamut of possibilities. Side by side one finds authoritarianism, rationalism, mysticism, a devotion to the past and a dominant interest in the future, a religion based on scholarly research and another grounded in romantic experience, a cloistered individualism and a pragmatic interest in human welfare. Students of Aquinas, of Kant, and of Schleiermacher, disciples of Keyserling and of Steiner, ecclesiastics, nature-lovers, and workers for a new social order, all are active today, and through their efforts a new series of general philosophical conceptions is rising from the ruins of the war.

It is with five of the Christian fragments unearthed at Oxyrhynchus by Grenfell and Hunt, under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Fund, that I propose to deal here. It will be convenient to quote these fragments as OP (Oxyrhynchus Papyri), and the discoverers of them as GH (Grenfell and Hunt), using the enumeration adopted in their large volumes (not that of the popular reprint of April 1904). The fragments to be considered are Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1, 654, 655, 840, and 1224; the first two of these (No. 1 and No. 654) are the so-called ‘Sayings of Jesus’ and ‘New Sayings of Jesus’; No. 655 is the ‘Fragment of a Lost Gospel,’ containing a page of sayings; No. 840 the ‘Fragment of an Uncanonical Gospel,’ published in 1908; No. 1224 the fragments entitled ‘Uncanonical Gospel,’ published in 1914.

The Old Testament has always been something of an embarrassment to the Christian church. The book was Scripture and its heroes were to be taken as examples. Nevertheless there was much in their conduct which ran counter to the prevailing Christian ethics. A problem thus arose both in exegesis and in ethics. Were the patriarchs to be justified? Should they be imitated? Marcion evaded the difficulty by simply rejecting the Old Testament, pointing out the complete antithesis, for example, between the precept, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” and the conduct of Joshua, who kept the sun up till his wrath went down. In the main the fathers resolved such difficulties by allegory, but even this key did not suffice. There was no denying that Moses really slew the Egyptian, that the Israelites robbed them, that Abraham lied, that Jacob was polygamous, and that Samson committed suicide, not to mention the deeds which made it appropriate to attribute to David the penitential psalms. Origen, the prince of allegorists, admitted that the incest of Lot and the polygamy of Abraham and Jacob were “mysteries not understood by us.”

In the Harvard Theological Review for July 1926 attention was called to a manuscript of the works of St. Athanasius (Athens, National Library 428) which is of interest as the oldest Greek witness to a recension of De Incarnatione recently discovered by Professor Lebon of Louvain. Further investigation of this manuscript, and especially an examination of its text of Contra Gentes, raises new problems in the textual history of Athanasius's works and adds to our knowledge of the recension of De Incarnatione discovered by Lebon.

Since John Lightfoot's contributions to the interpretation of the New Testament from Rabbinic sources a large literature has grown up on the subject, and in Strack and Billerbeck's recent commentary on the gospels an immense amount of erudition is stored up. Yet in spite of the invaluable labors of these scholars more light can still be thrown on the understanding of the New Testament from the study of the halakah underlying it.