Several perplexing problems cluster around the interpretation of the Song of Heshbon (Num. 21:27b–30). The crux interpretum is vs. 30, a verse which in the course of the textual transmission has become severely corrupted. A failure to penetrate deeply enough into the textual history behind that verse, resulting in a misunderstanding of its original relation to the remaining verses of the Song, has misguided the two major lines of interpretation in past scholarship.

The relative peace enjoyed by the Christians under the rule of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was followed during the next regime by an era of extraordinarily violent and massive anti-Christian movements that probably surpassed in intensity all the persecutions that the Christians endured during the first and second centuries. It is therefore not uncommon to hear the charges that Marcus Aurelius was a persecutor of the Christians; that he deliberately issued anti-Christian edicts; that the persecution under this Emperor was the first that deserved the name of persecution; that the persecutions during his rule had his sanction at least. Subsequent attempts by historians to exculpate the philosopher-emperor for his alleged responsibility — whether direct or indirect — in the persecutions under his rule are only to be expected. In contrast to these latter-day charges the ancient Christian writers, led by Justin, a victim of his rule, Melito, Athenagoras, and other writers of the same period and with hardly any exceptions, put an almost infinite trust in him and simply do not show any belief that he was a persecutor. Tertullian, in fact, roundly declared him to be a protector of the Christians. In spite of their rhetorical tendencies, they must have known better than these later historians. The absence of a clear view and historical interpretation of what happened under this philosopher-ruler is the most regrettable feature of most of the modern commentaries on the Christian problem of this era.

The unsatisfactory quality of the witnesses to the text of the Didache, especially that of Bryennios' codex Hierosolymitanus 54 (a.D. 1056), has been emphasized in a well-known paper by Erik Peterson. This evaluation holds true for Did. 1.3D–2.1, the object of the present study, to an even greater extent than was indicated by Peterson.

It will be the purpose of this paper to trace the doctrine of transubstantiation from the point at which the problem begins to come into focus down through the Council of Trent. It is widely supposed that the history of this doctrine is a fairly simple one. The assertion of the physical presence of Christ in the eucharist quite naturally and inevitably evolves into the doctrine of transubstantiation, given the context of Aristotelianism in which theology works from the early thirteenth century on.

Several important contributions to Bonhoeffer scholarship which have come out within the past year or so and some which have not yet been published have so decisively advanced our knowledge that a wholly new understanding of many questions is now possible. The unity, the comprehensiveness, and the range of Bonhoeffer's vision are beginning to emerge. One streak of faroff light in that vision was India.

Chronography became a discipline of its own during the Alexandrian age. Herodotus and Thucydides still reckoned the remote past by generations. But from 300 B.C. onward learned men of Alexandria attempted to assign more or less precise dates for notable events. Homeric scholars dated the fall of Troy 407 years prior to the first Olympic games in 776 B.C., i.e., 1184 B.C. Eratosthenes of Cyrene asserted that this was the first datable event of human history, giving an unmistakable demarcation line between mythology and history. For the Orientals, whose records reputedly went back to the time when gods and semi-gods held sway over man, Eratosthenes' Greek-colored view of ancient history appeared myopic. Perhaps to match the Orientals, Greek writers manufactured genealogical tables which traced the pedigrees of famous Greek cities to remote antiquity with their autochthonous progenitors. To create order among the conflicting claims, during the second century B.C., the universal chronicle made its appearance. In the universal chronicles the Greek and Oriental genealogical lists followed each other, were synchronized, or even tabulated.