Herodotus, in the course of his account of the customs of the Scythians, describes the treatment which the inhabitants of the Tauric peninsula reserve for their enemies: after consecration to Iphigeneia, they are struck on the head with a club and decapitated; their bodies are either buried or precipitated from the temple rock, and their heads are impaled on stakes. The head of a prisoner of war is stuck on a long pole which is hoisted over his victor's house. These heads of their enemies, the Taurians say, now watch over their captors' houses, guarding them from their high vantage-point (Herodotus 4.103).

Old Testament textual criticism focuses on variant readings (such as “on the seventh day” in the MT of Gen 2:2 as opposed to “on the sixth day” in the Samaritan Pentateuch and in the LXX and the Peshitta) and these readings must be evaluated carefully. Ever since the seventeenth century, abstract rules have been formulated for the evaluation of textual readings. These abstract rules are of different types and each generation of OT scholars has a different approach to them. In the seventeenth century only a few such rules were suggested, but after that time one notices a growing appreciation for and employment of textual rules. In the present century one discovers a frequent reliance on–and often a blind belief in–textual rules.

Late Spring of 1982 will see the tenth anniversary of the full publication of Clement's letter and its gospel fragments. Accordingly, this seems an appropriate occasion to review the discussion of them to date. The following review is based on about 150 published items that have come to my attention. No doubt some have been missed, but I trust these are representative.

In a handbook of 1607 for students of divinity and lightly learned clergymen, the puritan Richard Bernard gave pride of place to the works of continental theologians. For the best catechisms he cited Calvin and Ursinus; for “the definitions and distributions of the principal heads of theology,” Polanus; for commonplaces, Musculus, Martyr, and Szegedinus; for commentaries, Calvin, Martyr, and Musculus. These writers had each contributed to the systematizing of covenant exegesis and doctrine (though Bernard did not pick them for that reason), and it was no accident that this naming of great names did not include a single Englishman.