As everyone knows, Canon Muratori is a list of New Testament books that was found by Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and is contained in a codex dating from the eighth or possibly the seventh century, which belonged originally to Columban's Monastery at Bobbio. The list of New Testament books is part of this codex, which also contains a collection of tracts and creeds that appeared between the second and fifth centuries and that seem to have been collected and transcribed in the eighth (or seventh) century. The fragment on the canon is just that, since the beginning is lost, and the text ends abruptly, showing that it was copied from a mutilated and presumably ancient exemplar. There are also some bits of the Muratorian canon that were found in four eleventh- or twelfth century Latin manuscripts of St. Paul's epistles at Monte Cassino. And it has been shown that the compiler of the prologue in which these occur cannot have used the Milan manuscript. The fact that he was working from an independent source indicates that the poor Latin of the Milan text was not that of the original author. A Greek original was suggested by Muratori when he first published the list in 1740; his suggestion has received wide support, though some have argued for a Latin original. Muratori assigned the list to Caius, a presbyter in Rome, but others have suggested Papias, Hegesippus of Rome, Rhodon, Melito of Sardis, and others.

The object of this study is to illustrate and to attempt to modify in favour of Rabanus Maurus the judgment of de Ghellinck — “Sa prose pratique le plagiat sans vergogne, mais en général il choisit bien les passages qui lui servent d'extraits.” Although much has been written about the identity of the so-called Hebraeus moderni temporis whose exegetical work was extensively used by Rabanus in his commentaries on the books of Samuel and Chronicles and about the Jewish sources of this material, little or no attention has been paid so far to the motives of Rabanus in availing himself of these Quaestiones or to the principles, if any, he employed in the selection of his material. A further problem which deserves to be elucidated is whether Rabanus had access to a better text of the Quaestiones on Chronicles than that which has come down to us.

One of the most significant developments in medieval Islamic thought was the emergence in the ninth and tenth centuries of a theological reaction against some of the rationalistic and deterministic elements of Greek philosophy that had begun to influence Islamic life and thought. Alongside the assimilation of Greek ideas and the development of Arabic philosophy by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, a counter-movement arose, among the Mutakallimun (speculative theologians), that rejected any attempt to view nature as a closed, eternal, and necessary system or to view God as limited by human conceptions of justice or by human free will.

The subject and title for this paper came to me as inspiration from on high during the strike, Spring, 1969. A group of students in various states of hairy disarray, barefoot and grimacing, were banging on my desk and shouting over my phone when the thought for this paper cut across my consciousness.

The echo produced by some of my writings dealing with problems of Comparative Religions sounds to me as an invitation to restate thematically one of the main issues in the Encounter of Religions.

This present study is irenic in tone and has tried to overcome the temptation of self-defence. I shall try to rethink my approach to the problem of the encounter of the christian faith with the religions of the world, to present it for correction or even for total eclipse. How can I put forward more than a hypothesis in this field (now just emerging) of open dialogue among religions?