The Omri dynasty, in Israel, despite its relatively brief career of about half a century, is of unusual significance for the history of Judaism in general and of prophecy in particular. For the prophetic struggle against the House of Omri was motivated by principles that were inherent in prophecy.

This inscription, which was discovered some years ago in the Ceramicus, has been assigned on epigraphic grounds to the middle of the fifth century and Peek has conjectured with some probability that it is a memorial to the men who fell in the battle of Coronea. Their defeat and death is ascribed to supernatural intervention and the development of this topic has given the poem a form which bears little resemblance to that of the usual official epigram of the classical period. Apart from its historical and literary interest, the inscription is of importance as a religious document and the primary aim of this article is to examine its language in some detail, with a view to elucidating the religious ideas underlying it and to determining, if possible, its relation to the event which it records.

My Design in these pages is to discuss, not the Incarnation, but the philosophy of incarnation as such, the word “incarnation” being interpreted very widely. What is commonly called the Incarnation in Christendom, at any rate when interpreted in the common way, is the birth and life of Christ more than 1900 years ago, that is to say a historical occasion, supposed to be unique in kind, in which one of the persons in the Godhead, although always God, actually became a man. To those who take their stand upon this historical fact (as they deem it) I have nothing to say. I cannot see that philosophers are compelled to accept such a datum, and I am not specially interested in the question whether, accepting it, they could accommodate it to their philosophical theology. Anything that is said about incarnation in general will presumably have a certain bearing, direct or indirect, upon the Incarnation and upon any problems that may remain when that is accepted as a datum; but I shall not try to draw the moral if there is one. What I want to discuss is whether there is any sense of “incarnation” in which incarnation is, metaphysically speaking, necessary, probable or plausible. Would a theologian who had never heard of Palestinian history incline from the natural (or inevitable) trend of his closer reflection upon deity towards the opinion (or constraining inference) that there must be some sort of incarnation of the Godhead? That seems to me to be a general philosophical problem of some interest to philosophical theologians. In any case it is the problem that I want to discuss here.

Various views have been held in the past concerning the purpose of the sixfold chronology in Luke. “The breaking of this oppressive silence [since the time of Malachi] by the voice of the Baptist caused a thrill through the whole Jewish population throughout the world. Lk. shows his appreciation of the magnitude of the crisis by the sixfold attempt to give it an exact date.” From this we may pass to a somewhat calmer later view. “The evangelist is using here a form which he has taken over from an alien sphere. … It is derived from secular historiography, which has the habit of making prominent important events, especially those with which the principal narrative begins, by means of circumstantial datings and synchronisms.”