Since the earlyliterature on the1980s we have witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of historical Jesus. It is not entirely clear why Jesus scholarship has again become so important following the collapse of the first quest and the relatively meager results of the New Quest; the differences between this most recent quest and its two predecessors, however, are immediately evident. Key among the differences is the role played by scholarship on the Sayings Gospel Q. This essay offers some reflections on the ways in which Q has figured (or not figured) in reconstructions of the historical Jesus and offers some cautions in light of the achievements of a quarter century of composition-criticism on Q.

Is it possible to work back from Matthew and Luke to the final redaction of Q, from there to the earliest composition of Q, and thus ultimately to the historical Jesus? John Kloppenborg's article skillfully presents the difficulties and perils of such a procedure. I shall comment only on the second part of his paper; there is little to dispute with respect to the first part, which is an illuminating review of the role of Q (and other sources) in the search for the historical Jesus during the last two centuries. At the end, I shall offer some suggestions that may help to solve the conundrum of the historical Jesus.

John Kloppenborg's article is a superb example of why studies of the gospel tradition, including the Sayings Gospel Q, should be important to students of religion as well as of early Christianity. Beginning with the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, whose last anonymous and posthumously published essay on “The Intention of Jesus and His Disciples” inaugurated both the modern quest of the historical Jesus and the origins of the synoptic problem, Kloppenborg traces in an exemplary way the twists and turns of a restless biblical scholarship that continues to struggle with the interpretative challenge laid down by Reimarus. From the pioneering studies of David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur, and the Tubingen school, through the detailed analyses of Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, Bernhard and Johannes Weiss, and Adolf von Harnack, to the modern research initiated by Heinz Eduard Tödt, James M. Robinson, Helmut Koester, and Dieter Lührmann, Kloppenborg presents an archaeology of the discipline. His mastery of both primary texts and secondary scholarship demonstrates what is required of anyone who wishes to earn the right to have an opinion.

In recent decades, the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite (pseudo-Dionysius) has recaptured the attention of a number of scholars. These scholars address Dionysius's importance for the history of philosophy, for Christian aesthetics and liturgical and biblical symbols, and for postmodern theology. Much of this attention focuses on the brief and historically influential The Mystical Theology, written ca. 500 CE. For scholars, however, this text, like the God of which it speaks, seems to embody contradictions. I s there a consistent logic in the text, or is it deliberately inconsistent? In this essay, I shall analyze passages throughout the Dionysian corpus in order to interpret the sometimes dense expressions of Mystical Theology and uncover the logical structure of Dionysius's negative theology. I shall suggest that Dionysius's primary task is to deny that God is a particular being. By identifying the patterns of language used to speak of beings, Dionysius can identify both affirmative and negative language that avoids such patterns and hence is appropriate for speech about God. This interpretation demands close attention to the distinction between particular assertions or denials and the assertion or denial of all beings. By focusing on this distinction and on the higher status of negative over affirmative theology, I shall show, against the dominant trend in Dionysian scholarship, that this negative theology logically coheres; it is neither self-negating nor logically contradictory.

Ulfila the Goth (ca. 310–383) has gained fame as the Arian apostle to his people. More accurately, he was responsible for the conversion of semi-Arianism during the 340s. Yet two distinct traditions exist regarding Ulfila's own religious formation. One is an Arianized version of his life in the reports of Philostorgius and Auxentius, which claims Ulfila as an Arian from birth. The other, a Nicene version gleaned from the works of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, asserts that Ulfila “converted” from Nicene orthodoxy to Arianism sometime between 360 and 376. How compelling is either biography? If, moreover, Ulfila had remained loyal to Nicene doctrines until at least 360, to what had he converted the Goths in the 340s?

As Robin Winks has persistently and wittily demonstrated, there are striking and suggestive parallels between the methods of scholarship, especially in the human sciences, and detective fiction. Perhaps the earliest self-conscious methodologist, therefore, is the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes. Some attention has been given to extracting his procedures and presuppositions from the prosaic, once-removed accounts of Dr. Watson, who plays a role in Doyle's fictions somewhere between one of Socrates' interlocutors, “I hadn't thought of that, please continue” and Jesus' disciples as represented by Mark, who, in one scholar's well-known formulation, progress from “nonunderstanding to misunderstanding.” In the literature on Holmes, however, I find surprisingly little attention paid to the manuscript writings and publications by the archetypical detective himself. There are fourteen in all, although four seem only sketches. While the two “memoirs” Holmes published in the Anthropological Journal are attractive, it is what appears to be his first publication, one of three translated into French, that catches my eye. Holmes describes this publication, which is primarily concerned with tobacco ashes, in The Sign of the Four.