The Shepherd Chapter of Ezekiel, like the Shepherd Psalm, is one of the most beautiful chapters of the Old Testament. The first ten verses upon first examination appear to be a post eventum judgment upon the former shepherds of the nation. The glowing promises of 34:11–16 are a counterpart to this indictment. The Lord pledges that he will inaugurate a new order for his sheep whereby he himself will assume the rôle of the good shepherd and perform the functions neglected by Israel's erstwhile earthly rulers. Verses 17–22 are a supplement promising a firm hand against all recalcitrant elements that may appear in the flock itself. In verses 23–24, we return once more to the shepherd theme, but the Lord is no more the Shepherd, but David. Verses 25–31 comprise the final section wherein the Lord binds himself with a covenant to provide for the general well-being (shalom) of his flock.

For three-quarters of a century the hypothesis of an Alexandrian canon has been the commonly accepted solution to the problem of how the Jewish canon and the Old Testament of the early church came to differ. That hypothesis suggests that a larger canon of scriptures was initiated in Alexandria and circulated throughout Diaspora Judaism than what obtained in Palestine. The Christian church, becoming predominantly Gentile early in its history, adopted this enlarged canon, that included the books of the Apocrypha, from Diaspora Judaism. The hypothesis represents essentially a geographic distinction in canonical usage between Palestinian Judaism and Alexandrian and Dispersion Judaism. It is the opinion of the present writer that the Alexandrian canon hypothesis is not only unprovable, as Pfeiffer has recognized, but is erroneous. This opinion is based (1) on a study of the history of the Alexandrian canon hypothesis, (2) on an examination of the arguments favoring the hypothesis, and (3) on a re-evaluation of the status of canonical usage in Judaism at the time of the emergence of Christianity into the world.

Careful inspection of all external and internal evidence reveals that the Apology of Aristides, known since 1889 as the long-lost “earliest extant apology for the Christian Faith,” mentioned by Eusebius and Jerome, was written by a proselyte to Hellenist Judaism, probably in the time of Hadrian, not as an apology for Christians at all, but primarily as a counterattack upon polytheists and their religious notions and secondarily, as a defense of the monotheistic worship and the morals of the Jews. This definitely Jewish work of the second century was interpolated and “edited” by a Christian writer, probably of the late fourth century, and was thus converted into what passed as an apology for Christianity.

E. K. Rand tentatively ascribed the Paris MS B. N. 4404, s.IX, to the Scriptorium of Tours which he reconstructed in the monumental studies in the Script of Tours. Bruno Krusch offered a detailed description of this manuscript which Theodor Mommsen used for his edition of the Theodosian Code. The MS contains a collection of Roman and Germanic law codes and sources of law. Here we are especially interested in the Lex Romana Visigothorum, also called the Breviarium Alaricianum, and in the Salian and Ripuarian Codes, i.e., sources of law used in the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne. Some capitularies of Charlemagne, issued during and after the year 803, are attached at the end of the MS, which occupies an important place in the much discussed text transmission of the Lex Salica. Turonian provenience of the MS has been denied by Philippe Lauer, Bruno Krusch, Wilhelm Köhler, and C. H. Beeson, but Rand assumes that it deserves a listing among the books of Tours, since its script “seems nearer to that of Tours … and yet … none versed in manuscripts has ascribed the book to Tours.”

Adrien Baillet, an erudite priest who was librarian and preceptor in the house of the distinguished magistrate Chrétien-Fran¸ois de Lamoignon from 1680 till the time of his death in 1706, was one of the most prolific writers of his time. A Cartesian and a Jansenist, the author of substantial biographies and histories, voluminous critical compendiums on both secular and theological subjects, and provocative religious treatises, and the center of some of the stormiest quarrels of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he is today unknown to nearly everyone except specialists in his period. Many of the latter, moreover, are acquainted only with his massive biography of Descartes (1691) and his nine volume compendium Jugemens des scavans (1684–1686), an incomplete composition calculated to evaluate the principal works composed in all fields of human endeavor since earliest times as well as the judgments of their critics. The present study concerns one of the most obscure and at the same time most explosive of Baillet's works, his treatise on the cult of the Virgin Mary.

Berkeley's demonstration of God is not philosophically the most important part of his Principles of Human Knowledge. But a close understanding of this demonstration helps one realize just how clearly Berkeley saw, or was willing to see, the logical consequences of those tenets of the Principles which have proven important in the course of philosophy. A step by step analysis of the proof also discloses how much of his philosophical and religious heritage, some of it inimical to his tenets, Berkeley carried into this revolutionary document.