I like tennis—both to play and to watch it.1 Nothing is more pleasant than watching an exchange between Federer and Nadal. There is a similar kind of exchange that has been going on in this country in recent years. On one side, there are evangelical New Testament scholars; on the other, liberal scholars working on early Christianity. In the camp of the evangelicals, Ben Witherington,2 Craig A. Evans,3 and Darrell L. Bock4 are playing a defensive game, accusing the others of constituting a “new school,”5 one that prefers heresy over orthodoxy and promotes diversity where unity once was. In the camp of the critics, Elaine Pagels promotes the spirituality of the Gospel of Thomas; 6 Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Christianities flies in the face of his opponents;7 and Marvin Meyer considers the Gospel of Judas a valuable work that reveals in the mind of the dark apostle knowledge of the divine realm.8

Professor Hanan Eshel, in memoriam

Ancient and modern readers have offered two basic interpretations of the “[One like a] Son of Man” () in Dan 7:13. One line of interpretation holds that the One like a Son of Man is a symbol of a collective, namely, the faithful Israelites at the time of the Maccabean revolt.1 The other basic line of interpretation sees the One like a Son of Man as a divine figure of one sort or another, a second God, a son of God, or an archangel.

Many consider the political thought of Rabbi Nissim ben Reuben of Girona (RaN, ca. 1310–1380) to be innovative and daring, especially in comparison with other political theories in medieval Jewish thought. It has been argued that in his homily no. 11 RaN recognizes a secular politico-legal system headed by the king, which parallels the halakic-religious legal system under the control of the judicial authority.

“Since you have commanded me to write on the wisdom of philosophy, I shall cite to your Clemency the opinions of the sages, especially since this knowledge is absolutely necessary to the Church of God against the fury of Antichrist.”1 So wrote Roger Bacon to Clement IV. The pope had commanded Bacon to send writings of which Roger had spoken when Clement was still Cardinal Guy Folques.2 Clement's letter does not mention Antichrist, nor does it specify the subject matter of the aforementioned conversation. Still, since Bacon mentions Antichrist in what was likely a prefatory letter to either the Opus maius or Opus minus,3 the specter of Antichrist that lurks throughout Bacon's Opera and other works may not have come as a surprise. Yet, amid the clamor of Joachite apocalypticism that quickly coiled itself around the Franciscan Order in the latter half of the thirteenth century,4 Roger Bacon's own apocalyptic opinions remain underappreciated. This is not to say that Bacon's apocalypticism has gone unrecognized. Scholars have long agreed, as Brett Whalen has said recently, that Bacon “layered his writings with a sense of apocalyptic expectation.”5 Yet the historiographical tendency to separate Bacon's scientific writings from his religious beliefs and practices appears to have obscured Bacon's own radical ideas about the end of days.6

During the initial decade of the Protestant Reformation, the German Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528)1 functioned as a transitional figure between radical and magisterial reform. This observation is seen most clearly in the fact that Hubmaier, while concurring with his Anabaptist coreligionists on the necessity of believers’ baptism, dissented from their anti-statism and strict pacifism.2 Earning his doctor theologiae from the University of Ingolstadt under famous Catholic polemicist John Eck in 1512, Hubmaier was an essentially independent thinker who employed his academic training in an attempt to formulate doctrine that not only transcended the controversies of his day but also pointed Christians to the necessity of spiritual formation within a life of common discipleship. With this approach, Hubmaier turned to the Eucharist, second only to justification as the most divisive doctrine of the sixteenth century.3 Hubmaier objected to Roman Catholic transubstantiation, Lutheran consubstantiation, and Zwinglian sacramentarianism on the grounds that all of them, in their concern with the status of the elements, had lost sight of the internal transformation that Christ accomplishes in the faithful during the meal.

In a bold and complex book that refers to rigorous and close exegesis but progresses through cultivated intuition, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, locates himself—and asks his readers to place themselves—in a place at once secure and vulnerable, liminal and yet centered, the place at which traditions blur at their boundaries and insights grace us from all directions. I imagine that it can be an unsettling and off-putting read to anyone for whom faith is an undaunted rejection of multiple traditions and theology a xenologically bound discipline. But for those who look at the diversity of the human condition in wonderment and seek theological methods suitable for that diversity, it offers many lessons; these may be unsettling, but in a way that sharpens their own balance, and quickens their own search. The book as a whole seeks to provide a programmatic but grounded case for the discipline of comparative theology, which is in many ways a relatively recent field in the academy.