Last year there was published in New York a Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. This version, in the words of the title-page, is “translated from the Greek being the version set forth in 1611, revised 1881 and 1901, and compared with the most ancient authorities and revised 1946.” In effect this Revised Standard Version is a revision in the light of the Greek text of the English and American Revised Versions. It is not my business in this lecture to discuss the merits and demerits of this new Version as a translation. What I wish to point out, however, is that such a new version has been rendered necessary not only for linguistic but for textual reasons. The discovery of additional MSS and the very considerable achievements of textual critics since the publication of Hort's theory of the text in 1881, a theory which exercised considerable influence upon the framers of the English Revised Version, have, quite apart from any other considerations, made a fresh revision desirable.

There were indeed many respects in which Christianity was objectionable to Celsus. But perhaps no doctrine was so peculiarly nauseating to him as the Jewish-Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. At the beginning of the fifth book of the contra Celsum Origen is dealing with Celsus' attacks on the pride shown by the Jews in supposing that they were the chosen people of God. Celsus is contending that the Jewish belief in angels is merely a manifestation of this (5.6). They believe they have a particularly privileged position in God's sight on the ground of the angelic messengers sent to them by God (cf. 5.41), and this fantastic conceit is equally manifested in their selfcentered conception of the resurrection which is nothing more than the outcome of their delusion that they are the center of the universe and that the world was made entirely for their benefit (4.74–99). It is in this context that he continues:

It is foolish also of them to suppose that, when God applies the fire (like a cook!), all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly burnt up, and that they alone will survive, not merely those who are alive at the time, but also those long dead who will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as before. This is simply the hope of worms.

Considerable interest attaches, or should attach, to Martin Luther's tract entitled “Die Sieben puszpsalm mit deutscher auszlegung nach dem schrifftlichen synne tzu Christi vnd gottis gnaden, neben seyns selben ware erkentniss grundlich gerichtet.” Appearing in the early spring of 1517, approximately half a year before the posting of the Ninety-five Theses, it is the first original publication that Luther himself saw through the press. Its success was instantaneous and widespread. As prominent a man as Johann von Staupitz lost no time in recommending it warmly. Luther's searching analysis of the human situation made a deep impression upon the many readers who, like the author's superior in the Augustinian order, gave the slender volume an enthusiastic reception. It is important to bear in mind that the book, besides stirring Luther's scholarly friends as well as the learned in general rather more than he himself had anticipated, found immediate favor also with the “common man” for whom it had primarily been written. There is no exaggeration in the claim that Luther's earliest publication straightway established him as one of the most widely read writers in the German tongue: his unparalleled success as an author can safely be said to have begun with the very first book he ever put out. The popular demand for “Die sieben Busspsalmen” reached such proportions that the second printing was already underway before the first had been completely finished. The book then went through a number of editions both regular and pirated: Wittenberg, Leipzig, Strassburg, and Erfurt printers published it between 1517 and 1525.

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

That there is something strange and unusual about the ‘consecration’ coinage of Faustina the Elder, and, to a less degree, of her daughter too, has always been apparent to the student: it was forced on my own attention while I was writing the Introduction to B. M. C. Empire, IV. If I return to the subject, it is because it seems that there is still something to be added to the results already obtained.