Perhaps the most extraordinary story about Jesus to survive from antiquity is one of the least often told. It runs as follows: Towards the end of his life, Jesus's reputation has spread out from Palestine and reached the terminally ill Abgar V (also known as Abgar the Black), toparch of Edessa, the capital city of the kingdom of Osroëne. Abgar writes to Jesus requesting that he visit Edessa and heal him. In return he offers sanctuary from the Jews and shared rule of his city. The story preserves the text of both this letter and Jesus's reply, in which he declines to visit (citing his upcoming engagements in Jerusalem), but promises to send a disciple in his stead. After Jesus's death, the apostle Thomas, moved by divine impulse, sends Thaddaeus, one of the seventy (Luke 10:1–24), to Edessa. Escorted to Abgar's court, Thaddaeus cures him along with one Abdu son of Abdu. The newly converted Abgar gathers his citizens to hear Thaddaeus preach, and the story ends with the Christianization of Abgar's kingdom.

Any purely phenomenological description of the human being as in some sense “finite” must avail itself of a concept of finitude that does not rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the concept of God. Theologically motivated descriptions, however, face no such dilemma; they can and, indeed, must avail themselves of some concept of the human creature as a finite being created in God's image (Gen 1:27 KJV). For there to be a meaningful difference between these two descriptions, the concept of finitude common to both must have a different sense in each. These are some of the methodological requirements Heidegger lays down in Sein und Zeit §10: “The Delimitation [Abgrenzung] of Phenomenology from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology.” Heidegger's strategy for distinguishing the analytic of Dasein, in which the concept of finitude (Endlichkeit) plays a foundational role, from what he refers to as “the anthropology of Christianity” consists in distinguishing between two concepts of finitude: (1) finitude as lack or imperfection, defined as ens finitum relative to God as ens infinitum, and (2) an original concept of finitude, which, not being defined relative to God, is purely phenomenological and constitutes the horizon of any and all understanding of Being.

The history of the Reformation begins, and often ends, with Martin Luther. The history of Luther's biography is a chronicle of the perspectives from which Luther has been approached. Throughout the twentieth century, with few exceptions, his greatness was accepted as being beyond question, with each interpreter offering a new explanation for the Reformer's heroic place in European religious history. Scott Hendrix has been contributing to Luther studies since Luther and the Papacy (1981); his Short Introduction (2010) and an earlier biography (2009) are marked by lucidity and accuracy. His careful work on the little-known Urbanus Rhegius (1489–1541) and other Reformers has brought these significant participants in the expansion of religious reform out of the shadows of historical oblivion. For care with material and clarity of exposition, Hendrix is well positioned to write the American Luther biography of this anniversary year.

The Ba‘al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism (known by the acronym, the “BeShT”), was a charismatic teacher with extraordinary impact. While hasidic traditions record his vehement opposition to documentation of his teachings, his disciples nevertheless wrote what they remembered, and hasidic literature is suffused with traditions about him and conveyed by him.

In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul appeals to the principle of “equality” (ἰσότης) in order to encourage the Corinthians to contribute to the collection for the poor in Jerusalem. What is this “equality” of which Paul speaks and to which he exhorts his readers? Is it a principle of fairness, an equitable balance between the “haves” and the “have-nots” that might find expression in spirited generosity and charitable initiatives? Or is it “a regulative principle of mutual assistance,” which sets in motion a process of equalization between those who have surplus and those who have need? Or does Paul intend something more radical, more democratic? Is Paul asserting that all believers in Christ Jesus are “equal” and on this basis (ἐξ ἰσότητος) should engage in redistributive action, “so that there may be equality” (ὅπως γένηται ἰσότης)?

The late antique world was filled with demons. These demons were constantly present and always at the ready to attack unsuspecting humans. Like almost everyone else in late antiquity, the rabbis of Sasanian Babylonia were aware of demonic threats and took steps to protect themselves and their communities from harm. But while demons were a danger, they were also an opportunity for creativity, identity formation, and community building for the rabbis. In fact, some Babylonian rabbis “thought with” demons in order to organize their environment and imbue their world with larger spatial meanings.

This dissertation explores discussions of prophecy in early Christianity focusing on Origen of Alexandria's works. It argues that Origen engages the contested terms of prophetic activity to persuade his audience(s) toward the cultivation of a particular moral self.

Scholarship in the humanities has seen a recent burgeoning interest in the processes of “appropriation,” a conceptual category that moves us away from the idea of one-way transmission or “influence” and allows us to explore the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions or artifacts come to represent something “different from their original purposes.” Though the term has not acquired much currency in studies of medieval Jewish biblical scholarship, its fruitful deployment is amply attested in broader explorations of premodern exegetical literature. This investigation takes “exegesis and appropriation” as a revelatory integrating perspective on a neglected body of Hebrew scriptural scholarship: commentaries on the most important and influential work of Jewish biblical interpretation ever written, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Solomon Yitzhaki; 1040–1105). The focus falls on “Rashi supercommentaries” (as glosses on Rashi's Commentary are usually called) from medieval Spain and on some striking religio-intellectual dynamics evident in their pages. The study thereby addresses Moshe Idel's call for scholarship to engage more with questions about “the meaning of the arrival of a corpus of writings in a new cultural environment.”

In the late nineteenth century, the British writer Lewis Carroll published a nonsensical poem called The Hunting of the Snark in which an unlikely alliance hunts a fictional animal, which Carroll named the “snark.” Despite the alliance's intense search for the snark and their questions about how to describe and classify it (apparently, “a Boojum”), they do not find it. I want to suggest that any effort to locate “emotions” in the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East is comparable to hunting the snark. If we want our hunt to be successful, we will turn away from “the emotions” and toward something more like the psychological taxonomy that the emotions displaced in the late-modern period: namely, the taxonomy of “passions and affections.” “The emotions” are simply not to be found in the Hebrew Bible or in the historical contexts behind its emergence.

This article addresses two critical questions concerning Maimonides's views on human perfection at the end of his Guide of the Perplexed. The first is: For those who have reached the highest category of perfection—intellectual perfection, apprehension of the divine, the divine science—what prescription does Maimonides offer for perfecting that perfection, for solidifying the bond between them and God? I will argue: 1) that there is more than one method—that Maimonides indeed specifies two distinct methods—for stabilizing and intensifying the highest kind of perfection; 2) that the two methods yield two distinct ranks of perfect individuals; and 3) that Maimonides, in his attempt to perfect his own perfection, adopts the second method but achieves only the rank of those who employ the first.

Medieval accounts of disability by and large (though not universally) defend what is now labeled the “religio-moral” construction of disability: seeing an individual's disability as a punishment for that individual's sin.1 Unsurprisingly, such models are not much in favor among contemporary disability theorists for a number of reasons, among which we might include the unacceptable thought that an individual with disabilities somehow deserves those disabilities. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) accepts some version of this theory, but one rather different from the standard one (or at least, from what is now generally understood as the religio-moral model). Aquinas sees physical impairments—things that constitute a subclass of what he labels “bodily defects”—fundamentally as punishments for original sin. He is (generally) very careful to distance his account of defects from notions of individual punishment. (When he is not, it is because of pressure from Scriptural sources—though as we shall see below he believes that by and large the Bible, too, explicitly rejects the view that disability could be a punishment for individual sin.) So whatever we think of punishment models more generally, Aquinas's certainly removes one of the least appealing aspects of such models as typically understood. And Aquinas is careful, too, to associate many features of the human condition—not just those identified as a certain subclass of defects – with corporate punishment for original sin. To this extent, his account of physical impairments tends to normalize such impairments, and to de-emphasize their distance from other features of post-lapsarian human existence. While I doubt that what Aquinas says about bodily defects would satisfy many contemporary disability theorists, it seems to me that parts of his accout—and not least this normalization strategy—may appeal to more theologically-inflected accounts of the human condition.

When I shared an earlier draft of this article with a colleague who spends much more time in the modern theological world than I do, his reply was simple: “So, angels are a thing? And people want to talk about them?” Angels receive fairly short shrift in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology, but in late antique Christianity they certainly were “a thing,” if by “a thing” we mean an essential part of religious discourse, manifest in textual and material sources that testify to the significance of angels in theological speculation, popular piety, and ascetic practice.

There are two errors in footnote 1 of the article by Elizabeth Schrader, published online on 8 September 2016 and also appearing in print in this issue of Harvard Theological Review.

The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as well as the methodological approach of the small group of young scholars and students in Berlin who founded the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in 1819. Although outside the walls of the German university, these scholars endeavored to make inroads within the discipline of Orientalistik while standing firm in their hope that the Hegelian spirit of the day might give Judaism its determinate recognition in the light of Absolute Spirit and give the Jews their citizenship.

In 1977, legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin published Taking Rights Seriously, and it quickly received wide notice. At the time recently appointed H.L.A. Hart's successor at Oxford, Dworkin combined jurisprudential analysis with pointed commentary on United States Supreme Court cases, the latter developed principally in essays in the New York Review of Books. Defining law through its aspiration to justice and defining justice in terms of rights, Dworkin argued that judges were entitled to use moral philosophy both to interpret legal rules through the principles they instantiate and to fill in gaps in the law by leveraging general legal concepts into more precise conceptions. Often paired with his contemporary John Rawls's Theory of Justice, Dworkin's theory that judges should rework the law when possible to insure “equal concern and respect” was seen to elaborate the practical meaning of Rawls's first principle of justice (equal rights to basic liberties) as well as to boost the activism of judges, whom he encouraged to model “Hercules.”