On several counts, Esther is the strangest book in the Bible. Few of those who read it realize what a variety of curious problems it presents, and how little has been done toward solving them. As a preliminary to the following study, a few of the most troublesome questions raised by the book may be briefly stated.

The origins of the name Xριστιανοί are narrated in the Acts of the Apostles as follows. After Stephen's martyrdom, some believers from Cyprus and Cyrene, who had left Jerusalem, preached at Antioch. Their success became known at Jerusalem, and “the community which was in Jerusalem” sent Barnabas to Antioch. Barnabas in turn brought Paul from Tarsus. For a whole year they worked together and taught many people. Ἐγένετο δὲ αὐτοῖς καὶἐνιαυτὸν ὅλον συναχθῆναι ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ καὶ διδάξαι ὅχλον ἱκανόν χρηματίσαι τε πρώτως ἐν Ἀντιοχɛίᾳ τοὺς μαθητὰς χριστιανούς (Act, Ap. XI, 26).

Herodotus, in the course of his account of the customs of the Scythians, describes the treatment which the inhabitants of the Tauric peninsula reserve for their enemies: after consecration to Iphigeneia, they are struck on the head with a club and decapitated; their bodies are either buried or precipitated from the temple rock, and their heads are impaled on stakes. The head of a prisoner of war is stuck on a long pole which is hoisted over his victor's house. These heads of their enemies, the Taurians say, now watch over their captors' houses, guarding them from their high vantage-point (Herodotus 4.103).

At the twelfth International Congress of the Historical Sciences there were a number of papers read on the subject of religious tolerance and heresies in modern times. Among these there were two which are of particular relevance to anyone interested in the religious thought of the Reformation Era. Professors Martin Schmidt and Gerhard Schilfert, the authors, were especially concerned with English Puritanism and its relations with continental radical ferment. Schmidt analyzed the work of Hermann Weingarten, who believed that England's century of Reformation was the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth and that it was during the struggle against the Stuarts that the history of the English church became a record of new intellectual and religious movements. Hence, the chiliastic Independents of the English Interregnum were analagous to the Anabaptists of continental fame in the early sixteenth century. In fact, during the unrest of the English Puritan Revolution, German influences presumably transmitted from the Netherlands were willingly accepted. Among the writers involved in this process were Jakob Böhme and Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil. From these sources came the belief in the second coming of Christ which formed the unifying bond for all shades of English revolutionary Christian thought. Cromwell, himself, was deeply affected by chiliastic thought, but when he assumed political responsibility, he had to act in a more rational way. Finally the enthusiasm of the Fifth Monarchists and the Levellers subsided into the quiet mysticism of the Quakers and the natural rights position of the Age of Reason.

Philo of Alexandria's De vita contemplativa (henceforth VC) is one of the philosopher's most debated treatises. Indeed, it raises difficult questions of authorship and interpretation. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the subject, investigating the authenticity of the attribution to Philo, the identity of the socalled “Therapeutae,” the plausibility of their actual existence, and their possible relation to Christian monasticism and Essenism. In particular, as Jean Riaud has pointed out, in modern times, theological and apologetic agendas motivated the identification of the Therapeutae as either Jews or Christians.

There have been two principal ways of comparing Paul with Judaism, each of which has suffered from characteristic defects. One has been holistic in a certain sense. Taking “Paul” to be essentially represented by the doctrine of justification by faith and “Judaism” to be essentially represented by works righteousness, many Christian scholars have understood Paul and Judaism as antithetical. The characteristic weakness of this sort of comparison is that Paul is oversimplified, Judaism is both oversimplified and misrepresented, and the comparison is made in order to show the superiority of Paul to Judaism. That is, such comparisons have generally been pejorative and biased. The other principal method has resulted in more of a genuine comparison. Instead of dealing with generalized essences, this approach concentrates on individual motifs. It may properly be called atomistic, although the term Motivsgeschichte might better describe the method. Those who have followed this approach have generally answered the question of whether or not there is a positive relationship between Paul and Judaism affirmatively. The characteristic weakness of this approach — and this is a much less serious weakness than that of the other approach — is that a conclusion about some of the parts may lead too quickly to a conclusion about the whole. One may, for example, learn a great deal about the relation of what Paul says about Adam to Adamic speculation in Judaism without being able to determine whether or not Paul's religion was basically Jewish. As David Flusser has seen, building blocks from one edifice may be used to put together quite a different construction. Seeing the similarity, or even the identity, of some of the stones should not lead one to conclude that the building is the same. Thus a comparison of the two wholes as represented by their generalized essences generally goes awry, but the same may also be true of a comparison of any number of parts. Is there any way around this difficulty?

The object of this study is to illustrate and to attempt to modify in favour of Rabanus Maurus the judgment of de Ghellinck — “Sa prose pratique le plagiat sans vergogne, mais en général il choisit bien les passages qui lui servent d'extraits.” Although much has been written about the identity of the so-called Hebraeus moderni temporis whose exegetical work was extensively used by Rabanus in his commentaries on the books of Samuel and Chronicles and about the Jewish sources of this material, little or no attention has been paid so far to the motives of Rabanus in availing himself of these Quaestiones or to the principles, if any, he employed in the selection of his material. A further problem which deserves to be elucidated is whether Rabanus had access to a better text of the Quaestiones on Chronicles than that which has come down to us.

May I begin with a personal introduction to the theme of this evening's lecture, the encounter between continental pietism and New England Puritanism? I began teaching Church history at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg in 1932. There I had the opportunity to study the archives of August Hermann Francke, in the old library of Francke's orphanage. These archives were in a state of highly inspiring disorder, for there were chances of all kinds of unforeseen discoveries, both in the many boxes containing Francke's correspondence and on the shelves holding all the books sent to this head of pietism by his friends all over the world. At first, I studied his correspondence with ministers, scholars, bishops and generals in Russia and the Baltics, publishing an article about Francke in Russia. Then I came across some boxes which held an enormous mass of material connected with New England, letters to German ministers and German communities in Pennsylvania, diaries of emigrants, together with letters in English from Puritan theologians and New England missionaries. I was especially interested in Francke's correspondence with Cotton Mather.

At the turn of the century, Edward W. Blyden, resident of Liberia and former Presbyterian missionary from America, read to some African natives the following description from the New York Independent of the burning of a black man in Georgia:

Sam Hose was burned on Sunday afternoon in the presence of thousands of people. Before the fire had been kindled the mob amused themselves by cutting off the ears, fingers, toes, etc. to carry away as mementos. After the burning, and before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the heart and liver being especially cut up and sold. Small pieces of bone brought 25 cents, and “a bit of liver, crisply cooked, sold for 10 cents.” So eager were the crowd to obtain souvenirs that a rush for the stake was made, and those near the body were forced against and had to fight for their escape.

Chronography became a discipline of its own during the Alexandrian age. Herodotus and Thucydides still reckoned the remote past by generations. But from 300 B.C. onward learned men of Alexandria attempted to assign more or less precise dates for notable events. Homeric scholars dated the fall of Troy 407 years prior to the first Olympic games in 776 B.C., i.e., 1184 B.C. Eratosthenes of Cyrene asserted that this was the first datable event of human history, giving an unmistakable demarcation line between mythology and history. For the Orientals, whose records reputedly went back to the time when gods and semi-gods held sway over man, Eratosthenes' Greek-colored view of ancient history appeared myopic. Perhaps to match the Orientals, Greek writers manufactured genealogical tables which traced the pedigrees of famous Greek cities to remote antiquity with their autochthonous progenitors. To create order among the conflicting claims, during the second century B.C., the universal chronicle made its appearance. In the universal chronicles the Greek and Oriental genealogical lists followed each other, were synchronized, or even tabulated.

In a 1963 article in the Journal of Religion, Langdon Gilkey examined the troubled condition of the doctrine of providence and concluded that it had become “the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology.” He attributed its demise to the violent eruptions of evil in our century, the unfortunate link between the doctrine and now defunct theories of natural theology, as well as the pervasive Arminianism and naturalism of contemporary thought. Current neglect of the concept was all the more striking, he reflected, because of its integral relationship to nearly all the theological systems of the preceding century.

In a recent essay, Nicole Loraux identified a pattern of scholarly dependence on the origins of a particular deity for the interpretation of how human beings at various, specific times and places related to and used that figure to meet the needs of their lives. Shifting social and political conditions, such as the development and modification of the Athenian polis, led to changes in people's religious needs and are reflected by modifications, sometimes radical, in the conceptualization and worship of their gods. Loraux discussed the problems that this scholarly perspective brought to the study of goddesses in particular, where focus on the origins of many goddesses in a hypothesized worship of a Great Goddess of fertility can obscure our understanding of the ways in which these figures met the needs of individuals and cities at specific points in antiquity.

The goal of New Testament textual criticism would appear to be simple enough: to restore the original text written by each author of the New Testament books. Upon examination, however, the notion of simplicity vanishes immediately and each of the key terms here—“restore,” “original,” “text,” and “author”—has its problematic aspects, but more importantly the simply stated goal itself turns out to be inadequate. Grist for the text-critical mill consists of textual readings or variants, which for the relatively small collection of writings called the New Testament are not merely in the hundreds or thousands, or even the tens of thousands, but run to perhaps a third of a million. They stem from the nearly 5,500 Greek manuscripts, some 10,000 versional manuscripts, and innumerable patristic citations of New Testament passages.

We should like to have Josephus's history of the Jews from the great revolt to the thirteenth year of Domitian (Ant. 20.267), if he ever managed to write such a work. Since we do not have it, we are compelled to depend on a few scattered references in Josephus and other writers, and on our ingenuity, for our knowledge of Jewish political history after August 70. Nonetheless, the first few years of the period after 70 are slightly less obscure than the succeeding years because we possess, in book 7 of Josephus's Bellum Iudaicum, an account, albeit sketchy, of the aftermath of the revolt. It is therefore somewhat surprising that book 7, with the exception of the Masada episode (252–406), has been neglected by modern scholarship. Those scholars who have discussed the book at all have limited their comments to general statements on the book's poor style, unusual in Bell., or its date of composition. In fact, Bell. 7 is problematic throughout. In the first part of the book, until Titus's return to Rome (119), Josephus introduces extraneous material into its main account with exceptional crudeness.

In Frazer's Golden Bough the leading instance of the central figure whom he called “the dying god” was Adonis, famous from Greco-Roman literature and art but firmly localized in Semitic Phoenicia, Syria, and Cyprus. Since Frazer wrote, his other Near Eastern instances have been so transformed by increasing knowledge that it can be doubted whether they severally belong to the same type or indeed whether any general type exists. Adonis has hardly shared in these discoveries and debates, for research has emphasized instead the large developments which overtook his worship within the Greco-Roman world. Most of this research does not bear at all on the origins of Adonis, but scholars have sometimes been so bemused by the Greek elements as to forget or deny the Semitic. Everything has been called into question at different times. Such features of his myth as the boar and the myrrh tree and the incest are discounted as Greek embroidery; his peculiar festival, with mourning women and miniature gardens of lettuce, is traced to the preoccupations of Greek urban society; even the Semitic derivation derivation of his name is disputed. This Greek exclusivism cannot be sustained. All accounts of Adonis' life and lineage, and all analogies for his worship converge in the Levant — not in a single site or land, but in Phoenicia, coastal Syria and Cyprus together, lands which from the Late Bronze Age onward display a distinctive common culture, above all with respect to religion. This is where Adonis is at home, and where we may look for evidence to explain the figure of the dying god.

From the days of the Renaissance and Reformation to the present, the Mystery Religions of antiquity have engaged the attention of classical scholars and theologians alike. During what may be called the precritical stage of the study of this subject, it was commonly believed that by the Mysteries a constant succession of priests or hierophants transmitted from age to age an esoteric doctrine, better and nobler than that of the popular religion. Whether this recondite science had been derived originally from the hidden wisdom of India or Egypt, or from the Old Testament, or even from a primitive revelation to all mankind, was debated with characteristic disregard for historical methodology.

Among the Graeco-Oriental cults that shared the loyalties of the Mediterranean peoples during the first four centuries of our era, the religion of Sarapis occupied a commanding position. Throughout his career Sarapis was a worker of miracles, but no miracle of his doing ever equalled in historical significance the political thaumaturgy by which he was brought to life. A composite figure created in the last years of the fourth century B.C. by the first Ptolemy, for the purpose of binding together the divergent ethnic elements of Egypt, he was the Greek Pluto imposed on Apis, the Egyptian bull-god of Memphis, who became at death another Osiris, and specifically Osiris-Apis. The identification was of the usual syncretistic type, since Pluto and Osiris were both gods of the dead. As a newcomer Sarapis underwent a long probation at the side of Osiris and Isis, and although with characteristic inconsequence Sarapis never wholly supplanted Osiris, by the second century A.D. he had become, together with Isis, the most beloved figure of the native pantheon, while outside Egypt he was receiving the reverent attention of Greeks of the rank of Plutarch and Aristides. In great measure, the prestige of his magnificent temple at Alexandria and the unceasing flow of propaganda literature account for his eminence at this time. His greatest glory, however, was still to come. In the fourth century, when the approaching victory of the Christian cult threatened all pagan beliefs with extermination, Sarapis took on the rôle of a universal solar deity.

Boissier long ago remarked that Augustine's Dialogues (that is, the Contra Academicos, De Beata Vita and De Ordine) reminded him in a way of Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae. He was dealing with the vexed question of Boethius's Christianity. It seemed to him that Boethius in dealing purely philosophically in the Consolatio with problems lying more or less within the domain of theology had done nothing more than Augustine had done at Cassiciacum and that he was probably following Augustine's example. This meant that Boethius was just as much a Christian and probably the same sort of Christian as the young Augustine. Boissier did not carry his analysis of the resemblance between the two any farther.

Judges 5, the Song of Deborah, is and has traditionally been one of the foci of biblical study. Artistically, it evinces a consummate skill, with a series of powerful scenes and strong stanzas. Literarily, it has broad import, particularly in that it is one of the oldest integral texts in the Hebrew Bible. Few scholars dissent from the proposition that the poem is premonarchic. As a result, it represents also a virtually unimpeachable source for the study of early Israel.

Taking up this well worked problem in New Testament scholarship may seem audacious to some, futile to others. At least one scholar has exulted over his own claim, supported by a few, to have solved the problem; whereas at least one other scholar has declared the problem insoluble. Although the problem is difficult, the elements of a solution are indeed present in the discussion. It is taken up again in this essay because of its importance for research on the historical Jesus and on the emergence of Christology.