Historians of ancient Christianity derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that Athanasius of Alexandria, the fervent architect of Nicene Christianity, should also be the first known ecclesiastical authority to “list precisely the twenty-seven books that eventually formed the generally accepted canon of the New Testament.” This intersection of canon and creed abets the notion that Christianity matured and solidified in the latter half of the fourth century; henceforth heresy and extracanonical reading would together constitute evidence of theological backsliding, or, worse, deliberate and malicious distortion of an agreed-upon truth. If Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth century is frustratingly vague on what is and is not “canonical,” his reticence from within a period of dogmatic flux is understandable. In contrast, Athanasius toward the century's end is reassuringly firm, scripturally and doctrinally. From Easter of 367 onward, according to such a narrative, heresy and apocrypha would become coterminous, and a messy chapter of Christian history could be closed.

Dans un article paru il y a dix-neuf ans, j'ai tenté de prouver que le prétoire où Pilate condamna Jésus doit être cherché dans l'ancien palais d'Hérode, à la limite occidentale de l'antique Jérusalem, près de l'actuelle Porte de Jaffa, plutôt que dans la forteresse de l'Antonia, sise à l'angle nord-ouest de l'enceinte du Temple, aujourd'hui le Haram esh-Sherif. Ma démonstration s'appuyait sur les témoignages littéraires. Dans l'article simultané où il défendait la position contraire, mon vénéré maître le P. Vincent déclarait que “le meilleur, sinon l'unique moyen efficace” de combattre sa théorie serait de “démontrer avec quelque précision technique les erreurs dont (serait entachée son) interprétation des faits archéologiques.”

The Black church, historically, is the most significant institution in the Black community.

I. History and Development of the Black Church

A. There were differences of opinion with respect to whether slaves should be Christianized.

B. The Christian religion was accepted by the slaves because it offered hope and salvation.

C. Although at first religious instruction was given the slaves, this was later discontinued, then renewed after the Revolutionary War.

D. Three major denominations split over the question of slavery.

E. Independent churches were established by free Negroes in the North.

Form criticism has enjoyed great success in providing tangible insights into the social life and liturgical practices of Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity, but until now there has not been forthcoming a clear idea of what Jewish and Christian preaching was like before the middle of the second century CE Scholars are generally agreed that we have little, if any, direct evidence of sermons from this period. The sermons in Acts would seem to be excellent sources, but as Alexander Mac-Donald has pointed out, these are almost all missionary sermons or speeches to outsiders, and are therefore of little use in determining the nature of sermons addressed to coreligionists in the synagogue or church. Morton Smith attempted to isolate sermons in the synoptic gospels, but there he admits that the passages adduced—largely collections of sayings—may not constitute the actual form of oral preaching, but instead reflect a consistent pattern of literary sermon reports. As for Jewish sermons, the midrashic collections were edited later than the period in question, and it is generally unwise to extrapolate backward from these texts. Recent attempts to compare rabbinic homiletical forms with NT texts have been strongly criticized.

For some two hundred years now, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) has been the subject of intense interest and heated debate among Christian theologians. As the author of a seminal work in the theory of religionFriedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (trans. Richard Crouter; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). as well as a treatise in Christian doctrine that ranks second to none for its originality, methodological self-consciousness, and systematic stringency,Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (trans. H. R. MacIntosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928). In 1839 Johannes von Kuhn of the Catholic Tübingen school rightly observed that “among all the theologians of later and contemporary times, only Schleiermacher can be compared to [Thomas Aquinas] so far as scientific force and power are concerned.” Cited in Robert Stalder, Grundlinien der Theologie Schleiermachers: I. Zur Fundamentaltheologie (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz 53; Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1969) ix. Schleiermacher's significance in the history of modern theology is secure. By his liberal Protestant sympathizers he has been hailed as the “Reformer of theology,” the pioneer of a style of theologizing that is as peculiarly suited to the distinctively Protestant understanding of faith as it is capable of meeting the intellectual demands of the modern world.This honorific title was widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century and prior to the rise of dialectical theology in the twentieth. Representative is Wilhelm Herrmann, “Die Lage und Aufgabe der evangelischen Dogmatik in der Gegenwart” (1907), in ibid., Schriften zur Grundlegung der Theologie (ed. Peter Fischer-Appelt; 2 vols.; Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1966–1967) 2:16–20. To his equally numerous and vocal theological critics, Schleiermacher represents the enslavement of the Word of God to a pagan mysticism and speculative philosophy,Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und das Wort: Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichem Glauben dargestellt an der Theologie Schleiermachers (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924). the subjectivistic collapse of Christian theology into anthropology,Karl Barth, introduction to Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957). or, more recently, the classic exemplar of a linguistically naïve and apologetically motivated “experientialist-expressivist” misunderstanding of the nature of religious doctrine.George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). To friend and foe alike, however, he remains—for better or worse—the undisputed “father of modern theology.”In the English-speaking world, the work of B. A. Gerrish remains the best introduction to, and most sophisticated treatment of, Schleiermacher's theological achievement. See B. A. Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984) and the essays devoted to Schleiermacher in Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

For a long time, Lucien Febvre was obsessed by an arduous problem in cultural history: how could some brilliant intellectuals of the Renaissance have believed in witches? Influenced by the parallel that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl drew between child and primitive mentalities,Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalidad primitiva (Madrid: Akal, 1982). The original French edition was published in 1922. the French historian proposed an answer: in early modern times many beliefs could be upheld because a real Sense-of-the-Impossible did not exist. Febvre declared: “men in 1541 never said impossible.”Lucien Febvre, El problema de la incredulidad en el siglo XVI: La religión de Rabelais (México: Uthea, 1959) 382. Six years later he returned to the same issue, explicitly stating the dilemma in the title of an almost forgotten paper, “Sorcellerie, sottise ou révolution mentale?” How could Jean Bodin reconcile the publication of his Six Books of the Commonwealth with the ridiculous witchcraft stories included in his Dèmonomanie des Sorciers? In Febvre's view, Bodin could believe in the sabbat because until the middle of the seventeenth century there was no real Sense-of-the-Impossible in Western culture.Lucien Febvre, “Sorcellerie, sottise ou révolution mentale?” Annales 3 (1948) 15. See also Alexandre Koyré's 1949 article, “La aportación científica del Renacimiento,” reprinted in Estudios de historia del pensamiento científico (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1988) 43.

That Jonathan Edwards was greatly influenced by the writings of John Locke scarcely needs asserting. Edwards himself regarded his reading of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as the major intellectual event of his youth. His major writings and private notebooks abound with comments and reflections on matters discussed by Locke. What is fascinating concerning the history of Edwardsean scholarship, however, is that the decisive significance of Locke, for Edwards, has been elucidated only very recently, in the writings of the renowned Puritan scholar, the late Perry Miller.

I first became acquainted with Richard Niebuhr's scholarship and thought in a German graduate seminar on Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. Niebuhr's book, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, was a required text for the course and was regarded as the most significant study on Schleiermacher. My interest in Karl Rahner's theology had led me to go to Germany for doctoral studies. Once there, I discovered that much of what I had admired in Rahner had already been anticipated a century and a half earlier in Schleiermacher's work. Professor Niebuhr's study on Schleiermacher was the source of this insight. It influenced my decision later to translate into English Schleiermacher's On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke. My topic for this article, the theological retrieval of the category of religion, is obviously suggested by Niebuhr's study of Schleiermacher, which sought to overcome the dichotomies associated with the category of religion by the then-dominant Neo-orthodoxy. This topic is also a theme of Niebuhr's ensuing book, Experiential Religion, in which he elaborated his own constructive account of religion and experience. In addition, this topic appropriately relates to Niebuhr's activity at Harvard University, where he helped establish a program of studies in religion within the Committee on the Study of Religion.

It is normal for scholars to read a text of the Second Temple period with an eye to the particular historical circumstances and ideology that it seems to embody. For this was a period of rapid historical changes and sharp ideological conflicts, and by paying attention to reflections of history and ideology in a text, one can often better understand its meaning and situate it chronologically with greater accuracy. And so, scholars regularly ask: What can be deduced on the basis of this text about the precise period in which its author lived? What is there in the content of this text that can tell us something about its author's beliefs?

The subject of this paper, Christian of Stavelot, though he is one of the less familiar figures of the Carolingian revival of learning, whose only substantial work is a commentary on the First Gospel, should be of interest to any student of monastic education. Yet, apart from an admirable essay by Ernst Dummler and a shorter, but very useful, article by Manitius, recent research has not paid much attention to this writer.

The Immortality of Man was one of the fundamental creeds of the philosophical religion of Platonism that was in part adopted by the Christian church and that thus became one of the foundations of the Christian civilization of the Eastern and Western world. Ever since Paul in the 15th chapter of I Corinthians made resurrection the cornerstone of the Christian faith the Church has had a profound interest in the ancient philosophers who taught that man's soul is immortal and does not perish along with its mortal companion the body. Although this belief in the immortality of the soul, the ψυχή, is not the same as the Christian idea of man's resurrection in the flesh or in a transfigured body, both religious ideas have a natural affinity with each other; and it is therefore easy to understand that the Platonic belief in immortality was regarded as an anticipation of the Christian resurrection and helpful to the faithful who might wish to check their emotional expectations of a future life after death by rational reflection. Thus we find attempts to compare both things or to look for natural phenomena that could be interpreted as analogies of resurrection in nature.

In a very interesting and perceptive article, John J. Collins has reexamined Theodotus' epic Περι ᾽Iουδαίων. As opposed to the opinion that was prevalent until recently, i.e., that Theodotus was a Samaritan, Collins attempts to show that he was not only not a Samaritan, but that, on the contrary, his poem was directed against the latter group. He characterizes Theodotus as “a militant and exclusivist Jew” (p. 102) who nevertheless “composed one of only two surviving Jewish epics in the Greek language” (p. 102); this confirms, according to Collins, Tcherikover's view that the Hasmoneans were opposed to the Greeks for political reasons but did not reject Greek culture. Theodotus defends his Jewish nationalism through the medium of Greek epic poetry.

Studies on the essence and development of the concept of original sin abound. Not only has this fundamental tenet of Christian theology played an important role in the history of Western religious thought, but it continues to command the attention of scholars and theologians even today. Given this great interest, one is occasionally surprised at the narrowness of the historical and religious framework to which many have confined their discussions of original sin. All too often, scholars have overlooked the significance which events within the community they are examining or parallel developments in other religious communities might have for explicating a new direction in the history of this doctrine. While the present study can hope neither to reformulate the findings of the voluminous literature on original sin nor to compensate in large measure for this methodological shortcoming at times inherent in it, it will attempt to demonstrate by example how the notion of original sin did not evolve in a historical vacuum. It both drew from and contributed to prevalent philosophical and political theory, and it even interacted significantly with non-Christian religious concepts.

The figure of Satan has been a standing puzzle in the history of religion. Where did this figure originate, and what is its role? Satan is scarcely present in traditional Judaism to this day and is not present at all in classical Jewish sources—at least not in the form that later Western Christendom knew him, as the leader of an “evil empire,” of an army of hostile spirits who take pleasure in destroying human beings. Yet images of such spirits did develop and proliferate in certain late antique Jewish sources, from ca. 165 BCE to 100 CE. Specifically, they developed among groups I shall call “dissident Jews,” which included the early followers of Jesus; within decades, the figure of Satan and his demons became central to Christian (and later to Islamic) teaching. How did this occur?

From the time of Origen and of Rufinus and St. Jerome the question of the apparent change of the apostle's name from Saul to Paul has interested students of the New Testament. The problem is due to the fact that the author of the Acts in briefly giving an account of Paul's meeting with the Roman governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paullus, and with the false prophet Elymas, simply states: “Then Saul (who also is called Paul) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, etc.” Before this verse in Acts the apostle's name is invariably given as Saul, and after this verse he is always called Paul, except in two passages where there is reference to the very beginning of his career, his conversion. In his letters the name Paul, and never Saul, is used.

The pilgrim-diaries associated with Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (990–994), and Nikolás, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Munkaþverá, Iceland (1155–1159), commend themselves to historians of ecclesiastical Rome on more than one count. Both diaries include itineraries unusually detailed for their periods and in this regard are unique for the countries of origin and valuable in regard to the history of the regions traversed. More than this, and of particular moment for the historian of the medieval Church, both diaries devote considerable attention to sights seen in the Eternal City. Here these little works offer a welcome, in a sense intimate, view of Rome of the periods in question; for they tell us one very important thing that the medieval Baedekers do not, namely, just what two individuals elected to see or were shown or, equally significant, what two men chose to note down or especially remembered in the course of their tour of the city. The English diary with its systematic list of Roman churches — the titles often in a dubious Latin (see the individual items, especially pp. 275–276 below) — furnishes us, furthermore, with a little catalogue that, coming between the list of Leo III (806) and the list that the papal chamberlain Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III) compiled in 1192, fills an obvious gap. The Icelandic diary, though less important in this regard, gains in interest by including a number of secular monuments and considerable detail about the churches, wanting in the English work. Both texts are worthy of more study than has been devoted to them.

Ben Sira's view of the cult and his relationship to the priesthood are issues which have received much attention from scholars, yet there is no consensus on either question. Most critics cannot escape from the conclusion that Ben Sira had at least an interest in cult and priesthood. Some have argued that he harbored even a domineering interest in cultic worship, but others, like R. Smend and R. Pfeiffer, are ambivalent: they claim on the one hand that Ben Sira had an intense interest in things cultic, but on the other that he kept “a meaningful distance” from the cult (Pfeiffer). In other words, though his interest was intense, the ritual itself really meant very little to Ben Sira. The contradiction in this statement is evident. In a recent monograph, J. Marböck argued that although Ben Sira had a personal love for temple ceremony, he attributed to cultic law and ritual a very subordinate position. J. G. Snaith has made similar claims about Ben Sira's view of the cult.

As every one knows, psychology is a word to conjure with. We have today the Psychology of Art, the Psychology of Business, the Psychology of Advertising, the Psychology of Childhood, of Adolescence, and of Old Age, the Psychology of various great men and of various centuries and epochs, until one stands quite aghast at the psychological insight of our times, and feels that the key to everything and anything worth knowing must surely be in the hands of the omniscient psychologist. In fact, psychology would seem to have enlarged her bounds at the expense of every other subject, and to have chosen all knowledge to be her province; so that he who desires his book or treatise on any subject whatever to be regarded as strictly “modern” and “scientific” must needs endow it with a psychological title. This is indeed a short and easy method of becoming a psychologist; and the result is— as one might expect—that all the psychology contained in many of these works is spread, usually in large letters, upon the titlepage. All is not gold that glitters; neither is every treatise psychological which bears that mystic word upon its cover.

In no field of serious inquiry are these remarks more pertinent than in that of religion. Our book-shelves and our periodicals are laden with works on “religious psychology,” most of which prove on examination to be hardly more psychological than anatomical or geographical. Treatises on theology and statistics, on Church history and Sunday-school methods, as well as that large and amorphous class of writings which twenty years ago would have appeared under the title “Philosophy of Religion”—all these are now pressing themselves upon our attention by the use of that potent shibboleth, “Psychology.” And yet, though one-half the works with titles of this nature have not much more to do with genuine psychology than with the weather, there is, I believe, a young branch of scientific inquiry which rightly deserves the name Psychology of Religion.