“Spirit” in antiquity was seen as the uncontrollable, dynamic, and numinous presence of divine power. It had no relation to rationality, nor were human beings masters of this spirit. On the contrary, it was thoroughly irrational and entirely the agent of the gods. When the spirit was present in human beings, its manifestations were poetry, prophecy, visions, ecstasy, and speaking in tongues.

The simple story of the book of Ruth abounds in problems for which no final solution can ever be found, since the materials for their solution are denied us. On this village scene, so different in character from most of the scenes of those ungentle times, the curtain is half lifted. But only half. Naomi returns from her sojourn abroad, bringing her daughter-in-law with her, and Ruth goes out to glean in the harvest-field. Then unexpectedly we find Naomi possessed of land, and we are left to guess how it came into her possession, and what had happened to it during the years of her sojourn in Moab. We are not told the relationship of Boaz to Elimelech, or the relationship of the nearer kinsman; nor are we told why the hand of Ruth went with the property. That the story of Ruth's marriage must be linked with the question of levirate marriage is generally agreed, though this is clearly not strictly a case of levirate marriage, since Boaz is not a brother-in-law or levir. There are not wanting, indeed, those who draw a much sharper distinction between Ruth's marriage and levirate marriage, but to this we must return. Of levirate marriage in ancient Israel we know very little, and while the later scholasticism of the Talmud may preserve, some ancient traditions, it cannot be implicitly trusted to throw light on customs which were already obsolete when the book of Ruth was written, needing to be explained to the reader as customs that formerly held in Israel.

My point of departure in this essay is Davíd Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006. Speaking of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, Carrasco projects an image of a vexed and ambiguous zone that is not merely geographic or political; it defines an existential situation of being betwixt and between, of struggle and suffering, that Karl Jaspers sums up in the term Grenzsituationen (borders/limit situations). The frontier throws up images of borderline experiences, of a destabilized and transgressive consciousness in which “dreams, repressed memories, psychological transferences and associations” possess greater presence than they do in ordinary waking life, and religious experiences emerge from the unconscious like apparitions. This interplay between borderlands and borderline phenomena—between “the differences we have with others and the conflicts within ourselves” also finds expression in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. “Mestiza consciousness,” she observes, may be identified with a “juncture … where phenomena collide.” This implies “a shock culture, a border culture, a third country” where migrants find themselves at the limits of what they can endure, border patrol agents are stretched beyond the limits of what they can control, and intellectuals find that orthodox ways of describing and analyzing the world do not do justice to the experiences involved.

In two interconnected theoretical works published in 1962, Lévi-Strauss argued that the tendency among primitive societies to formulate animal classification systems and to express these systems ritually cannot be explained as a side-effect of social classification, as Durkheim and Mauss had argued, nor can it be explained on the narrow materialistic grounds posited by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. The negative evidence adduced by Lévi-Strauss is empirical: animal classification systems are neither limited to societies in which there exists a fixed correlation between social groups and animal species, nor do they pertain to species that are of significant material or symbolic value to the classifying culture. According to Lévi-Strauss, the ritual expression of the mental act of classification functions like a language, containing “stressed” and “unstressed” elements and aiming to convey theoretical messages.

In two earlier articles published in Harvard Theological Review,“Richard Hooker's Via Media Doctrine of Justification,” HTR 74 (1981) 211–20, and “Richard Hooker's Via Media Doctrine of Repentance,” HTR 84 (1991) 59–74. I argued the thesis that the thought of Richard Hooker (1544–1600) represents a distinctive via media way of doing theology that immeasurably influenced what would later become known as “Anglicanism.” This thesis has recently been vigorously challenged by a certain group of scholars who constitute what may now well be regarded as a “new school” of Hooker interpretation.The leader of this new school is W. J. Torrance Kirby, whose revisionist interpretation is clearly set forth in Richard Hooker's Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1990) 33–37, 126–27; “Richard Hooker as an Apologist of the Magisterial Reformation in England,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade; Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997) 220–23; and “Richard Hooker's Theory of Natural Law in the Context of Reformation Theology,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999) 681–703. See also Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England (Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster, 1997); and “Hooker's Theological Method and Modern Anglicanism,” Churchman 114 (2000) 40–70. These scholars argue that the via media understanding of Hooker's thought, along with his anachronistic association with what only much later became known as “Anglicanism,” were largely creations of “Catholicizing” leaders of the nineteenth-century High Church Oxford Movement—including Hooker's editor, John Keble, and most notably John Henry Newman in his pre-conversion Anglo-Catholic guise. These scholars then set forth their counterthesis that Hooker is to all intents and purposes a faithful English exponent of all the basic “orthodox” doctrines of the Magisterial Reformers, namely, Luther and especially Calvin.

For most Christians Jerusalem is a heavenly city of solace and peace, a safe haven after the trials of life in this world. “Jerusalem whose towers touch the skies, I yearn to come to you. Your shining streets have drawn my longing eyes, my life long journey through …” It is a symbol of the soul's yearning to find rest in God. “Jerusalem my happy home, when shall I come to thee, when shall my sorrows have an end, thy joys when shall I see?” Yet Jerusalem is also an actual city set on a hill on the edge of a desert, a city where Christians live and have lived for centuries but whose population today is largely Muslim and Jewish. At one time, in the years prior to the Muslim invasion of Palestine in the seventh century, it was the chief city in a land ruled by Christians. More than five hundred churches and monasteries marked the landscape and thousands of monks inhabited the caves of the Judaean desert. Jerusalem's eloquent bishops and learned priests wielded power in the great capital of the Byzantine world, Constantinople on the Bosporus.

Josephus dates the publication of his Jewish Antiquities to the 13th year of Domitian's reign and the 56th year of his own life (93/94 C.E.). Because the Autobiography evidently forms an appendix to the Antiquities (see below), many scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries dated it along with or soon after the Antiquities' publication. A problem with this supposition, however, is that the Autobiography assumes the death of Agrippa II, while the 9th-century ecclesiast Photius apparently places his death in the 3rd year of Trajan (100 C.E.). Thus, with the conflict of testimony, other scholars dated the Autobiography after 100 C.E.

The literature of the rabbis in its many volumes stands before the student of the rabbinic period as a resource of enlightenment and a source of frustration. A vast treasure of haggadic materials which would be invaluable to the historian of the period is too often rendered inaccessible by difficulties in dating and localizing traditions. Even when traditions are associated with particular rabbis, multiple attributions and major variants engender extreme caution if not despair in the literary critic and historian. When traditions are unattributed in a literature which has developed over centuries as is the case with the Targums, the problems are magnified.

Until comparatively recently writers on religion were absorbed by questions concerning the origins of religious beliefs and practices. They endowed primitive man with a kind of rational logicality in his belief, or, like Frazer, they saw his religious practices as simply the application of erroneous reasoning. The modern trend is to try to view the religious or cultural institution as an essential part of society, existing because of the needs of that society. This is the theme, for instance, of Malinowski when he says that “religion is not born out of speculation or reflection, still less out of illusion or misapprehension, but rather out of the real tragedies of human life, out of the conflict between human plans and realities.”

In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin extensively quotes the Jewish scriptures and includes several citations of logia of Jesus. Furthermore, while explicit citations from Paul are peculiarly absent from the text, Justin, writing from Rome, certainly knows Paul's writings in detail and uses them. Indeed, it seems that the Dialogue provides a perfect occasion for him to employ Paul because in it he addresses the relationship between Judaism and the church, a central topic in both Romans and Galatians. Besides the appearance of Pauline quotations, several of Justin's arguments directly rely on Paul's thinking. For example, Justin probably has Galatians 3 before him as he composes Dialogue 95–96. Oskar Skarsaune's analysis of Justin's writing also indicates that Romans is one of Justin's preferred sources for quotations of the Jewish scriptures; that is, he sometimes quotes the Jewish scriptures as they appear in Paul rather the LXX. He draws especially from the Jewish scriptures quoted in Romans 2–4 and 9–11 because the chapters examine the problem of Torah and the Jews' rejection of the gospel, also two important issues in the Dialogue.

In 1997, the Harvard Theological Review published an article written by L. Michael White in which he “presents and analyzes evidence for the social location and organization of Jewish groups in the environs of Rome, specifically from the port city of Ostia” during the first centuries CE. White draws from two sources in his examination: archaeological remains of the Ostia synagogue and rather scanty—but important—epigraphical material, the Mindius Faustus and the Gaius Julius Justus inscriptions. White's study is the most extensive discussion of the archaeological evidence in English since the excavator, Maria Floriani Squarciapino, presented her preliminary reports from the excavations of the synagogue in the early 1960s. Despite the great interest that the synagogue at Ostia aroused when it was unearthed and excavated during two campaigns in 1961 and 1962, it has since been neglected by scholars.

In a study recently published in this journal, Lawrence Wills has identified, in a wide range of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian literature, a recurring pattern that is sometimes characterized in those sources as a “word of exhortation” (λόγος παρακλήσεως: Acts 13:15; Heb 13:22; cf. Acts 2:40; 1 Macc 10:24; 2 Macc 7:24; 15:11; Apostolic Constitutions 8.5). Toward the end of his article, Wills suggests that the form of this word of exhortation may define a point on a larger rhetorical trajectory within Greco-Roman Hellenism, and that “we can perhaps go further and note the actual compositional techniques that have passed over from Greek rhetoric into Jewish and Christian oratory.” In this assessment Wills is, I believe, quite correct, and in this essay I wish to build upon, and at specific points to refine, his analysis of the form of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian sermons.

The publication of a revised version of James Skedros's doctoral dissertation on the origin and development of the cult of St. Demetrius at Thessalonica, the alleged site of his martyrdom, during the early and middle Byzantine periods is most welcome in itself, but it also invites renewed attention to an old problem. What was the origin of the cult of St. Demetrius at Thessalonica? It is the purpose ofthis article to offer a fresh solution to this problem.

Late Spring of 1982 will see the tenth anniversary of the full publication of Clement's letter and its gospel fragments. Accordingly, this seems an appropriate occasion to review the discussion of them to date. The following review is based on about 150 published items that have come to my attention. No doubt some have been missed, but I trust these are representative.

Eusebius answers the question in the affirmative, but gives this answer as an inference from facts which he shares with his readers. This is in H. E. iv. 22, when he is in fact taking leave of him. He has made important use of Hegesippus in Books ii, iii, and iv of his Historia Ecclesiastica.

Fragments of biblical psalms have been found at Qumran in Caves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and ll; and there is the Psalms Scroll from Cave ll. There were undoubtedly more texts of the Psalter in the Qumran library than of any other biblical literature — 27 accounted for to date. By and large, the biblical psalms recovered thus far from Qumran are in very close textual agreement with the psalms of the early medieval Ben Asher manuscripts from Cairo and Aleppo (the textus receptus). In fact, all witnesses to the texts of the biblical psalms, whether in Hebrew or in early Greek, Latin, Aramaic, or Syriac translations, are in broad general agreement, that is, are of one basic recension. It is because of this that it was possible, in a comparatively short time in 1961–62, to construct a supporting critical apparatus for the scientific edition of the Psalms Scroll. The texts of the 38 biblical psalms in the Psalms Scroll are, with some interesting exceptions, the texts we have always known; the order of the psalms and the presence among them of nonbiblical psalms, however, are very surprising.

The long-accepted theory that Hebrew literature is largely the product of Babylonian influences is now discredited, both because of the unquestionable originality of Hebrew thought, in general, and in particular because the use of cuneiform models and materials is recognized to have been greatly overrated. Eventually Amurru or Khatti or Caphtor may be found to have made important contributions in the intellectual realm, as they have in the material, but at present the most powerful antidote for Pan-babylonianism is to be found in Egypt. Not that the view is returning which once prevailed among the Greeks, that all culture and wisdom came from the valley of the Nile, but the extent and importance of its influence, especially in Palestine, is becoming more and more evident.

The Hasidic movement started in the latter part of the eighteenth century in the Podolia section of Ukraine, under the influence of Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760). By the middle of the nineteenth century Hasidism came to dominate the religious sensibilities of Eastern European Jewry. As it changed from a marginal, nascent revivalist curiosity to an establishment fixture, it attracted magnetic leaders of great pneumatic powers and created a rich homiletical literature. Its combination of direct religious engagement and a message of joy in the worship of God appealed both to spiritually inclined rabbinic figures and to the masses of the undereducated.

Justin, a philosopher converted to Christianity, addresses these words to the Roman senate as he protests a recent case of arbitrary arrest and execution of Christians. Although outraged by the verdict, he cannot fault the judge, Urbicus, praetorian prefect of Rome, and personal friend of the imperial family. Justin knows that Urbicus only followed orders in pronouncing the mandatory death sentence against those convicted of atheism as evinced by their refusal to worship the gods or to sacrifice to the divine genius of the emperor. Instead Justin invokes the story of Genesis 6—the story of the fall of the angels—to indict the whole system of imperial power, and to attack the divine pantheon that supports it as a false government, a form of demonic tyranny.