The relationship of the preaching and teaching of Jesus to apocalyptic has been a vexed one ever since Albert Schweitzer's assault on the liberal “Lives of Jesus” and his advocacy of consistent eschatology along with his characterization of Jesus’ teachings as interim ethics. While many of the details of Schweitzer's hypothesis failed to be persuasive, his insistence that Jesus’ activity be seen in the context of apocalypticism has made a profound impact on subsequent historical Jesus scholarship and, in spite of his own noncommital stance with regard to the Two Document Hypothesis, on the theological characterization of Q.

In 1943 the SS Gauleiter, “district administrator,” of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, commissioned a performance of The Merchant of Venice at the famed Burgtheater to celebrate the deportation of allthe Jews;Vienna had become Judenrein “cleansed of Jews.” When Werner Krauss, the Nazis'leading actor, first appeared on stage as Shylock, he made the audience shudder. According to the newspaper account:With a crash and a weird train of shadows, something revoltingly alien and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage…. The pale pink face, surrounded by bright red hair and beard, with its unsteady, cunning little eyes;the greasy caftan with the yellow prayershawl slung round; the splay-footed, shuffling walk; the foot stamping with rage; the claw-like gestures with the hands; the voice, now bawling, now muttering—all add up to a pathological image of the East European Jewish type, expressing all its inner and outer uncleanliness, emphasizing danger through humor.

While no consensus obtains among specialists as to what the term “rewritten Bible” (or “rewritten Scripture”) properly denotes—or whether, indeed, it is proper to use at all—most agree that the texts thought to represent this category are basically exegetical in character. That is, they are supposed to have as their aim or goal the interpretation of texts that are now part of the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, it is universally recognized that the authors of so-called rewritten Bible compositions exercised a substantial degree of freedom in their retelling. They clearly had their own interests, motives, and aims, distinct from those of the biblical narrative. These interests (sometimes characterized as “ideological” in nature), in turn, determine the structure or literary shape of their work, including such basic elements as character, plot, scope, and narrative voice. Thus, while it is constitutive for the genre or category that such works mainly follow the sequence and wording of the biblical text, they are not—and cannot be—identical to the latter in compositional form. Every rewritten Bible composition is defined by its own retelling strategy or program.

To Ovid, sophisticated as he was, ancient and simple piety made an appeal; not, as in the case of Vergil, because it accorded with deep-seated feelings of his own, but rather in the same way as plain fare will sometimes please an over-indulged palate, by a certain piquancy of contrast. It is therefore not so surprising that in him we find one of the most perfect expressions of the oldest recoverable stratum of Italian, or even ancient Mediterranean, religious sentiment. It occurs in the Fasti, iii, 296–7: Frazer thus renders the couplet: ‘Under the Aventine there lay a grove black with the shade of holm-oaks; at sight of it you could say, “There is a spirit here.’”

The Work of the Northumbrian Alcuin in the service of Charlemagne by far excels in importance the contributions of other scholars allied with the Frankish king. One of Alcuin's many interests was to develop in the leaders among the laity of a barbarian age a sense of moral responsibility and a personal culture fit for the commanding positions which these men held. Many of the letters sent by Alcuin to Charlemagne and other members of the Royal household, to the kings of Mercia and Northumbria, to Frankish and British nobles and government officials, overflow with advice and requests to mend their ways. With this aim he wrote special works for some of these persons — for one example, the Rhetoric as a Via Regia for Charlemagne, a work which must be classed as the oldest Carolingian speculum principis, preceding that of Smaragdus of St. Mihiel (written for Louis the Pious), that of Jonas of Orláns (for Pippin of Aquitania), that of Sedulius Scotus (for Lothar II), and that of Hincmar of Reims (for Charles the Bald).

One of the more troublesome issues facing Protestant reformers after the abolition of the Roman Catholic purgatory in the early sixteenth century was the need to explain the status of body and soul in the interim between death and resurrection. Eager to identify the precise destination of the whole person after bodily expiration but before the general judgment, preachers sought to bring comfort to bereaved survivors of the recently departed by formulating an acceptable counterpoise to the centuries-old Roman Catholic geography of the other world. Unlike the authors of learned theological treatises on the nature of the soul and body, eulogists faced the unenviable task of interpreting the experience of death and its sequel to an audience that often lacked the sophistication required for the rigors of sustained exegesis. The task of the eulogist was to attempt to make plain the contours of postmortem existence in a manner designed both to warn and to reassure. In their efforts to define an emotionally satisfying alternative to the Roman Catholic story, however, English Protestants formulated an increasingly wide variety of disparate—and sometimes contradictory—accounts of life after death, each of which was normatively based upon a personal understanding of scripture. By the late seventeenth century, even as English funeral sermons that treated the afterlife began to reflect a broad consensus regarding the separate destinations of body and soul, there remained much confusion over the precise condition of those eternal partners before Christ's promised return. The failure to resolve this dilemma in a satisfactory manner and the inability to arrive at an acceptable consensus on a matter of central concern to believing Christians contributed to the growth of mortalist and annihilationist theories by the close of the century. Conceptual disarray within the orthodox camp, then, provided an opportunity for more innovative thinkers to step forward, persons whose understanding of eschatological time, anchored in their own unique interpretation of the Christian scriptures, negated any need for continued debate about a putative “middle place”.

In the triumph of Christianity after Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge, no group has been more assiduously studied than the senatorial aristocracy of the fourth and fifth centuries, the clarissimi and their families, whose initial reluctance to abandon paganism is as clear as their ultimate accommodation to the new religion. An important indication of their Christianization is the number of them who were willing to forego traditional political careers for ecclesiastical office. Ambrose comes immediately to mind as an example of such a senator from the fourth century, and Sidonius Apollinaris from the fifth. With precipitous speed Ambrose resigned the governorship of Aemilia-Liguria to become bishop of Milan, and Sidonius accepted ordination to the see of Clermont in the year after he had been urban prefect at Rome. Because of these senators and some others like them, students of Late Antiquity have been willing to identify many fourth-century bishops as members of the senatorial aristocracy who seemingly chose between two competing forms of vita activa, the Empire and the Church. The issue is not trivial, especially if one believes with Arnaldo Momigliano that “when the choice is offered, when you can choose between being a bishop and being a consul, you are no longer an ancient man, you are a medieval one.” I think that there were few if any such medieval men among the clarissimi of the fourth century. I propose to argue here that when the identification of fourth-century bishops with imperial senators is cross-examined, it seldom carries conviction, and that the episcopal lists of the fourth century contain surprisingly few names from senatorial families.

Looking at nation as text, as culture, questions the totalization of national culture and opens up the widely disseminated forms through which subjects construct “the field of meanings associated with national life.” It offers a perspective that enables us to enter discourses beyond those fixed, static, “official” ones.

One of the most significant shifts in Psalms scholarship in recent years has been the emergence of a new interest in tracing how early religious communities interpreted this religious poetry within the context of an emerging scriptural canon. Whereas the form-critical studies that dominated much of the twentieth century concentrate on recovering the original Sitz im Leben (or “life setting”) of the liturgical compositions collected in the Psalter within Israel's religious cult, the recent scholarly turn emphasizes how these prayers and praises came to be reread in light of narratives and other material found elsewhere in the Bible. In point of fact, the earliest evidence for this practice of canonical relecture is preserved within the Book of Psalms itself, where historical superscriptions correlate a number of psalms with specific events in King David's life. Through the addition of superscriptions, the moving penitential prayer found in Psalm 51 becomes “A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba” (compare 2 Samuel 11-12), the lament of an individual surrounded by threatening enemies found in Psalm 3 becomes “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son” (compare 2 Samuel 15-18), and so forth.

In his influential study The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger asserted that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death or, more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.” Berger was not suggesting that religion is primarily a private obsession of the individual with death. Rather his thesis is that religion is a social phenomenon, part of the human enterprise of “world-building” by which we attempt “to impose a meaningful order upon reality.” The significance of death is not an individual matter because “death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality—of the world, of others, and of the self. Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, ‘business-as-usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here everything in the daytime world of existence in society is massively threatened with ‘irreality’—that is, everything in that world becomes dubious, eventually unreal, other than what one used to think.” In short, death is a threat to the meaningfulness not only of the individual life, but of the common enterprise of society and, indeed, of any attempt, social, religious or philosophical, to perceive reality as a coherent and purposeful order.

The Bible, we are continually reminded, was written with an intent remote from that of the philosopher. To examine the Bible for its logical implications might therefore appear futile. The present inquiry, however, is undertaken in a more Socratic spirit. Socrates carried his search for truth into the most unlikely quarters. Unimpressed by pedigrees, he winnowed ideas in banquet hall and market place, rejecting none until they stood condemned by their own inner contradictions. The aim of the following pages is to apply the Socratic method to the Bible; more specifically, to examine some logical implications of biblical anthropomorphism.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, several ethnologists became interested in the phenomenon of fasting. They found, in the words of one study, that “the custom of fasting is wide-spread among peoples at very different stages of civilization, and is practiced for a variety of purposes.” The impulse to order such multifarious data led later scholars to construct systems of classification. One such attempt describes the motivations for fasting as follows: “it may be an act of penitence or of propitiation; a preparatory rite before some act of sacramental eating or an initiation; a mourning ceremony; one of a series of purification rites; a means of inducing dreams and visions; a method of adding force to magical rites.”

In 1986, Michel van Esbroeck published a remarkable new Life of the Virgin that not only is among the most profound and eloquent Mariological writings of early Byzantium but also presents a useful compendium of early apocryphal traditions about Mary. Some of the Life's episodes are already well known from their original sources, such as the Protevangelium of James and the early dormition apocrypha, but many other extrabiblical traditions appearing in this Life of the Virgin are not otherwise attested in early Christian literature. This is true especially of the section that overlaps with the gospels, where the Life expands the canonical narratives in ways unprecedented (to my knowledge) in Christian apocryphal literature. By writing Mary into the story at key points and augmenting several of her more minor appearances, the Life portrays Mary as a central figure in her son's ministry and also as a leader of the nascent church. The result is a veritable “Gospel of Mary” in the section of the Life that emphasizes Mary's essential contributions to her son's earthly mission and her leadership of the apostles in the early Christian community: the Life gives a brief account of the same events recorded in the canonical gospels, but with the Virgin Mary brought to the fore at nearly every instance. The origins of these traditions are not entirely clear, and while they may be the work of the Life's author, it is equally possible that they reflect now lost apocryphal traditions about Mary that once circulated in late antiquity. In any case, the attention that this earliest Life of the Virgin lavishes on the activities of Mary and other women as important leaders in the formation of Christianity is rather striking and quite exceptional among the literature of Christian late antiquity. In its emphasis on the roles played by these women it represents a surprising ancient predecessor to much of the recent work in New Testament scholarship to recover the importance of women in the early Christian movement.

Perhaps in nothing, not even in scientific outlook, is the contrast between the Modern Age and the Middle Ages more striking than in the changed attitude toward money and money-making. In the Middle Ages trade was frowned upon and the money-lender despised. In this attitude church and society generally agreed. The church was always castigating the sin of avarice. The making of money was designated by Thomas Aquinas as ‘turpitudo,’ even though he admitted its necessity. The thesis that the shop-keeper could only with difficulty please God was introduced into canon law. Usury, which meant not only extortionate interest but interest of any kind, was prohibited by several councils of the church, and to a usurer the privileges of the sacraments were often denied. Even in those days there were, to be sure, practical qualifications of these theoretical judgments, due to the need of money— a need often as keenly felt by the lords spiritual as by the lords temporal. Nevertheless the generalization is safe that money-making was regarded as socially degrading and morally and religiously dangerous. Today all this is changed. Money-making has become the chief aim of modern civilization. In countless ways, gross or subtle, it determines our lives and thinking. It entices into its service many of the best minds of our college graduates. Even our professions, law, medicine, the ministry (witness the vast development of ecclesiastical advertising), are more and more entangled in its net, while the commercialization of amusements, including our college sports, is notorious.

The present article was begun with the limited purpose of making known the new inscriptions discovered by the Harvard-Catholic University Joint Expedition to Serabit in the spring of 1930. In the course of this study, I perceived that some signs doubtful in the inscriptions already published were made clear by the new slabs, and I decided to go over the entire field again.

This paper discusses the issue of “Christian” identity customarily defined by its distinctiveness. I wish to start with a biographical observation: The classics school that I entered in April 1939 in Frankfurt am Main was under the same roof as the Jewish high school. This struck me as very peculiar given the propaganda and political activity of the late thirties in Nazi Germany. The Jewish high school was named after Samson Rafael Hirsch, the famous Jewish scholar and rabbi of nineteenth-century Frankfurt. On our side of the building there was nobody who would answer my questions about the school, and before long the object of my boyish inquisitiveness ceased to exist. As part of the German war machine, a military censorship complex took over the Jewish part of the building and closed the Jewish high school. The Jewish students and their teachers disappeared. We, the students of the non-Jewish part of the building, wondered during study breaks where they and the many Jews in the neighborhood of our school had gone. As the yellow star on the clothes of Jewish fellow citizens appeared, it became very obvious to us youngsters that there were fewer and fewer Jewish people around. As the Nazis established a store “for Jews only” at the trolley stop near our school, the pain and hunger of the people with the Star of David showed more and more on their faces. Their number visibly dwindled.

In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul directly addresses only the Galatian churches; through them, however, he is engaged in a polemic against rival missionaries who had influenced the churches with another gospel. If one intends to analyze Paul's argumentation in Galatians 1–2, it is necessary first to ask about the characteristics of these missionaries and their gospel. In the history of research, many different pictures of the opponents and their gospel have been drawn. These reconstructions result partly from the method of so-called mirror reading; this method infers the position of the opponents by reversing the negations and affirmations in Paul's argumentation. Recently and with good reason this method has been criticized. In my analysis I confine myself to what can be said with certainty about the opponents: First, the opponents shared with Paul the belief in Jesus as the messiah; otherwise Paul could not have termed their message a “gospel” (Gal 1:6). Second, for the opponents the gospel of Paul was incomplete, because it lacked part of the commandments of the covenant, particularly the commandment of circumcision as a prerequisite for full membership among the people of God (Gal 5:3–4; 6:12–13). Although Paul himself did not mention it, we can safely assume that on this point the opponents referred to scripture. Gen 17:10–11, for example, states clearly that without circumcision no one can be a member of the covenant.