[I am deeply indebted to Professor A. D. Nock for his kindness in reading this paper in its first draft and for his invaluable criticisms and suggestions.]

In the Christology of the New Testament we are faced with two distinct methods of expressing the belief of the Church as to the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Of the belief that He was merely a great human teacher we find no trace; the Church would never have come into being, if it had not believed that He had risen from the dead. As we all know, the Christology that prevailed was that which saw in Him the Incarnation of the divine Word or Wisdom, which was at once the divine and living pattern of the cosmos, the agent by which the cosmos was created, and the divine mind immanent in the cosmos and more particularly in the mind of man. It was inevitable that this cosmogony should triumph in the end, since it was the only one which could, with whatever difficulty, be formally reconciled with Jewish monotheism; moreover it transferred the Lord from the realm of eschatology, which meant nothing to the Greek convert, into the sphere of cosmogony which was one of the central problems of the semi-Gnostic philosophy and theology of the hellenistic age, as we meet it in the Corpus Hermeticum.

In the first of his letters ex Ponto (vv. 51–58) Ovid mentions the confession of sins practised in the religion of Isis by the faithful (in the presence of a priest?). One man, seated before the altar of the goddess (Isiacos focos, v. 52), confessed that he had offended her divinity (numen violasse fatentem, v. 51); a second, deprived of his sight in punishment for some similar crime, went along the public road crying out that he had merited the castigation (se meruisse, v. 54). Ovid affirms that he had seen all this with his own eyes (vidi ego, v. 51). It may be that his vidi ego is purely rhetoric. Confession of sins, however, was certainly practised in Egypt ab antiquo, as is proved by a group of Theban inscriptions of the epoch of the XlXth Dynasty (about 1300 B.C.) dedicated to various divinities, amongst whom is a local goddess assimilated to Isis-Hathor. Moreover, ophthalmia was very common in Egypt.

The theory that this number reflects the number of kinds of fish recognized in antiquity comes from Jerome, Comm. xiv in Ezechiel (Migne, PL 25, 474C). He says, “Writers on the nature and properties of animals, who have learned ‘fishing’ in either Latin or Greek (one of whom is the most learned poet Oppianus Cilix), say there are one hundred fifty-three species of fish.” It was customary in antiquity — and the practice has not come to an end — to generalize from single instances, and we shall not be far from the mark if we suspect that Jerome's only source for this statement is his understanding of Oppian. Jerome knew the work of Pliny on natural history, and Pliny (N. H. ix. 43) states that there are seventy-four species of fish, in addition to thirty varieties of Crustacea.

In view of the fatefulness of Ludwig Feuerbach for religion in the modern world, it is curious that recent theologians have written so little about him. For the most widely effective critiques of religion in our time, those by Marx and Freud, are both variations on a theme that received its classic expression not from them but from him. Yet Karl Barth is the one major theological figure of today who has explicitly concerned himself with Feuerbach over the years. Even if Barth had no other bearing on our situation than this, his reflections on Feuerbach would merit the attention I propose to give them by considering three questions: (1) Who is the Feuerbach with whom Barth has been concerned? (2) How has Barth responded to him? (3) Has he answered him?

The Hebrew originals of the above-mentioned Psalms have been recently published by J. A. Sanders from a scroll containing approximately the last quarter of the Psalter which was found in the Eleventh Cave at Qumrân. In his preliminary notice on the unrolling of this scroll Sanders had already written:

There are seven non-canonical compositions, aside from Ps 151, interspersed among the psalms. One of these is a prose account of the psalms and songs composed by David and the purposes for which he wrote them. The total number of musical compositions attributed to David is 4050.

In many fields of activity Robert Grosseteste was an important figure in thirteenth-century England. Bishop of Lincoln for nearly two decades (1235–1253), he pursued a vigorous policy as statesman and churchman. He was already a distinguished teacher and chancellor of the University of Oxford. His voluminous writings were more acceptable to his contemporaries than those of any other author. His scientific achievements were such that Professor Sarton has styled a volume of his monumental History of Science, From Robert Grosseteste to Roger Bacon. In death his memory was revered as that of a saint.

In several passages in the Hebrew Bible, we find similar phrases used to describe the punishment the authors hope the deity will mete out to those who are their enemies. In Psalm 3, the psalmist's situation is described in this way:

One of the perennial, and more vexing, problems in religious thought and philosophy has been the question unde malum. In ancient, medieval, and modern thought, the issue has been viewed mostly in its theological context. From the perspective of traditional monotheistic theology, the problem thus presents itself: If God is truly all good and all powerful, then why would God cause or even allow evil, whether natural (e.g., earthquakes, floods, human disease) or moral (murder, rape, and the like), to exist? Inasmuch as the existence of evil, at least from the phenomenological point of view, is an indisputable fact, it would seem that either divine omnipotence or benevolence must be limited.

Interpretation of the OT is a many-faceted thing in gnostic literature. The old view that Gnosticism implies a rejection of the OT has had to be considerably modified in the light of new discoveries. The Nag Hammadi texts have shown that the Gnostics made far more use of the OT than could have been expected on the basis of older premises. R. McL. Wilson, in a recent article, has pointed out that no less than seventeen OT books are quoted in the gnostic writings collected in Werner Foerster's anthology. To be sure, Genesis—especially the first chapters—is by far the most-quoted OT book. And it is obvious that the use made by the Gnostics of Genesis and other OT writings is hardly conventional, to say the least. Even so, it is of no use to scholarship simply to be satisfied with calling attention to the “perversity” of gnostic OT interpretation. For it is important to observe the manifold ways in which the OT is utilized in gnostic, especially Christian gnostic, texts. One can then attain a proper understanding of the role of biblical interpretation in the development of Gnosticism, as well as early Christian theology in general.

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his Herrlichkeit, laments the eclipse of the aesthetic in modern theology, noting that the being of a Christian is itself a thing of beauty inscribed by the grace of God; that is, it is a form of existence “opened up to us by the God-Man's act of redemption. . . . God's incarnation perfects the whole ontology and aesthetics of created being.” Von Balthasar traces the loss of the aesthetic dimension from Protestant theology to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, which seeks to abstract “data” of scriptural revelation into objective formulae. This approach leads to the historicism of Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Barth, effectively removing the meditative gaze from theological contemplation. Von Balthasar's ultimate argument is that it is necessary for Protestant theology to revive the Alexandrian tradition in order to recover the “transcendent principle of beauty as derived from and most proper to God,” which is to be “for us the very apex and archetype of beauty in the world.”

Andrew of Crete, born in Damascus in 660, led a monastic life in the monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from 678 onwards. Sent on an official mission to Constantinople in 685, he preferred to stay in that city and for ten years continued his monastic practice there. When Leontius III ascended the throne in 695, Andrew was by imperial order ordained deacon of the Hagia Sophia and became head of both the local orphanage and the administration of the deaconry . In 711 he was appointed metropolitan of Crete with his see in Gortyna. In that year he signed the anathema of the 6th Council under Emperor Philippicus (711–713), thus supporting Philippicus's monotheletism, although soon afterwards he returned to orthodoxy. He stayed in Crete until 730, when Emperor Leo III called him back to the capital because of his opposition to the imperial policy that favored iconoclasm. For ten years he ventilated his resistance to that policy in his homilies but was finally exiled to Lesbos. He died on 4 July 740 in Eresos.

After exhorting the brethren not to hold the faith with acts of partiality (2:1), the author of the Epistle of James presents an example of partiality in the assembly (2:2, 3), followed by a reproach in the form of a rhetorical question (2:4). Dibelius has rightly warned against historicizing this example, as though it presented an actual incident for which the author gives advice. But even when James 2:2, 3 is understood as an example employed for paraenetic purposes, still we must ask how this example was understood —i.e., what type of situation is depicted and what is the point of the example?

One spring in the latter half of the month Adar, some time after the death of Salome Alexandra (76–67 B.C.), “there was a certain Onias, who, being a righteous man and dear to God, … in a rainless period prayed to God (ηὔξατο τῷ Θεῷ) to end the drought, and God … heard his prayer and sent rain …” The story of Honi (Onias), so plainly told by Josephus, is reported much more dramatically in the talmudic sources. According to one source, the drought had lasted three years.

The outstanding importance of allegorical interpretation to the medieval scholar engaged on interpreting the Scriptures is well known. The method, which had originated in the East and was older than Christianity, became well established in the West during the Patristic age; in its application there was a good deal of variety. Ambrosiaster in commenting on the Pauline epistles combined orthodoxy with an unswerving adherence to the historical sense. Tyconius, on the other hand, laid down no less than seven rules whereby to interpret the prophecies in the Old Testament. Augustine went further in finding allegorical meaning in passages of Holy Writ than Jerome, who always maintained a certain balance in expounding the literal and the spiritual sense. The latter is more pronounced in his earlier commentaries when he was still consciously under the influence of Origen. In his later works allegorical interpretation becomes noticeably less; but it is not wholly absent even from his unfinished commentary on Jeremiah. To Gregory the Great the sensus spiritalis and particularly the sensus moralis were of such paramount significance as almost to oust the literal meaning. His influence on Bede and through Bede, as well as directly, on later expounders of the Bible was enormous.

In a recent article, F. Pfister has put forth a theory which appears to me so interesting a mixture of fruitful suggestion and of error as to repay a detailed and critical examination. It is briefly that ‘der Verfasser des Urevangeliums, das in verschiedenen Fassungen den drei Synoptikern bekannt war, eine kynisch-stoische Heraklesbiographie vor Augen hatte, und in enger Abhängigkeit von dieser das Leben Jesu geetaltete.’ This proposition he endeavors to support by a series of comparisons between details of the life of Jesus as given in the Synoptic Gospels and descriptions of the corresponding events in the life of Herakles, especially as told by our later authorities, such as Diodorus Siculus and the so-called Apollodoros.

I recently became aware that I had for a long time entertained certain preconceptions about the way in which Presocratic thinkers saw the world, without ever having seriously considered the evidence on which my belief was based. This I have now tried to do, with the results which are set forth in this paper. Since in any case it will deal, in a fairly general way, with problems concerning the interaction of philosophical and religious thought in early Greece, I hope it will have a certain interest, whether or not its readers agree with the thesis put forward. The perennial fascination of that topic has been enhanced in recent years by the discussion provoked by Werner Jaeger's book on The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, from which I take this sentence as a kind of text for my own reflections: “Though philosophy means death to the old gods, it is itself religion.”

First, a few remarks about the audience of the Gospel according to Mark. This study is based on the premise that Mark was read aloud in gatherings of Christians in the late first and early second centuries that were not necessarily liturgical in a narrow sense. Further, those who listened were not all equally committed to the Christian faith and probably assimilated and interpreted the instruction that they received in various ways. Some in the audience, even if they were familiar with the Pauline understanding of Jesus as the Son of God, may have preferred to de-fine Jesus' divine sonship in another, more traditionally Jewish way, to be discussed below. Finally, even if the Gospel was written primarily for insiders, it is likely that copies were available to interested or critical outsiders. Celsus's knowl-edge of the Gospels shows that this happened at least by the second half of the second century.

This essay is an analysis of the natural law theory of one of the most important of the seventeenth-century Puritan philosophers and theologians, William Ames (1576-1633). Ames' theory of natural law has historical importance because of its contribution to the formulation of fundamental doctrines upon which modern democratic institutions were raised — such doctrines as the duties and inalienable rights of individual citizens, the social contract or government by consent of the people, and the right of resistance when a government exceeds the bounds of its authority. For although Ames spent his life in England and Holland, and although he died in the midst of his preparations to emigrate to America from Holland, his greatest impact and predominating influence were in the New World, He has justifiably been called ”the spiritual father of the New England churches,” ”the favorite theologian of early New England,” and ”the father of American theology.”