In his most recent book, the great Semitist, Professor Charles Cutler Torrey, presents a new theory to explain the phenomena of the Old Testament quotations in the Gospel of Matthew, and thus adds one more element to the recurrent debate on Aramaic origins of the gospels. Hitherto most critics have held that the vast majority of citations in the first gospel were taken over from the Septuagint (or, more properly, the Old Greek) version, the chief exceptions being the Reflexionszitate or “formula citations,” a group of passages introduced by some such formula as “in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying” (1:22). The latter were thought to have been made on the basis of the Hebrew text, either directly by the evangelist, or borrowed from an old book of Christian testimonies or proof-texts, or, as Bacon believed, taken over from the Aramaic “targumic material” which had grown up in Syria around Mark's gospel. Torrey completely rejects this usual view, which assumes that our Mt. was originally written in Greek. The original Mt., he says, was in Aramaic, and its principal source was the originally Aramaic Mk.; its biblical quotations were, however, in the Hebrew of the Bible. If, at many points, quotations in the Greek Mt. agree with Greek Mk., it is only because the translator of Mt. made use of the latter.

The echo produced by some of my writings dealing with problems of Comparative Religions sounds to me as an invitation to restate thematically one of the main issues in the Encounter of Religions.

This present study is irenic in tone and has tried to overcome the temptation of self-defence. I shall try to rethink my approach to the problem of the encounter of the christian faith with the religions of the world, to present it for correction or even for total eclipse. How can I put forward more than a hypothesis in this field (now just emerging) of open dialogue among religions?

It was demonstrated elsewhere that after a visit to Rome in 1886–87 a small group of American Catholic bishops, later known as Americanists, came to hold a number of religious convictions which accounted for the reformatory activity of these men between that visit and the papal condemnation of Americanism in 1899. Briefly, a faith or myth was born alongside the standard Catholic orthodoxy of the period, one which affirmed God as rearranging the world, determining the decline of Europe and the emergence of the United States of America as a “New World,” destined, as in the puritan dream, to shed its influence around the world. The unique features of this American Catholic reinterpretation of the puritan myth were that it was housed within an international religious institution, and its object was not exactly the spread of political liberty or a purified Christianity, but a modernized or Americanized Catholicism.

On May 8, 1847, The Literary World—the newly founded vehicle in New York City for the program of “nativist” literature—reviewed an exhibition at the National Academy. The magazine had just undergone an editorial revolution and the new management was endeavoring to tone down the strident nationalism of the first few issues; still, the exuberant patriotism of the reviewer could not be restrained, for he had just beheld two exciting landscapes of Staten Island painted by J. F. Cropsey.

During the last twenty or thirty years evidence has been rapidly accumulating to prove that the codex was in general use for books at a much earlier time than was formerly supposed. The definite testimony of Martial and others on the subject could be misinterpreted, discounted, or overlooked so long as there was no clear corroborating archaeological evidence. Papyrus and the roll had taken firm hold upon the classicistic imaginations of modern students of ancient literatures, especially after the nineteenth-century discoveries of papyri in Egypt, and no one dreamed that the New Testament documents could have been written originally on anything but papyrus sheets and papyrus rolls.

Thanks to the considerable surviving corpus of Old-Norse literature much is known about Old North-Germanic religious practices and beliefs; by comparison, our knowledge of corresponding matters in the West-Germanic area is meager. For England, historically and sociologically an offshoot of, and by the time of the earliest written records long separated from, the north-west German homeland, our best source of information is a rather miscellaneous collection of charms. Next probably come the epic poem Béowulf and the historian Bede, who especially in his Historia ecclesiastica passim furnishes some additional information. Otherwise one is dependent upon scattered materials, ranging from single words to such cult objects as the cenotaph ship excavated in 1939 at Sutton Hoo in Norfolk. In the face of this relative paucity of knowledge any little additional information may be welcome.

The Slavonic version of Josephus’ History of the Jewish War, extant in some fifteen Russian MSS. of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was first brought to light in recent times by A. N. Popov, the discoverer of the Slavonic Book of Enoch, who in 1866 called attention to passages contained in this version, but unattested elsewhere, relating to John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. Popov published the Slavonic text of parts of these passages. The Preface to Niese and Destinon's edition of the Greek text of the Jewish War (1894) contains a reference (p. xxii) to the existence of the version, but the text was then still inaccessible. For our further acquaintance with the Slavonic version we are chiefly indebted to the Esthonian scholar, Alexander Berendts of Dorpat.

Every student of Christianity learns how the Protestant Reformation wrested the bible from the clutches of priests and monks. Luther's insistence on scripture's preeminent authority, the spate of vernacular translations, and the invention of movable type all combined to draw literate laypeople to the biblical texts. Once the clerical monoply was broken, Christianity entered a new phase of its history.

In the course of a valuable discussion of the Di Indigetes, Koch seeks to prove that the epithet means Stammväter, using as his material certain passages of Greek authors which seem to equate indiges with γενάρχης. Of these the chief is the famous fragment of Diodorus Siculus preserved in a Vatican MS. and first published by Mai, Scriptorum Veterum Noua Collectio, ii, p. 116.

The Union of Lyons between the Greek and Latin churches was largely the result of the political aims of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus. It was he who initiated the negotiations and who almost single-handedly attempted to force the union upon his Empire. He was convinced, as both Greek and Western historians repeatedly observe, that union was the one effective means to avert the menace of an expedition against Constantinople by the powerful coalition of Charles of Anjou, then King of Sicily. Recently recovered from the Latins by Palaeologus, Constantinople was still relatively weak, and it was mainly the Emperor's flexible diplomacy that had hitherto been able to maintain it against the Latins. To Palaeologus' mind only the offer of union could induce the Holy See to restrain Charles from his plan of conquest.

If one can trust the testimony of modern biblical scholarship, the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 is leading a double life. According to some, Deuteronomy 32 represents a lawsuit in which God summons witnesses to the stand (Deut 32:1), issues a formal indictment (Deut 32:15–18), takes an oath (Deut 32:40), and, finally, pronounces punishment (Deut 32:19–29). For others, Deuteronomy 32 represents a wisdom text that identifies itself as a teaching (Deut 32:2), chastises Israel for its intellectual shortcomings (Deut 32:6, 28), and repeatedly exhorts Israel to remember and understand (Deut 32:7, 29). Thus Deuteronomy 32 seems to have two literary identities: one as an act of indictment drawing on legal language; the other as an act of instruction belonging to the sphere of wisdom.

John Calvin urged Peter Martyr Vermigli to leave Zurich to serve as pastor of the Italian church in Geneva. If Martyr were to join him, Calvin wrote in his February 1557 letter, he would share the task of giving biblical lectures and might even “resign the whole task to you, so far as your convenience will permit.” In a September letter to the Zurich Senate, Calvin again invited Martyr to Geneva where his mission would be “to the incredible profit of both the men of his own nation and ourselves.”

Is apophasis dead? Can there be a contemporary apophatic theology, or critical method, or approach to comparative religion and interreligious dialogue? If such approaches are possible, then a resource of virtually unfathomable richness lies largely untapped. I suggest that apophasis has much to offer to contemporary thought and that, in turn, classical apophasis can be critically reevaluated from the perspective of contemporary concerns.

Il pourrait sembler superflu de dire que je n'ai pas la prétention d'éliminer par ces lignes les mystères qui enveloppent μυστήριον et sacramentum, deux termes hérissés de difficultés et dont l'évolution sémasiologique est loin d'être claire. Je voudrais présenter seulement quelques remarques qui sont le fruit d'études sur le grec et le latin des chrétiens et qui pourraient contribuer à la solution du problème de l'équivalence de μυστήριον — sacramentum. Or, ces études nous révèlent de plus en plus des tendances générales, voire des règles, d'après lesquelles les deux grandes langues de l'antiquité classique ont évolué sous l'influence exercée par le Christianisme. Sans entrer dans le détail je voudrais donner quelques suggestions d'ordre général, inspirées par l'étude des procédés qui déterminent l'établissement du vocabulaire technique du grec et du latin des chrétiens.

Even gods are not always above bureaucracy. Societies very different from each other have entertained the idea that the heavens might be arranged much like an earthly bureaucracy, or that mythological beings might exercise their power in a way that makes them resembles bureaucrats. The best-known case is the Chinese “celestial bureaucracy,” but the idea is also found in (to take nearly random examples) Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, the Hebrew Bible, Late Antiquity, and modern popular culture. The primary sources discussed in this essay pertain to an area of history where bureaucracy was historically underdeveloped, namely medieval Scandinavia. Beginning with the Glavendrup runestone from the 900s, I examine a way of thinking about divine power that seems blissfully bureaucracy-free. Moving forwards in time to Adam of Bremen’s description of the temple at Uppsala (1040s–1070s), I find traces of a tentative, half-formed bureaucracy in the fading embers of Scandinavian paganism. In the 1220s, well into the Christian era, I find Snorri Sturluson concocting a version of Old Norse myth which proposes a novel resolution between the non-bureaucratic origins of his mythological corpus and the burgeoning bureacratization of High Medieval Norway. Although my focus is on medieval Scandinavia, transhistorical comparisons are frequently drawn with mythological bureaucrats from other times and places. In closing, I synthesise this comparative material with historical and anthropological theories of the relationship between bureaucracy and the divine.

Then thelordsaid to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And thelordput a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. (Gen 4:15)

The sumerians failed to develop a systematic philosophy in the accepted sense of the word. In particular it never occurred to them to raise any questions concerning the fundamental nature of reality and knowledge, and therefore they evolved practically nothing corresponding to the philosophical subdivisions commonly known as metaphysics and epistemology. They did, however, speculate on the nature and, more particularly, the origin of the universe, as well as on its method of operation. And there is good reason to infer that in the course of the third millennium B.C. there emerged a group of Sumerian thinkers and teachers who, in the course of their quest for satisfactory answers to some of the problems raised by their cosmic speculations, evolved a systematic cosmology and theology carrying such high intellectual conviction that they became the basic creed and dogma of much of the ancient Near East.

In Kierkegaard's hands the story of Abraham and Isaac is clearly a story about the relationship between the life of sacrifice and the religious life. By leading us on to deeper and deeper levels of sacrifice, he aims to make us grasp the essential nature of faith and, with it, the right relationship between the individual and God. He does this by means of a dialectic involving Abraham's response to God in contrast to (1) the other possible responses he might have made, and (2) Kierkegaard's own response to what he believed was the divine command to break his engagement to Regina Olsen.

In three books and numerous articles, Calum M. Carmichael argues for a radical transformation in the way the laws of Deuteronomy are to be understood. His most recent work, Law and Narrative in the Bible, maintains that the legal corpus of Deuteronomy, far from being “law,” rather constitutes “literature,” in which the Deuteronomistic historian reflects upon the full range of pre-exilic Israelite narrative, Genesis through 2 Kings. In the course of this argument, Carmichael makes fundamental assertions about the composition of Deuteronomy, the history of Israelite literature, and the history of interpretation. Carmichel introduces his work as an attempt “to overturn longstanding views on material that has always been in center stage in the study of the Bible” and as “radical in its results.” His work has already generated a series of further studies of narrative allusion and drafting techniques in Deuteronomy that presuppose his arguments.