The problem of the manumission of slaves by sale to a divinity or by consecration has been studied by many scholars. Nevertheless the following questions still arise. What real sense had the sale? What characterizes the sale and the consecration respectively? How do they bring about one's liberty? What is a fictitious or trust sale? Do the several manumission procedures of Delphi, of central Greece, of Macedonia, of Asia Minor and of Syria reflect the same customs and traditions? Cameron, after discussing a number of inscriptions of Imperial times relating to sacral manumission, puts the following question: “It would be interesting to inquire whether this conception is to be regarded as having survived continuously with the institution from an early period in Greece, or as having been revived and strengthened by new social and religious influence after remaining dormant in a period in which sacral manumission was no more than a legal fiction.” I should like to try to answer this question.

Christian anti-Jewish polemics have a long and rich history, stretching all the way back to the early stages of the new faith community. Anti-Jewish treatises dot the history of Christian literature from the third century onward. By contrast, Jews seem to have been much less concerned with combatting Christianity. It has been widely noted that the earliest Jewish compositions devoted to anti-Christian polemics stem from the twelfth century. While the twelfth-century provenance of the earliest Jewish anti-Christian tracts has long been recognized, little attention has been focused on the significance of this dating. The fact that sometime toward the end of the twelfth century, perhaps in the 1160s or 1170s, two anti-Christian works, the forerunners of a substantial body of Jewish anti-Christian polemical-apologetic works, were composed almost simultaneously begs interpetation. What changes gave rise to a new Jewish sensitivity, to a need to present Jewish readers with formulation and rebuttal of Christian claims? The answer clearly lies in the enhanced agressiveness of western Christendom toward the Jews, as well as other non-Christians, a development that has been recognized and discussed extensively in modern scholarly literature. In the face of an increasingly aggressive Christendom, Jewish intellectual and spiritual leadership had to reassure the Jewish flock of the rectitude of the Jewish vision and the nullity of the Christian faith. This is precisely what the first two anti-Christian treatises, the Milhamot ha-Shem of Jacob ben Reuven and the Sefer ha-Berit of Joseph Kimhi, undertook to achieve. Given the pioneering nature of these works, it is striking that insufficient scholarly attention has been accorded to these two efforts. They surely have much to tell both of perceived Christian thrusts and of meaningful Jewish rebuttal of these challenges.

In January or February of 384 c.e., the Christian pilgrim known to us as Egeria left Jerusalem, where she had been based, and headed east. According to her own account, she felt impelled by God to climb Mount Nebo. With her traveled “some holy men from Jerusalem, a presbyter and deacons, and several brothers (monks).” The trip, which took them through Jericho and Livias, went very well. Her guides were able to point out further local sites, and, after some instructive detours, they reached their goal. Mount Nebo was high and steep, but the group of pilgrims, now swollen in number by the addition of local monks, made the climb successfully. Close to the summit they found a church commemorating the site of Moses's death. After a short service consisting of readings from Scripture and prayers, the local holy men asked Egeria if she would like to see “the places which are described in the Books of Moses.” This proposal “delighted” her, and together they climbed up to the actual summit.

Patristic exegesis soared to sublime heights with the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs. This nuptial tale, replete with evocative imagery and multivalent symbolism, supplied fertile ground for the mystical musings of Origen (ca. 185–254 C.E.) and Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–395 C.E.). Although its overt eroticism engendered some apprehension, the profound symbolic meanings deployed by the church fathers enabled the church to embrace fully the Song of Songs as a deep reservoir of theological insight. Always provocative and potentially scandalous, it perennially generates hermeneutical difficulties. Since exegesis invariably reflects the social and historical location of the interpreter, disparate themes and issues will resonate with different readers in different eras. For a generation of scholars attentive to the problem of racism, Song 1:5 merits particular attention because of its complex employment of racial imagery. In this verse the Bride proudly declares: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Qedar, like the curtains of Solomon” ( []; ). Both the Hebrew and Greek word for “black,” and , have negative connotations, and the ambiguous sense of the conjunction between and constitutes the grammatical crux of the hermeneutical debate.

In 1974 I published a paper arguing that behind the pseudepigraphic presenta-tions of the religious experiences attributed to apocalyptic seers by the Jewish apocalypses of the Second Temple period, there lay a kernel of actual visionary activity or analogous religious experience.Michael E. Stone, “Apocalyptic, Vision, or Hallucination?” Milla Wa Milla 14 (1974) 47–56; repr. in Selected Studies in Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha with Special Reference to the Armenian Tradition (SVTP 9; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991) 419–28. This was not the regnant view then. Indeed, it had long been a prevalent opinion of scholarship that pseudepigraphic apocalypses are in some sense forgeries and that they present completely fictitious narratives about their claimed authors, with no roots in reality. The actual course of historical happenings might be presented in a symbolic vision, often culminating in prediction, but the framework, the seer, and his doings or feelings (there are no women among the supposed authors) are fictional. At most, the pseudepigraphic framework may hint at the general circumstances in which the work was composed. A Baruch or Jeremiah work about the destruction of the First Temple might well have been written after the destruction of the Second, but that had to be proved on other grounds than correspondence between the fictional situation and that of the author. (Indeed, the book of Baruch was not written in the context of the destruction of the Temple, nor the Qumran Jeremiah Apocryphon.) Scholars regarded words and actions ascribed to the pseudepigraphic author as fiction.In fact, this is an oversimplification. 4 Ezra was written after the destruction, but despite the overall temporal congruity, the framework is not a full one-for-one equivalence. Though the temporal framework can be shown, on various grounds, to be roughly accurate, we hesitate to say the book was written in Rome because the author says he was writing in Babylon; see 4 Ezra3:1 and Michael E. Stone, Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra (Hermeneia; Min-neapolis: Augsburg-Fortress, 1990) 10. Moreover, they often maintained that pseudepigraphic apocalypses were forwarding one or another particular and partisan viewpoint, and using a literary fiction to do so.

Today, New Testament scholars interpret the book of Acts and its account of the Hellenists—Stephen's martyrdom in particularSee Acts 6–8.—while historians of Christianity study the cult of Saint Stephen and the healing power of his relicsParticularly in the eyes of Augustine; see De civitate Dei, 22.8; also p. 290, below.. In contrast to the situation in earlier scholarship, there is, alas, little dialogue between the two groups, because the first does not investigate the reception of the book of Acts,Even in the German collection Evangelisch-katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, whose intention is to respect the Wirkungsgeschichte, Rudolf Pesch's commentary on the book of Acts presents only one reference to a Christian text influenced by Luke's account of Stephen's martyrdom, the story of the martyrs of Lyon preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. eccl. 5.2.5; see Rudolf Pesch, Die Apostelgeschichte. 1.Teilband (Apg 1–12) (2d ed.; EKK 5.1; Solothurn: Benzinger; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1995) 267. and the second does not bridge the gap between the time of the New Testament and the fourth century, when the cult of the saint begins to be well attested. My long-term intention is to establish links between the two scholarly fields and to consider Stephen's career in the New Testament and his role in the life of the church as two phases of a continuous history. This paper, an expression of my short-term intention, fulfills two preliminary tasks: to present the modern research on the hagiography of the first martyr and to collect the ancient material on Stephen. As far as I can judge, such a file or “dossier” on Stephen, the first martyr, does not exist.

In The Theological Project of Modernism, Kevin Hector of theUniversity of Chicago Divinity School offers a nuanced and timely defense ofwhat he sees as an unjustifiably maligned tradition in modern Christiantheology. He focuses on what is commonly labeled the liberal or revisionisttradition, centered in its early stages on figures such as Immanuel Kant,Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Albrecht Ritschl, Ernst Troeltsch,and, more recently, Paul Tillich. By carefully reconstructing key arguments fromthese thinkers, Hector shows not only how this trajectory hangs together as atradition, but also how its animating impulse differs from what many criticshave assumed. Hector's central claim is that this tradition isfundamentally concerned with a distinctive problem, namely, how to relatereligious faith to a sense of one's life as one's own—or,put differently, how one's faith can be self-expressive. Hector labelsthis the problem of “mineness,” or the problem of “howpersons could identify with their lives or experience them as‘mine,’ especially given their vulnerability to tragedy,injustice, luck, guilt, and other ‘oppositions’” (viii).Hector argues that for his chosen thinkers in this tradition, faith—morespecifically, faith in a God who is able to reconcile suchoppositions—plays a crucial role in resolving this problem.

Simone Weil's essay “La personne et le sacré,” known in English as “Human Personality,” is a remarkable piece of philosophy that has not, I think, received as much attention as it deserves among analytic philosophers. And when it has been discussed by such philosophers, they have not always gotten to the root of its oddities and peculiar interest. Granted, it is in some ways extremely difficult to translate Weil's approach to her themes into the kind of discourse characteristic of present-day Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Also, those who are attracted by Weil's writings tend to read her on her own terms, which leaves one with a sense that the hardest questions have not been put to her, and that the difficulties of her work have not been fully brought to the surface. Be that as it may, I wish here to take seriously the central claims that Weil makes and to explore them from an analytic perspective, not least because “Human Personality” contains, in nuce, most of the themes that preoccupied Weil.

It is a privilege to have the opportunity for such extended reflection on my book Nicaea and Its Legacy. No doubt some authors feel that their manuscripts are truly finished before they are published: I am one of those who merely abandons a manuscript to the copy editors when other pressures demand an end to hostilities. It should be no surprise, then, that I have always envisaged Nicaea as a snapshot of a moving landscape, not just in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the fourth century, but also in my own thinking. Accordingly I will begin here as I was invited to do in our discussion at Harvard, by offering an account of what I think Nicaea accomplishes and of some areas in which the book needs further work.

Source of half a hundred medieval popular romances, the Greek version of the Barlaam and Ioasaph legend has been variously ascribed to three different authors widely separated in time: to St. John of Damascus (c. 676–749), to an anonymous author supposed to have flourished about 600, and to St. Euthymius (d. 1028), a monk of Mount Athos. All three attributions are at present current; it now seems clear that we must discard the first two, and that we are justified in naming Euthymius as the author of this Greek version. The oriental language from which he derived this version we can now identify as Georgian. A brief summary of the evidence which may be adduced for all three attributions is in order here.

The belief in the greatness of individual human beings who are acknowledged as benefactors of the city, the nation, and humankind is as old as the beginnings of Western culture. When the first Christian apostles encountered this belief, it was already well established in the Greco-Roman world. And, with all its intriguing lure, it is still an important and pervasive current in our present situation. Indeed, this belief is very much alive as all of us face the demand for excellence in our teaching and our studies, as well as the expectation that graduates will emerge as recognized leaders in religious communities and in our society at large.

It is held by many that religion had its origin in the emotional life, in “loving reverence,” or in fear, or in awe; and many make some particular emotion the distinguishing mark of religion. Since, indeed, religion is a part of the struggle for the preservation and perfection of life, it involves from the very beginning emotional states. But to speak of religion as originating in emotions is to assume a conception of religion which seems to me utterly unacceptable. If any sentiment or emotion, such as reverence or fear or awe, is found at the dawn of religion, it exists as part of the response, in a particular situation, to a sense of the presence of an invisible Being, upon whom one depends and with whom one desires to hold satisfactory relations. The emotion belongs to an experience involving the whole man, that is, man as a feeling, thinking, willing being.

I am indebted to Mr. Neil Ker for first drawing my attention to the presence of these small papyrus fragments in the Library of Magdalen College, Oxford, to the Librarian, Dr. C. T. Onions, for enabling me to study them, and to the President and Fellows of the College for permitting their publication.

The fragments were purchased by the Reverend Charles B. Huleatt in Luxor in 1901 and presented by him to his old College through the then Librarian, the Reverend H. A. Wilson. It is probable that there were further fragments of the same leaf since a letter by Mr. Huleatt to the Librarian refers to purchases of fragments from the same manuscript in successive years, but nothing beyond what is published below is now extant in the Library. The fragments were correctly identified by their purchaser, and assigned by him to the third century A.D.; a note in the Librarian's report for 1901 reads: “Mr. Huleatt supposes them to be of the third century; but Dr. Hunt who recently examined the fragments thinks they may be assigned with more probability to the fourth century.”

That King James I of England was ardently interested in religious ideas is well-known to students of the seventeenth century. Less well-known is the fact that he was specifically interested in the cause of religious reunion and played a leading part in a movement to find a way to reconcile the different national churches of his day and thus significantly to reduce international tensions. His plans did not exclude the possibility of a rapprochement between the Churches of the Reformation and Rome — even though James's own religious and political writings involved him in a series of bitter exchanges with leading Roman Catholic controversialists. From the beginning of his reign in England James had wanted to approach the problem of religious disunity through an international assembly of divines — or an ecumenical council, and he took care to make his intentions clear through diplomatic channels. During the years 1610–1614 he made use of the celebrated classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, then resident in England, in stimulating support for his ideas, especially in learned circles on the continent. Casaubon's death in England in the summer of 1614 deprived James of a zealous ally in the cause of Christian reunion, but it did not bring the campaign to which they had committed themselves to an end. By this time James was involved in the most ambitious reunion plan of his career, the result of his collaboration with Pierre Du Moulin, pastor of the Reformed Church in Paris and one of the leading theologians in France

In lectures the charm of which his students will never forget, Dr. C. C. Everett used to speak of Schopenhauer as the most brilliant of the profound philosophers. This German thinker is perhaps little read in England, and still less in America, where the levels of culture are low, and the primitive life-instincts still fresh and strong. But among old and reflective peoples the case is bound to be different; so far as he is known at all, he is certain of a hearing—and a not unsympathetic one, whatever the final verdict. He has already ploughed deep in German thought, and his influence in France and Italy is considerable. Perhaps he is (or would be) most easily understood in India, his doctrine, in capital points, being parallel to the Buddhist philosophical writings. As we in America get further on, in age and in reflective habits, he will probably be more and more read here; and one of the crucial problems of philosophical thought may come to be, how Schopenhauer shall be disposed of.

Nearly a century ago, Paul Volz, who is known primarily for his research on early Jewish eschatology, wrote a provocative analysis of the divine spirit in Jewish antiquity; one quarter of this study is devoted to “the spirit hypostasis” (Geisthypostase), that is, spirit (πνεῦμα) interpreted as an independent being rather than a natural element, such as wind, or the spiritual element of humankind, such as the soul.1 In the context of this intriguing discussion, Volz observed that “Philo unequivocally describes the spirit as an hypostasis,” for it mediates God's own power (Mittelwesen), accomplishes concrete actions, such as visiting and leading to truth, and possesses particular characteristics, such as invisibility and complete wisdom. According to Volz, however, Philo understood this spirit hypostasis less as a personal being than a cosmic principle:

The personal character of the Philonic pneuma normally retreats into the background, despite its hypostatic character. The reason for this lies probably in Stoic influence, from which Philo took over the panpsychic pneuma, and moreover in the Philonic conception of the Logos, alongside which the pneuma could never fully be developed.

A recent rereading of Paul Ricoeur's influential study, The Symbolism of Evil, led me to a surprising realization: the dialectic of primary symbols in that book, which superficially resembles the dialectic of subject and object found in many phenomenological studies of religion, can be extended to Ricoeur's analysis of myths and even to his hermeneutical program. The result is a systematic dialectical structure which recalls Hegel's phenomenology more than that of Husserl. This structure also suggests a solution to the problem Ricoeur encounters when he tries to understand the historical linkage between the Christian myth of Adam's fall and the Gnostic myth of the soul exiled in the body. Most significantly, the systematic structure of The Symbolism of Evil helps to illustrate the radical difference between transcendental and historical phenomenologies.

For many years it has been the accepted belief that ‘from the fourth century of our era’ the Book of I Enoch ‘gradually passed out of circulation, and became lost to the knowledge of Western Christendom’ until 1773, ‘when an Ethiopic version of the work was found in Abyssinia by Bruce.’ It is doubtless true that I Enoch was not in any exact sense known to Europe until the return of Bruce, but the belief that he was the first to ‘discover’ the book or its Ethiopic translation appears erroneous. This discovery had been made approximately two centuries before 1773. In his widely read Relation of a Journey George Sandys informs the reader that in a mountain fastness the

Abissens or A Ethiopians…have…the goodliest Librarie of the world: where many bookes that are lost with vs, or but meerely mentioned, are kept entire: as hath bin lately reported by a Spanish Frier that hath seene them, if we may beleeue him: amongst which, they say, are the oracles of Enoch (with other mysteries that escaped the Flood, ingrauen by him vpon pillars) and written in their vulgar language.