During the lifetime of William James, his philosophical work, closely connected as it is with many traditions of British philosophy, made a marked impression—one might almost say, a stir—on the Continent of Europe. Since his death, obituary notices and comprehensive reviews of his philosophy have made the intellectual legacy of the departed thinker the object of still greater attention, the more because, outside of the pragmatic school itself, the interest in the writings of so fine and penetrating a mind as Bergson naturally extends itself to cognate movements of thought.

In this legacy, James's philosophy of religion stands out with special prominence, partly by reason of its contrast to the type of philosophy of religion which is traditional on the Continent of Europe, partly because of the wealth of his own new and valuable suggestions, which have been added to by a number of zealous followers. It may not be uninteresting, therefore, to the readers of this Review, if I try to characterize what is peculiar and new in this, the first thorough-going contribution from America to the philosophy of religion. In doing so, I shall discuss two points: first, the contrast between James's ideas and the European philosophy of religion; and, second, the positive value that the new ideas which thus emerge seem to me to have.

The Pro Caelio is certainly, as an editor describes it, one of Cicero's most brilliant and entertaining orations. If separate editions have been few and if the Pro Caelio is less well known than some other speeches, the explanation lies not in the oration's merits but in the fact that the reading of teachers is to some extent determined by what has been thought proper for schoolboys. In antiquity, in any event, the oration seems to have been highly regarded; it is quoted by Petronius, Aulus Gellius, and Fronto, and a number of times by Quintilian. Moreover, writers of the fourth century and later, notably St. Augustine, also show some acquaintance with it.

Certain biblical laws can be satisfactorily explained only on the basis of their concern to avoid a blurring of the two opposites, life and death. The famous prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother's milk (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Deut 14:21b) is to be explained in this way. In cases where the mother's milk was so used, an ancient observer must have noted that the milk that is naturally associated with the life of the animal was given a reverse role and was now applied to the dead animal. The law represents a reaction against the uncomfortable position of having to juxtapose the natural state of life before death with the unnatural state of “life” after death.

Influences, interrelationships, call them what one may, have long provided a topic for stimulating discussion, – an exercise in which Paul Lapp excelled. With this in mind I offer this brief essay involving discernible influences that reached Palestine during the Pottery Neolithic. It is an outline, in date limited to between 6000 and 4000 B.C., and in space bounded by Mersin, Hassuna, and southwards to Palestine, including the East Bank of Jordan.

When Paul is placed in his Greek context, it is generally his thought, vocabulary, and literary style that receive attention. This is to a degree at least also true when attention is given to the early church's interpretation of his letters. Greek influence can also be perceived in early Christian reflections on the physical appearance of Paul. Less well known to most students of early Christianity than the literary evidence are the artistic representations of Paul, but the curious literary portrait of Paul in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which in some respects agrees with early Christian paintings, is well known. There, Onesiphorus sees Paul as “a man small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of friendliness; for now he appeared like a man, and now he had the face of an angel.”

Five portraits of Jesus by North American scholars published in the 1980s demonstrate the strength of the current resurgence in Jesus scholarship and disclose the central questions dominating the current discussion. These portraits (by E. P. Sanders, Burton Mack, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the present writer, and Richard Horsley) demonstrate that, after decades of relative disinterest, a “third quest” for the historical Jesus is under way. Each portrait or gestalt is interesting in its own right as a construal of the traditions about Jesus and as an exercise in historical reconstruction. Taken together, they illustrate the range of options in contemporary Jesus scholarship and point to the likely focal points of Jesus research in the 1990s.

The Acts of Peter (hereafter Acts Pet.) contains an account of the destruction of an imperial statue by an exorcised demon, a statue that is subsequently miraculously restored by its owner Marcellus with the help of prayer and the apostle Peter. Although scholars seldom examine this episode in significant detail, when they have addressed it, they have for the most part agreed that it is an indication of the anti-imperial stance of the text generally and an attack on the legitimacy of the imperial cult more specifically. This is perhaps not wholly surprising, given that the majority of the other apocryphal Acts of the apostles (hereafter AAA) do seem to exhibit this vein of hostility, and this corpus is often interpreted as something of a homogeneous whole.

From the standpoint of marketing and sales, Henry David Thoreau's first major publishing venture, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was something of a fiasco, a fact hardly mitigated by his famously stoic, as well as humorous, avowals of failure. When, four years after its first appearance, he finally acquiesced to his publisher's petitions to accept the seven hundred and six unsold copies piled in the warehouse, he noted wryly in his journal, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.” Besides the commercial disappointment, Thoreau must have found the book's critical reception somewhat disheartening also.

Eldon J. Epp recently asserted that “the greater the ambiguity in the variant readings in a given variation unit, the more clearly we are able to grasp the concerns of the early church.” I agree with this principle and submit that the famous text-critical problem regarding the authenticity of Luke 22:43–44—the agony of Jesus on the Mount of Olives, which mentions the angel and the sweat “like drops of blood”—has not yet yielded its store of information about early Christianity, particularly in Alex-andria. This article has the modest purpose of presenting two technical notes on the complex question of the external evidence (from the manuscripts) bearing on Luke 22:43–44. These findings provide some of the groundwork for a reappraisal of the Lukan account of Jesus' prayer on the Mount of Olives. This article has the modest purpose of presenting two technical notes on the complex question of the external evidence in the manuscripts bearing on Luke 22:43–44.

At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call “the reflexive turn,” in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. Where did the very concept of “religion” come from? Whose interests are served by this apparently modern, European, and Christian way of categorizing practices? One way to think about the effect of the reflexive turn is to think of the conceptual vocabulary in religious studies as a window or lens through which scholars had previously been examining the world. What had been taken as natural and transparent now becomes itself the object of study. Richard King calls this “the Copernican turn,” that is, as he nicely puts it, a turn to focus on the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. The goal of this turn is to “denaturalize” the concept of religion (King, 1). The reflexive or Copernican turn, in my judgment, is a crucial aspect of social inquiry that scholars of religion should not ignore. But it clearly leads to the question: once one denaturalizes the concept of “religion,” what does the academic study of religion study?

At least since the time of Ferdinand Christian Baur in the mid-nineteenth century, the concepts of “Jewish Christianity” and “Gentile Christianity,” together with related binary pairs (Jewish Christian / Gentile Christian, Jews / Gentiles), have functioned as basic categories in the critical investigation of Christian origins. Adopting the voice of his hero Paul, Baur speaks of “my Gospel of Gentile Christianity, as opposed to Jewish Christianity,” the English terms rendering Heidenchristentums and Judenchristentums, respectively. Speaking of Paul's success in establishing “a Gentile Christianity,” Baur says that “the greater the strides were which the Gospel made among the Gentiles, the greater was the importance which the Gentile Christians assumed over the Jewish Christians.” Such increase in importance notwithstanding, the “Jewish-Christian party opposed to [Paul],” he says, remained “powerful,” and the “conflict between the Pauline and Jewish Christianity” continued to mark the early history of the movement. The place of this conflict in Baur's reconstruction of Christian origins is well known, and his characteristic terminology is readily recognized.

But I know that it can only be gained by abandoning everything.—St. Teresa of Avila

The role philosophy played in the rise of new Jewish esoteric traditions in the Middle Ages has always been a critical question for kabbalah scholarship. Many scholars have contributed to our understanding of kabbalah's relationship to Greek, Christian, and Jewish philosophy, Neoplatonic and Neo-Aristotelian traditions alike. In this article I wish to contribute to this vast scholarly discussion by enlightening some aspects of theosophical kabbalah's innovation in light of its dialogue with philosophical ideas. This dialogue is complex, and the extent of kabbalah's interaction with philosophy is difficult to evaluate. My assumption in the following is that such a dialogue is best apprehended where conflict can be detected. Consequently I will study different cases of theological conflict between theosophical and philosophical conceptions—cases of heresy, where a theological tension can be identified. These tensions will help us to evaluate the nature of the theosophical innovation in question. The framework of this article rests on the assumption that theosophical kabbalah shares with different philosophical traditions some important theological structures but also that it maintains important conceptual differences. In order to evaluate the theological tensions involved I will analyze different cases of theological heresies, both philosophical and theosophical. I hope with this analysis to clarify theosophical kabbalah in light of its theological renewal, a renewal that was not merely the result of the acceptance of or resistance to philosophical ideas but also of the emerging of what I propose to call counter-theology.

Professor Hanan Eshel, in memoriam

Ancient and modern readers have offered two basic interpretations of the “[One like a] Son of Man” () in Dan 7:13. One line of interpretation holds that the One like a Son of Man is a symbol of a collective, namely, the faithful Israelites at the time of the Maccabean revolt.1 The other basic line of interpretation sees the One like a Son of Man as a divine figure of one sort or another, a second God, a son of God, or an archangel.

The medieval expression of Jewish esotericism known as Kabbalah is distinguished by its imaging of the divine as ten hypostatic sefirot that structure the Godhead and generate the cosmos. Since Gershom Scholem, the preeminent twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah, declared the term sefirah (sg.) as deriving from “sapphire”—pointedly rejecting its connection to the Greek σφαῖρα—scholars have paid scant attention to the profound indebtedness of the visual and verbal lexicon of the kabbalists to the Greco-Arabic scientific tradition. The present paper seeks to redress this neglect through an examination of the appropriation of the diagrammatic-iconographical and rhetorical languages of astronomy and natural philosophy in medieval and early modern kabbalistic discourse. This study will place particular emphasis on the adoption-adaptation and ontologization of the dominant schemata of these most prestigious fields of medieval science by classical kabbalists, what it reveals about their self-understanding, and how it contributed to the perception of Kabbalah as a “divine science” well into the early modern period.

This article deals with the similarities and differences between Ben Sira and Chrysippus regarding their solutions to the tension between free will and determinism. Both Ben Sira and Chrysippus argue for compatibilism, the theory that free will and determinism are compatible. However, Ben Sira and Chrysippus have different understandings of freedom required by moral responsibility. According to Chrysippus, consent is the internal cause of persons’ actions, and, thus, they should be responsible for these actions. By contrast, Ben Sira claims that although being shaped by God’s plan, persons could have done otherwise and, in this sense, are responsible for their sins. The first section of this article examines the texts of Ben Sira and Chrysippus regarding the problem of free will. The second section discusses the positions of Ben Sira and Chrysippus on compatibilism. The last section explains the possible influence of Chrysippus on Ben Sira and the main difference between their understandings of freedom.

Many inferences have been drawn by liturgical scholars from the letter of Pliny to Trajan, Epist. x. 96, in the year 112. The purpose of this note is to suggest that such inferences are at least partly invalid.

The formidable storm of literature concerning the narratives of the Last Supper shows no sign of abating any of its force, and the following reflections are submitted in the none too confident hope that perhaps even at this stage in the discussion the problem can be looked at from an unconventional angle. The Lucan account with its notorious difficulties of text and interpretation, the one being inextricably bound up with the other, has been the Waterloo of many investigators. Both the shorter and the longer texts present the student with their individual mass of problems. Since Hort the arguments against the originality of the longer text have had so wide an influence, especially perhaps on Englishspeaking writers, that if these thorny questions could be settled by taking a vote, it is possible that even now the shorter text would have it. Unfortunately the weight of argument is rather more evenly divided. Only so can we understand how it is possible for a scholar like Joachim Jeremias entirely to change his mind on the fundamental issue. It may very well be, of course, that the position adopted in the first edition of Die Abendmahlsworte Jesu can still be regarded as unrefuted even by its author. (Who knows if the next edition may not revert to it?) But it cannot be denied that Jeremias' statement of the case in favor of the longer text in the second edition is powerfully argued.

I do not venture to meet this company as one qualified to preach, nor yet as an authority in matters which are technically theological. My contribution is intended to present some thoughts that have interested me as a student of philosophy. I hope that one or another of these thoughts may aid others in formulating their own opinions, and in defining their own religious interests, whether these interests and opinions are or are not in agreement with mine.

Recently it has been pointed out afresh that in any investigation into Paul's life the Pauline letters must be taken as the primary source while Acts must be treated as of secondary rank. For although Luke may have been an eyewitness to some of the events which he narrates, his knowledge of most of the happenings in his book was derived either from the recollections of others or from written sources, and when historical information is transmitted in this way through several hands the possibility of misunderstanding and inaccuracy is greatly enlarged.