From ancient times it has been averred that the Gnostics derived their basic ideas from the Greek philosophers, especially Pythagoras and Plato. For example, Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 2.14) argued that the Valentinian Gnostics borrowed their doctrines of the pleroma and kenoma from Democritus and Plato. Hippolytus (Ref. 1.11), more systematically, tried to show that the founders of the Gnostic heresies borrowed most of their ideas from Greek philosophy and religion. The Valentinian brand of gnosis, Hippolytus (Ref. 6.21–29) argues, is derived from the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato. Tertullian (Praesc. 7) claimed that all of the heresies were based on Greek philosophy. Valentinus is stated specifically to be “of the school of Plato.” Plotinus (Enn. 2.9.6), the reputed founder of Neoplatonism, claimed in a famous tract that his doctrinal opponents, whom he did not identify but who were obviously Gnostics, based their doctrines on a misunderstanding of Plato. Porphyry's Life of Plotinus 16 provides us with more information on the Gnostic opponents of Plotinus, and refers to them as αἱρετικοὶ ἐκ τῆς παλαιᾶς ϕιλοσοϕίας (“sectarians from the ancient philosophy,” i.e., Platonism).

God is the Creator of the Universe, the Ruler of the Universe and of the Fate of man. He enjoins his commandments upon man, which man must keep. He is the High God, elevated above man and not to be reached by man. In antiquity he had no cult and no sacrifices, nor were prayers directed to him. Man believes in this God and fears him. But man needs also a God who is his helper, who cares for him in his sorrows and his anxiety. Man believes in this God and trusts him. These two differentconceptions of God are differently emphasized in different religions. The great achievement of Christianity was to combine the two; this conditioned and furthered its spread and its victory.

Even though the text of 1 Cor 15:31–32 printed above agrees with all recent critical editions of the NT, it almost certainly is false to the autograph. The basis for this claim comes neither from new textual evidence nor from a more scientific analysis of the old evidence, but from conjecture prompted by internal problems in the passage which other methods have not yet solved. Before I make my case, however, I should mention the two points in these verses where the ancient versions differ. Some texts do not contain the ἀδελϕοί (“brothers”) in line 31b, and others expand it to ἀδελϕοί μου (“my brothers”) or to ἀδελϕοί ἡμῶν (“our brothers”). Because it is difficult to know which reading is best, the American Bible Society edition is wise to put ἀδελϕοί in brackets and to acknowledge the difficulty in the apparatus.

A small number of scholars have noted T. S. Eliot's anticipation of the hermeneutical theory later articulated by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eliot similarly concerns himself with the epistemological assumptions of positivism in the human sciences and the implications of objectivizing texts and other cultural phenomena by adopting the attitude of the scientific observer. For both thinkers, this represents an approach to social life which either distorts or altogether misses the truth claims of those whose ideas are to be interpreted. Furthermore, Eliot develops a theory of understanding that is similar to the historicizing of interpretation that one finds later in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. However, among those who have observed these affinities, a key difference has been neglected. In his effort to confront such secularizing forces in the human sciences, Eliot comes to embrace an intellectualist philosophy of history, which relies on a tenuous dualism between the metaphysical and the physical, while Gadamer's philosophy of history collapses the dichotomy between the world of ideas and the existential realm. Thus, Eliot ultimately identifies what transcends history exclusively with the realm of the spirit. This essay argues that as the mature Eliot struggled with the empirically reductive tendencies of the human sciences and aimed to save religious truth from their deterministic assaults, he increasingly retreated to an intellectualism that misconceived the ultimate basis of religious truth. Consequently, the existing literature neglects the intellectualism that defines Eliot's understanding of truth within history and the more concrete understanding of that encounter that one finds in Gadamer's thinking.

In August 1947, a few months after President Harry S. Truman pledged the United States to fight communism around the globe, Time magazine delivered a stern warning to its wide readership from Reinhold Niebuhr, the nation's best-known theologian: “The new idolatry in the U.S. may be a blind, uncritical worship of democracy.” The Time article excerpted a Christianity and Crisis piece on “Democracy as a Religion” in which Niebuhr stressed the hidden dangers of the increasingly ubiquitous paeans to democracy in postwar America. That spring's commencement addresses, he noted, would give any sensible observer the distinct impression that “Americans have only one religion: devotion to democracy. They extol its virtues, are apprehensive about the perils to which it is exposed, pour maledictions upon its foes, rededicate themselves periodically to its purposes and claim unconditional validity for its ideals.”

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 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.

Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that Kant had erected an epistemological boundary between mental representations and external reality that precipitates an anxiety in modern theologians about whether one can properly refer to God. As a way past this boundary, Wolterstorff's Reformed epistemology retrieves Thomas Reid's account of perception as an alternative to Kant, according to which knowledge of external objects is direct and immediate. Further, Wolterstorff points to the Dutch neo-Calvinist Herman Bavinck as one who bears many “reidian” elements in his epistemology, especially in the way in which Bavinck argues that the epistemic accessibility of the external world ought to be taken for granted. The thesis of this present paper, however, is that a closer investigation of Bavinck's account of perception reveals that he, unlike Reid, accepts the gap between mental representations and external objects, such that representations are those through which we know the world. Bavinck affirms that a correspondence between the two can be obtained by an appeal to the resources found in Christian revelation. In effect, what emerges in a close comparison of Bavinck and Reid is that Bavinck's account is an alternative theological response to the kantian boundary—one according to which mental representations correspond with external objects because both participate in an organically connected cosmos shaped by a Triune God.

A fascinating anecdote preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (b. ῾Abod. Zar. 17a) tells the story of a woman who comes before Rav Hisda and discloses to him that her younger son is the product of incestuous intercourse she has performed with her older son. Rav Hisda, in turn, rather than instructing her with regard to her penance, orders the preparation of her shrouds, thus indicating that her death is inescapable and imminent. Although the nature of the encounter between Rav Hisda and the sinner is not explicit in the story itself, the passage is situated within the Babylonian Talmud in the context of a broader legal and theological discussion centered on the penitential requirements for a person seeking to turn away from minut (heresy).

And never be joyful, save when you look in love upon your brother.

—a probably authentic saying of Jesus recorded in the now lost Gospel of the Hebrews

On the east wall of the south balcony in the St. Thomas Church of Leipzig, one of the principal churches where J. S. Bach worked as musical director from 1723 to 1750, there hangs in memory of one Bartholomæus Helmut a large, anonymous sixteenth-century painting now known by the title Gesetz und Gnade (“law and grace”) or Gesetz und Evangelium (“law and gospel”).A badly mangled reproduction, with many important elements cut off from all four edges, can be found in Herbert Stiehl, “Das Innere der Thomaskirche zur Amtszeit Johann Sebastian Bachs,” Beiträge zur Bachforschung 3 (1984) 91; a serviceable one in Ernst-Heinz Lemper, Die Thomaskirche zu Leipzig: Die Kirche Johann Sebastian Bachs als Denkmal deutscher Baukunst (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1954) 213; and a good one in Landesamt f¨r Denkmalpflege Sachsen, ed., Die Bau-und Kunstdenkmäler von Sachsen: Stadt Leipzig, Die Sakralbauten (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1995) 1.280. The picture presents a powerful series of theologically conventional contrasts of type with antitype. At the far left Moses is shown on his knees at the edge of a precipice receiving stone tablets—the law—from a pair of hands sticking out of a cloud; at the far right, in a roughly parallel position, Mary, with wavy blonde hair, is shown receiving a cross-bearing baby Jesus—the gospel—from a fully visible God. At the left, further below, humanity's Fall is depicted: Adam and Eve break God's law by eating of the forbidden fruit (from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), and are shown thus bringing death into the world; at the right, divine redemption is depicted: Jesus, with heavenly rays beaming from his head, suffers on the cross (a sort of tree), and is shown conquering death. Likewise at the left is found the bronze serpent amid exodus encampments of the Hebrew people in the wilderness;See Num 21:4–9; cf. 2 Kgs 18:4. at the right is a large church of Christian worship amid the established city of God, the New Jerusalem.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

It is a commonplace that the Biblical commentators of the earlier Middle Ages were traditionalists who copied or adapted the Fathers and rarely added much of their own. At the same time there was much variation in method; for there is a world of difference between the commentaries of Bede or Paschasius, carefully integrated works bearing the impress of the writer's own mind and personality, and compilations that are no more than collectanea of Patristic passages strung together but lacking inner cohesion. Between these two extremes are works like those of Hrabanus or even Alcuin. Most of the material in them is borrowed, but its arrangement has been carried out with some skill and the compiler, besides quoting his authorities verbally, gives some variety to his exposition by reproducing part of the traditional teaching in his own words. The commentators also differ greatly in the degree to which they acknowledge their sources. Bede and Hrabanus often indicated their indebtedness to others by specific statements in the text or by a more general reference in the margin to the author cited. Even so the reader needs to be on his guard, because the commentators, by quoting the ipsissima verba of their source, may completely mislead him. A palmary example of this occurs in Hrabanus' commentary on Genesis. He introduces (PL 107, 506B) a discussion of Lamech and his seventy-seven descendants who perished in the Flood with the words: “referebat quidam Hebraeus in apocryphis eorum libris.” This might easily be interpreted as an allusion to the mysterious Jewish scholar whom Hrabanus is supposed to have consulted and to whom we shall have to return.

In the past two decades considerable theological energy has been expended in the construction of various ecological theologies and spiritualities. Process theologians, ecofeminists, and theologians of creation, earth, nature, ecology, and land have been elucidating religious perspectives that they hope will help transform human attitudes toward nature and the environment. These writers have sought to reorient Christianity away from anthropocentric views that claim human dominion over nature, premillennial expectations that embrace the destruction of this world, soteriological preoccupations that focus on individual salvation, and otherworldly assumptions that foster alienation from the earth and nature. Some sanguine observers have seen this recent ferment as the greening of American theology or even the greening of the American churches. At the same time, intellectual historians have paid increasing attention to the history of Western ideas about nature and have debated at length the impact of Christianity's theological heritage on the environmental crisis. Specifically, a number of historians have constructed a genealogy of American conservationist and preservationist thought by tracing out a line that includes, among others, George Catlin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.

For many years the writer has wondered about the ancient Israelite claim to a town as far out in the coastal plain as Tell el-Ḥesi, if that town is correctly identified with Biblical Eglon. During 1964–65, when with graduate students I was able to explore the area in person, thus supplementing the study of maps, my puzzlement with the historical topography and archaeology of the area deepened. It is a disappointment that there never was an opportunity to discuss the matter with Paul W. Lapp, in whose honor this issue is published, because his interest in such topographical matters had been whetted by the same teacher as my own, William Foxwell Albright.

Since John Lightfoot's contributions to the interpretation of the New Testament from Rabbinic sources a large literature has grown up on the subject, and in Strack and Billerbeck's recent commentary on the gospels an immense amount of erudition is stored up. Yet in spite of the invaluable labors of these scholars more light can still be thrown on the understanding of the New Testament from the study of the halakah underlying it.