Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary, in the first volume of his Documents of Jewish Sectaries. The longer and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor, probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth.

The scientific study of religion which has gone on for the past fifty years has reaped a rich and varied harvest; but a thoughtful observer might hold with good reason that its most important result is this, that all investigators, whether themselves religious or not, have come to recognize candidly the tremendous motive power of religious emotion and the actual validity of religious experience. Yet singularly enough comparatively little attention has been paid to ancient religious feeling for its own sake. Classical scholars have made fruitful researches into the objective phenomena of ancient religion, particularly Greek and Roman cults; they have considered the relation of religion to philosophy and morals; and after many aberrations they have even found firmer paths through the morass of mythology. But we still await an adequate study of the subjective side of ancient religion.

Professor H. J. Rose's thoughtful and suggestive article, “Mythology and Theology in Aeschylus,” has probably led many students of Aeschylus to reread his tragedies with an eye on the specific problems to which Rose directs our attention and also to rethink such impressions and views concerning Aeschylus' religious outlook as they may previously have formed. Professor Rose skillfully illustrates the difference between mythology and theology by contrasting the praise of Zeus in the first great chorus of Agamemnon with the references to Cassandra's experience which we find in a later part of the same play. It is probably true that there are in Aeschylus' work masses of traditional mythology that have not been reforged by his own creative imagination, not become organically assimilated to his own religion, but these are few and far between. On the whole, mythology provides the material which his vigorous and intense thought hammers into shape — into a new mythos which shows the gods acting as Aeschylus' own religious — or theological — convictions demand that they should act. In the larger part of his paper Professor Rose unless I have missed some points, is less anxious to separate the areas of mythology and theology by a clearly drawn boundary line, and to me at least this restraint seems very wise; for if one thinks too rigidly in the terms of these two concepts one runs a risk of cutting through the live tissue and of tearing asunder what has become intimately blended in the poet's own religion.

The nadir of the Tridentine papacy occupied those years which spanned the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 and the imprisonment of Pius VII by Napoleon from 1809 to 1814. The suspension of the Church's most distinguished organ of Ultramontane sentiment alleviated the further spread of Febronian or Josephist principles throughout the Netherlands and the German and even Italian sections of the Empire. Yet, Pius VI's concern with the Punctuation of Ems or the Synod of Pistoia paled in comparison with the challenge to spiritual and temporal papal authority contained in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and other doctrines and consequences of the French Revolution.

The exact status of the fourth tractate included among the Opuscula Sacra of Boethius is still uncertain, though the other theological works are now almost universally accepted as genuine. Boethian scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were generally inclined to reject Tractate IV. Viktor Schurr, in the outstanding recent work devoted to the theological treatises, takes the same view, basing his judgment upon the lack of a title indicating authorship and upon the notation ‘actenus Boetius’ found between Tr. III and IV in Codex Augiensis XVIII (saec. IX). Schurr, like some of his predecessors, was strongly influenced in this conclusion by the doctoral dissertation of E. K. Rand. In that study Professor Rand attacked the authenticity of the unsigned treatise with vigor but also with prudence, tempering, in certain instances, the views of earlier proponents of his own position. Though he concluded that Tr. IV was not genuine, he made no secret of the uncertainties of the case.

A hymn to the Creator ascribed to Plato deserves attention, even if both form and content show clearly that it is of much later date. Such a poem is preserved in the Anthologia Latina, where it is introduced as a translation from Greek made by “a certain Tiberianus.” This interesting document, in thirty-two verses, may be translated as follows:

“Almighty, borne by age-old heavens, amid Thy myriad virtues Thou art ever One, and no one can measure Thee with number or with time. Now (if by any name it is meet to invoke Thee) Thou shalt be invoked by the unknown name in which Thou, the Holy One, dost rejoice, whereat the mighty earth trembles, and the wandering stars stand in their swift course. Thou art One and likewise Many, Thou art First and Last, Thou art at once the Center and the Survivor of the universe. For Thou art without end, yet Thou bringest an end to the swift passage of time, and on high, from eternity, Thou dost behold harsh fate swept on with immutable whirl, Thou dost behold lives enclosed in time and again led back and returned to the upper spheres — so that the vitality, exhausted by births, which the universe has lost may return to it and may again circulate through the (celestial) bodies.”

During recent years, scholars have been producing a great deal of important work to clarify and interpret Milton's metaphysical position, but at least one important question appears still unsettled. Does his materialistic monism embrace the whole range of being, uncreated as well as created? It certainly comprehends the whole hierarchy of creatures; does it comprehend God too?

In 1908 Harvard University began the exploration of the large hill in central Palestine which marks the site of the ancient Hebrew capital Samaria. The chief results of the year's work were the discovery of a Roman statue of heroic size (probably representing Augustus), a well-preserved Roman altar, an imposing stairway, about eighty feet broad, and the massive foundation-walls of a large building, the connection of which with the Herodian temple to Augustus was considered possible.

Although Jesus' agony in the garden (Matt 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42; Luke 22:40–46) may be powerful and even inexpressibly poignant to modern readers, it was a plague and embarrassment to patristic and medieval interpreters. Few narratives in the New Testament were so inimical to received christological assumptions. Ancient and medieval interpreters, at least those ultimately judged to be orthodox, ascribed to the Incarnate Word the qualities of divine consubstantiality, omnipotence, omniscience, obedience, and impassibility. The pericope, at least in its Markan and Matthean versions, however, presents a figure who appears in utterly human form—powerless, ignorant, recalcitrant, and passible.

In the catalogue of manuscripts at the Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos by Eustratiades and Arcadios there is a curious error in the description of No. 236. The manuscript contains a variety of patristic treatises, letters, and fragments, four of which are thus described:

The centuries which we designate politically by the names of the dominant powers of the age successively as the Persian, Greek, and Roman periods of Jewish history constitute as a whole an epoch in the religious history of Judaism. In these centuries, past the middle of which the Christian era falls, Judaism brought to complete development its characteristic institutions, the school and the synagogue, in which it possessed, not only a unique instrument for the education and edification of all classes of the people in religion and morality, but the centre of its religious life, and to no small extent also of its intellectual and social life. Through the study of the Scriptures and the discussions of generations of scholars it defined its religious conceptions, its moral principles, its forms of worship, and its distinctive type of piety, as well as the rules of law and observance which became authoritative for all succeeding time. In the light of subsequent history the great achievement of these centuries was the creation of a normative type of Judaism and its establishment in undisputed supremacy throughout the wide Jewish world.

“To help your conception,” Jonathan Edwards counselled his congregation, “imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, all of a glowing heat, or into the midst of a glowing brick-kiln, or of a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine also that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within and without as a bright coal of fire, all the while full of quick sense; what horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace!” “But your torment,” warned Edwards by way of conclusion, “your torment in hell will be immensely greater than this illustration represents.”

James Cone is without question the leading proponent of Black theology in America. His books, articles, and lectures have exercised great influence inside and outside the black community. Thus far, however, Cone has not explicitly stated his theological ethic, although much of significance for ethics is embedded in his works. It will be our purpose in this short essay to stimulate him and others to articulate the ethical aspects of his theology. Our aim, then, is to set forth what we believe to be the ethic implicit in his first two books, Black Theology and Black Power and Liberation: A Black Theology of Liberation. Our essay will be critical in nature and will attempt to deal with theoretical questions.

In the extant writings of certain of the Church Fathers there are some interesting references to a man named Thallus. At the present time, beyond what can be inferred from these early Christian references, nothing is certainly known about him. In recent years, however, attempts have been made to fix the identity of this Thallus. Because of its potential significance for the early history of the gospel tradition, one of these attempts has become rather popular. Much of the acclaim over this suggested identification would seem to be based on a confusion between what has recently been said about Thallus and what is actually known about him from the early Christian references. Consequently, numerous errors of fact and fancy have arisen. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate, first, what is actually known about the Thallus referred to by the Church Fathers, and second, the validity of the identification currently proposed.

In June of 1533, Thomas Cranmer wrote to Nicholas Hawkins, Archdeacon of Ely, and reported to him that a certain John Frith had been ordered by Henry VIII to undergo an examination for suspicion of heresy before a tribunal which included Cranmer himself and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. The interrogators discovered that Frith “thought it not necessary to be believed as an article of our faith, that there is the very corporal presence of Christ within the host and sacrament of the altar.” Frith must have defended his own position in a winning manner, for both Cranmer and Gardiner were reluctant to see him persist in his heretical opinion. Cranmer, in this same letter, owns to having “sent for him three or four times to persuade him to leave… his imagination;” and we have it on Frith's testimony that, after his arrest, he visited Gardiner's residence in what was probably an effort on the Bishop of Winchester's part to win the young reformer back to Catholic belief.

Uttering a vow was an important and popular religious practice in ancient Judaism. It is mentioned frequently in biblical literature, and an entire rabbinic tractate, Nedarim, is devoted to this subject. In this article, I argue that starting from the Second Temple period, alongside the regular use of the vow, vows were also used as an aggressive binding mechanism in interpersonal situations. This practice became so popular that in certain contexts the vow became synonymous with the curse, as in a number of ossuaries in Jerusalem and in the later Aramaic incantation bowls. Moreover, this semantic expansion was not an isolated Jewish phenomenon but echoed both the use of the anathema in the Pauline epistles and contemporary Greco-Roman and Babylonian magical practices.

C. S. Lewis read Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros in his mid-thirties, probably during the Christmas holiday of 1934. His first recorded thoughts, including the statement above, are from a letter dated “Jan 8th 1935” to his Oxford colleague Janet Spens. Despite his decisive criticism of what he calls Nygren's “central contrast”—that agape is selfless and eros self-regarding—Lewis ends this letter with a declaration of uncertainty: “However, I must tackle him again. He has shaken me up extremely.” It is remarkable, then, that Nygren is not mentioned by name in Lewis's The Four Loves (1960). Lewis's opening remarks on his theology of love, which do not directly refer to Nygren, “are critical of Nygren's main thesis in Agape and Eros.”

In the ancient church, human bodies were contested commodities. Early Christian writers frequently wrangled over the ethical implications of dress and bodily adornment, and sought to regiment various forms of physical interaction and movement within their communities, from sexual contact to pilgrimage travel. Bodies—and how they were used—functioned as privileged markers of Christian identity, as valuable capital in the complex economies of Christian discourse and practice. Nowhere was this more the case than in discussions about Christ's body and its relation to his divinity. While such christological discussions took place throughout the Mediterranean world, in this article I have a keen interest in the ways in which the body of Christ was represented in Alexandria and Egypt from the fourth through the eighth century. Specifically, I want to explore late antique Coptic Christian understandings of the incarnation, and I propose to do so from a new theoretical perspective.

The second book of Samuel was a neglected work in the theological, exegetical, and liturgical traditions of the Western church from the Patristic era through the Protestant Reformation. The theological developments and articulations of the early church focused on the books of Genesis, John, and the great Pauline corpus;1 for example, 1 Corinthians was central to the fourth-century trinitarian debates2 and Romans to the soteriological discussions of the entire western tradition.3 Similarly, the book of Psalms had an enormous impact on the liturgical life of the church as well as its christological statements.4 One need only cast an eye back to Augustine's numerous commentaries on the book of Genesis to understand the profound depth with which certain books of the Christian Scriptures were interpreted in the early and medieval church.5