Over the past twenty-five years, the social and ethical aspects of Gnosticism have won increased attention. Scholars have tended to shift away from phenomenological approaches to Gnosticism, which maintained a strict demarcation between ethics and cosmological speculation. Rather, scholars have increasingly recognized and explored social ethics within the various “Gnosticisms” that flourished in the second to fourth centuries, focusing on particular topics such as sexual ethics, gender roles, and the soteriological implications of sinful or virtuous behavior. Little attention, however, has been devoted to the question of how ancient rhetorical conventions shaped Gnostic ethical and moral discourse, especially as it is evidenced in the Nag Hammadi sources. The application of rhetorical criticism to other early Christian literature has demonstrated that the proper identification of the genre of a text is a crucial step toward determining how that text was designed to rhetorically influence its audience. Thus, an appreciation of the generic conventions that dictate certain features of a text can improve our understanding of the social context in which that text was produced. In this essay, I examine one text from Nag Hammadi, the Interpretation of Knowledge (NHC XI,1; henceforth Interp. Know.), whose genre has not, in my opinion, been satisfactorily established. I will argue that the text should be read as a sustained work of paraenesis—that is, as a moral exhortation with a persuasive intent. On the basis of that identification, I will attempt to reconstruct some features of the social context in which it was produced.

In this article I pursue two interrelated goals. First, and more narrowly, I argue that the in Rom 5:1 plausibly refers to Christ's (conventionally translated as “faith” or “faithfulness”) and not to the of Christ followers; and certainly not to the of Christ followers that is specifically “in Christ.” To my knowledge no modern commentator identifies the in Rom 5:1 as Christ's own. Several scholars suggest it in passing, and one presents a partial argument turning on several claims of coherence with his broader reading of Paul. I offer a more thorough case for the plausibility of this suggestion, especially by demonstrating how my reading of Rom 5:1 makes sense as an encapsulation of Paul's emphases in Rom 3:21–4:25.

The word κρατήρ, the great mixing vessel in which the wine was mixed with water and from which it was drawn, is not seldom used metaphorically in religious literature. To begin with, it may be useful to quote a few examples showing how the metaphor is used in secular literature. Pindar calls the messenger who brings his ode a sweet krater of loud-sounding songs and Aristophanes calls the sycophant a vessel of evils. Plutarch speaks of a krater, placed in the middle which contains myths and arguments mixed up. In Aeschylus Clytaemestra says of Agamemnon that, since he has filled a krater in the house with so many evils, having returned he has to drink it off himself. Philostratus speaks of krateres set up from which the thirsty ones drew. The metaphorical use of the word comes very near to the concrete facts: a storage vessel in which liquids are mixed and from which they are drawn.

Marcel Simon (1907–1986) wrote many articles and published a number of books during a long, active career as a scholar. Yet he remains most prominently associated with the first of his books, Verus Israel, initially submitted as a dissertation. Published in 1948, Verus Israel was revised with the addition of a lengthy post-script in the original French in 1964, and translated into English in 1986. Based on research virtually complete before the war, this book is an outstanding example of new circumstances forcing scholars to revise their conceptions of the past. As Simon explains in the preface, his book is a response to the calamity of racist anti-Semitism. Although this anti-Semitism had been apparent even before the Second World War, its disastrous results had become painfully evident only in the war's aftermath. These were the issues that led Simon to re-examine the nature of the relationship between ancient Christianity and Judaism.

It is a joy for me to contribute to a volume of essays dedicated to Krister Stendahl. I owe him a particular debt of gratitude. From the time that I—an immigrant from Holland—started to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1955 until today, Krister has been a model for me of what it means to be not only a conscientious scholar but also a Christian theologian. Through the turbulent years of the sixties and early seventies he always found time to counsel and guide me—however much we were geographically separated from each other.

The argument pursued in these pages is based, substantially, not on theories of Christian development to which it has been sought to bring the literary data into conformity, but on a direct application to those data of general principles of comparative documentary criticism. It may be worth while to state some of those principles in their generalized form:

1. Where two or more documents correspond in contents, order and language beyond the degree that is necessitated by their subject or probably explicable by accidental coincidence, there is a presumption that, unless inter-dependent, they share (immediately or mediately) a common written or oral source.

2. Where these correspondences or identities attain a certain degree of minuteness the balance is tilted against the hypothesis of merely oral connection.

3. Unless external considerations urge, it is unscientific to conjecture hypothetical documents to explain correspondences for which a theory of direct inter-dependence is sufficient.

4. In determining the direction of dependence (i.e. whether document A depends on document B, or vice versa) weight must be given to the internal coherence of subject-matter on the one hand, and to the employment of merely external links in combining material on the other hand. We may also be helped by a knowledge of the literary methods and the psychology of one or both authors, and especially by evidence of an author's deviation from his habitual style or vocabulary under the influence of a source.

Josephus's version of Numbers 22–24 is a significant source for ascertaining his understanding of the divine spirit. On the one hand, this story contains the highest concentration of references to the divine spirit in the Antiquities. Josephus regularly omitted references to the divine spirit, leaving, apart from this passage, a mere five. In marked contrast to this tendency, his version of Numbers 22–24 has three references to the divine spirit (Ant. 4.108, 118, 119), while the biblical version has but one (Num 24:2). The result is that one third of Josephus's references to the divine spirit are concentrated in the tale of Balaam and the ass.

The Rev. H. St. J. Hart has recently put forward the interesting suggestion that the crown of thorns in John 19, 2–5, was made from the long thorns (modified leaflets) that grow on the base of the rachis, or axis, of the date-palm frond. Such a crown, with its tall spines projecting upward from a headband, was intended as a caricature of the radiate crown worn, in numismatic and other representations, by kings and emperors of Hellenistic and Roman times. In the narrative of John it was not an instrument of torture, but merely a “property” used in mockery of Jesus' pretension to be King of the Jews. Mr. Hart provides two excellent plates, which show the radiate crown as it appears on coin types, and also two improvised radiate crowns, one made from the leaflets, the other from the thorns of the date-palm.

“Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching or practice, then whether it comes to men by nature or in what other way?” These questions were once put to Socrates by Meno. How did Socrates, the patron saint of moral philosophy, reply? Leaving aside his ironic profession of ignorance, he proposed that the answer would only come once the nature of virtue was understood and defined.

Augustine's attack on skepticism in the Contra Academicos is, it seems to me, both interesting and important. Its interest lies in the fact that the argument developed by Augustine is rather more sophisticated than most commentators seem willing to admit. It is important because it places the moral and epistemological features of skepticism in a new and revealing light, and in so doing offers, I think, a plausible refutation of skeptical doctrine. If I am correct, then the study of Augustine's reasoning is of more than purely historical interest: it is worth studying for its own timeless philosophical content.

Two years ago I presented in this Review (vol. XVIII, 1925, pp. 115–127) a preliminary account of the papyrus codex, containing a large part of the Similitudes of Hennas, which belongs to the University of Michigan collection (P Mich 917). The complete publication of that text has been greatly delayed by the demands of other duties; and now the importance of a more recent discovery obliges me to turn aside from the larger task in order to bring to the attention of scholars a new fragment, which may be the oldest extant portion of Hennas’ work.

Recent published allusions to Platonism in the minds of Calvinists, and the compatibility of its position there, brings back the memory of Professor William Wallace Fenn's interpretation of the thought of Jonathan Edwards, in lectures more than twenty-five years ago at the Harvard Theological School. Since this interpretation is no longer popular among writers, it might be of interest to mention it again. Professor Fenn liked to picture Edwards as the protagonist of a New England Tragedy. There was tragedy in the outward failures of his life. But the more devastating tragedy was his inward failure as a Christian philosopher. This, according to Fenn's interpretation, arose from Edwards' self-conscious awareness of being unable to reconcile his Platonism with his Calvinism.

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), well known for his book The Idea of the Holy, and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), even more famous for his hermeneutical programs of demythologization and existential interpretation, had, according to Bultmann himself, “been friends at Breslau.” Although Bultmann admitted in 1969 with incorruptible fairness that “the calling of the systematic theologian Rudolf Otto was a great gain for the theological faculty at Marburg,” he also had to state that “Otto and I grew so far apart that our students, too, were aware of the antithesis between his work and mine.” Already ten years earlier, in his first autobiographical draft of 1959, Bultmann mentioned “tensions with R. Otto, Hermann's successor,” which “led to lively discussions” among the students at Marburg. Those tensions date back at least to the early twenties, as two letters of Bultmann to Karl Barth reveal. In the first letter, written at the end of 1922, Bultmann stigmatizes the notes of Otto to F. Schleiermacher's Reden, Über die Religion, as “totally misleading.” In a letter written in April 1927 Bultmann expresses the hope that the opposition at Marburg to the Swiss theologian Eduard Thurneysen might be overcome “in six months, when Otto will be in India.” Thurneysen belonged to the new movement of so-called Dialectical Theology.

In the centuries since Tertullian asked, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the dichotomy between these two cities and their respective cultures has assumed almost mythical proportions. Scholars have expended a great deal of energy to show that this sentiment has a greater prescriptive value than a descriptive one. It now seems apparent that for nearly a thousand years, from the time of Alexander to the Muslim conquest, the Jews of Palestine lived in and successfully negotiated with Greco-Roman culture. The question that remains open is the depth and intensity of this interaction. It would plainly be both irresponsible and beyond my capabilities to attempt any type of comprehensive answer to this question.

The study of Isidore falls roughly into three periods, mediaeval, when the text was used principally for catenae and florilegia, sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century, when it was published and a rudimentary historical account of Isidore worked out from it and from the better-known testimonia, and modern. Of the modern period the outstanding works have been H. Niemeyer's account of Isidore's life and writings, Capo's, Turner's and Lake's studies establishing the relationships of the major western MSS, and the recent work of Dom Andreas Schmid, Die Christologie Isidors von Pelusium, which, by its account of the history of the text, marks a new period in the study. Besides these works, the past fifty years have seen considerable collection of parallels between Isidore's letters and passages in classical or early Christian authors, as well as several detailed discussions of the content of the letters. These discussions have uniformly been undistinguished expositions of the obvious, and the largest collection of parallels, that of L. Bayer, merited the crushing review it was given by K. Fuhr and has since been considerably supplemented by articles which individually, however, are minor.

Understanding the role played by emotion in relation to culture and nature is relevant to theories of religion and to issues of theological method. The extent to which one grants emotion independence from cognition may well determine whether one views religious experience as an avenue available to free one from culture or simply as the product of culture. In theories of religion the role played by emotion may determine both the integrity granted the subject's account of her or his experience and the appropriate methods for interpreting the general significance of the account. In regard to theological methodology, the role played by emotion will likely indicate whether experience is viewed as a relative consequence of construction and critique or the authoritative starting point for construction and critique.