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.

Papias of Hierapolis has suffered from the fact that his work, Exposition of the Words of the Lord, in five books, has been lost, and that so little or, if preferred, just so much, has been preserved, that the fragments confront us with difficult problems. These are many and may easily overshadow the text. The following comments are primarily of an exegetic nature and serve to shed light on Papias and his work.

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.

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.

Professor Adolf von Harnack in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy for December 9, 1915 (pages 854–875) has discussed afresh in his characteristically interesting and instructive fashion the textual criticism and meaning of the angels' song in Luke 2 14. After a full exposition of the evidence and an investigation of the rare word εὐδοκία, he decides for the following text:

Δόξα ἐν ὑΨίστοις ϑεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς

Εἰρήνη ἀνϑρώποις εὐδοκίας,

which he translates:

“Glory in the highest to God and on earth

Peace to men of (His) gracious will.”

This form of the Greek text is in the second line substantially that on which the English Revised Version rests (“men in whom he is well pleased”); but Harnack, following Origen, connects εὐδοκίας not with ἀνϑρώποις but, by a somewhat harsh hyperbaton, with εἰρήνη, and interprets: “Peace is now given to men—no ordinary peace but the peace of His gracious will.”

Harnack's argument, which contains much valuable discussion on various aspects of the verse, need not be here repeated. But two of the points which he makes, and in regard to which his reasoning is convincing, deserve notice; for although at first sight they might appear to occupy but a modest place among his results, in reality they seem to offer the key to the serious textual problem of the passage, and so lead to a translation and interpretation quite different from Harnack's. They may be stated thus:

(1) With the reading εὐδοκίας, the song is a distich, of which the first line must be taken to include the words ἐπὶ γῆς and the second to begin with εἰρήνη.

(2) ἀνϑρώποις εὐδοκίας is a phrase wholly unexampled and in itself full of difficulty. For εὐδοκία means “God's gracious will.” It refers to His purpose, His choice, not to His approval or satisfaction with man's performance; and it looks to the future, to grace, to the hope of a needy world, not to the past, to man's merit, or even to the inherent worth of human nature.

In a study entitled Letter and Spirit in Jewish and Roman Law I suggested that the antithesis γράμμα καὶ πνεῦμα (Letter and Spirit) coined by Paul was the equivalent to the Greek antithesis ῥητὸν καὶ διάνοια, which was a commonplace in ancient Greek rhetoric. After this article was printed, I discovered a passage in Origen which confirms beyond all doubt the correctness of my conjecture. This statement is found in his refutations of an argument advanced by Celsus. This pagan philosopher charged that there were many contradictions between the Law and the New Dispensation, which demanded an explanation. For instance, “Why did he give them laws by Moses that they were to become rich and powerful… Yet his son, the man of Nazareth, gives contradictory laws, saying that a man cannot come forward to the Father if he is rich or loves power.”

Johannes Gaertner recently published an article on Latin verse-translations of Psalms in which he described at length the history of a “buried and forgotten literary genre” that reached the height of its popularity during the sixteenth century. Psalms, however, was not the only book of the Bible to find itself arrayed in this curious dress, and one may accordingly add a bibliographical footnote to Professor Gaertner's article by noting some of the most important Latin verse-translations of individual books and also of large portions of the Bible, almost invariably written by Germans or Dutchmen: the practice seems to have been largely a phenomenon of the northern Protestant reformation.

Georgian literature, if it must yield the palm to the Armenian for extent and variety of content, is in at least one respect distinctly superior to its neighbor. A large body of extremely ancient manuscripts have survived, which have preserved to us a highly diversified series of texts. And in general the oldest Georgian manuscripts usually contain the most valuable material. This is true of the Old Testament; the most complete, and on the whole the best, surviving manuscript of that is likewise the oldest. About this manuscript much has been written, but hardly anything has been published from it, and, strangely enough, no detailed description of it has ever appeared. The account herewith presented rests on a careful personal study of the entire codex in the original and in photographs.

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.

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.

In his undergraduate classes in New Testament Introduction, Krister Stendahl used to cite 1 Cor 15:8 as a classic example of a text with an exegetical crux that is signalled through diverse translations in the modern versions. The crucial word is ἔκτρωμα, literally “abortion,” “miscarriage,” “embryo,” or “stillborn child.” Cataloging the witnesses to the Resurrection, Paul states that the risen Christ appeared to him last, as to “an (or the) ektrðma.” But in what sense does the apostle apply the metaphor to himself?

Basil wrote the homily On Envy around 364, after he was ordained a presbyter by Eusebius of Caesarea. He probably intended it as a Lenten sermon for his congregation in Caesarea, which was largely composed of catechumens. The homily has received very little attention from scholars, although, along with nine other homilies, it has been classified as one of the moral treatises, rather than as an exegetic or panegyric work. Most recent scholarship has deemed it an authentic homily of Basil's. One can readily see why On Envy has been overlooked by historical theologians: the treatise is didactically straightforward, theologically and philosophically unsophisticated, and in no way combats Arian opponents. There are, how-ever, other reasons to find On Envy of interest. The treatise documents Basil's attempt to confront a mode of behavior that implicitly questions the church's authority. Simply stated, On Envy is Basil's direct effort to wrest control over the evil eye for the church. What is significant about the homily is that it demonstrates how Basil continued to work within the indigenous code of Mediterranean social behavior that was dominated by honor, shame, revenge, and envy. Thus what Basil offered his congregation as a solution to the grave problem of envy is really a recasting of the pursuit of virtue, so common to Christian Neoplatonists, into the Mediterranean social code. Virtue is rewarded by the most valued possession: honor.

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.

In 1963 a bronze statuette was acquired by the Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla. It portrays a naked goddess with a modified Ḥatḥor hair style. She is seated, her feet resting on a pedestal which is inscribed with five lines of old Phoenician writing. The writing surface on the pedestal measures only 4.1 × 2.8 cm. and unhappily is marred by bronze disease, that is, by corrosion which swells and flakes. The figurine with its inscription was published by J. M. Solá-Solé in 1966 in an excellent paper which correctly dated the inscription (and the statuette) in the first half of the eighth century B.C. and went far in deciphering the difficult text. In figure 1 we have attempted to draw a facsimile of the statue pedestal based on the published photographs.

In a recent study of the Greek text of 1 Esdras we argued that it frequently reflected an old, often nonexpanded Semitic Vorlage despite the many corruptions and secondary expansions peculiar to the “apocryphal” text. Esdras B [hereafter: G], on the other hand, was also found to differ from the received Hebrew text, but its variants were small enough that its underlying text-type could be called Proto-Massoretic. This analysis conflicts with that of Bernhard Walde, Wilhelm Rudolph, and others, who would assign the same geographical and chronological horizons and nearly identical Vorlagen to 1 Esdras and G. We shall test our interpretation, therefore, by studying the differences in the Hebrew texts of Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 on the basis of the translation of Ezra 2 in 1 Esdras 5. Although the latter has many omissions and doublets —in fact, it is in relatively poor shape —not enough attention has been paid to its alternation between Ezra-type and Nehemiah-type texts.