Newly discovered ancient manuscripts of previously unknown texts found in a fragmentary, disordered, and incomplete state present challenges to modern scholars seeking to restore, conserve, and study them. The first order of business is the ordering of the disordered pages, if possible. Restoring page sequence is, in effect, reconstructing their original order in the ancient codex, from which sheets and leaves were detached, by accident or by design. Restoring page sequence cannot be accomplished apart from making a provisional transcrip-tion and translation of the fragments. A final critical transcription of the ancient text and its translation into a modern language, however, await the codicological reconstruction of the manuscript, for page sequence affects how a text is understood and hence translated. The process might popularly be described as trying to reconstruct a multilayered multisided jigsaw puzzle, lacking most of its pieces. The recently published Gospel of the Savior (P. Berol. inv. 22220, hereafter GSav) is one such previously unknown text, and its reconstruc-tion proceeded in precisely the manner described above.

The last few years have seen a renewed interest in the study of papyrological remains as a means of shedding light on early Christianity.1 To add further evidence to this discussion, I draw attention to two papyri in Yale University's Beinecke Library. In 1997, Yale acquired several papyri from Galerie Nefer in Zürich. The lot contained papyri ranging in date from the Ptolemaic era to the Medieval period. Two of these pieces (both, unfortunately, without specific provenance) appear to be Christian textual amulets.

Divine hiddenness in the Hebrew Bible is widely construed as the conceptual equivalent to divine absence. This article challenges this influential account in light of Psalm 88—where the hidden God is hostilely present, not absent—and reevaluates divine hiddenness. Divine hiddenness is not conterminous with divine absence. Rather, with its roots in the ancient Near Eastern idea of the royal and cultic audience, the meaning of “hide the face” (סתר + פנים) may be construed as a refusal of an audience with the divine king YHWH. Building on this insight, I argue that divine hiddenness possesses a petitionary logic and develop a distinction between the experiential and petitionary inaccessibility of salvific divine presence. Divine absence and hostile divine presence denote the former, while divine hiddenness the latter. I probe the relationships between divine hiddenness, divine absence, and hostile divine presence, concluding that the absent or hostilely present God is not ipso facto hidden.

The theme of this special issue is “Jesus’ Sayings in the Life of the Early Church.” I wish to expand the theme slightly to “Jesus’ Sayings and Deeds in the Life and Appeal of the Early Church.” I add the word “deeds” because the two concepts of words and deeds are intimately linked in the classical tradition and the culture in which Christianity arose. I have added the word “appeal” because this article will present a chain of events indicating how the words and deeds of Jesus, as emulated by Christians, strongly appealed to the Greco-Roman world.

The present writer visited the Wâdi Naṭrún in February 1923, and at the monastery known as Abû Maḳâr he found the fragment which is here published.

In the first book of the Tusculanae, and in the last book of De Republica, Cicero has left us two notable documents in the development towards later views of the soul and the hereafter. Both works are among his best; both are composed with care, neither is a random compilation of doxographical material. In the Somnium Scipionis, the language of the dream reflects with particular persuasiveness the impulse of the soul to take wings and fly away into the ever-calling unknown. But the essential doctrines of both works are the same: the hereafter in its reality, as a return to the beginning of things, as the true life; and the death of kings and philosophers as a robing, a sacred investiture.

It is a curious feature of the present time that a boom in secular interest in the idea of a life after death seems to be matched by a recession in high level theological interest in that possibility. There is today a wave of popular non-religious concern about death and about a post-mortem existence, expressed in parapsychology, occultism, thanatology, and talk of mediumship, reincarnation, out-of-the-body experiences and the reports of those who have been revived after having been clinically dead. And yet at the same time some of the best Christian thinking today is inclined to deemphasize the idea of the life to come, even to the point of virtually abandoning it as an element in the Christian message. It is true that there is much talk of the future (sometimes with a capital F), and of Christian hope and of the radically eschatological character of the gospel. For example, Jürgen Moltmann has said that “From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving. …” But when we read on we find that the hope of which he speaks is, in so far as it has any content, a this-worldly hope and that ‘the life everlasting’ has been reduced to a penumbra of mythic imagery.

The scope of this article is strictly limited. It takes no account of the great issues, social, national, and international, which, in the course of time, flowed from the few simple folk “in the north parts” of England about Scrooby and Gainsborough who obeyed what they believed to be a divine impulse.

Others far more competent for the purpose have already dealt with, or will deal with, these. Nor does it do more than touch the details of the life into which the exiles passed at Amsterdam and Leyden. For on these, Dr. Dexter and his son — to mention but two of the workers in this fieldx — may almost be said to have spoken the last word. Nor does it follow the Pilgrims into the new world where they struck root with such heroic fortitude, except so far as is required to correct one or two somewhat inveterate mistakes. It is, in fact, limited to the man who, beyond any one else, was the chief spiritual influence in those earliest pioneers whose character and ideals imparted a permanent direction to the development of New England. At the same time, while relating the substance of what is known of Robinson, I have tried to state the truth with regard to the circumstances in which the Pilgrim movement took its start; and if, in so doing, it has seemed necessary to criticize adversely the conclusions of one writer in particular, my excuse must be that his narrative has been accepted, in some high quarters, as that of an authority on the subject whose word is final. It is not by any means final, as the sequel, I think, will show.

The Chorus of Milton's Samson Agonistes is highly platitudinous because it relies on Old Testament traditional wisdom to account for Samson's experience. It is groping within that kind of wisdom to understand the significance of what is happening to Samson, while his experience cannot be made explicable on the basis of Old Testament legalism. Trying to cope with the Chorus, critics often speak of the “different levels of awareness” in the poem and tend to press a division between Samson and his Chorus, too frequently insisting that the separation obtained is even greater at the end of the work. Professor Summers, for example, ascribes this tension between the protagonist and the Hebraic Chorus to the disparity between heroic and non-heroic experience: “…the Chorus is often wrong in typically unheroic ways, and … only as a result of the action does it acquire ‘true experience’ and understanding. Those Danites, friends and contemporaries of Samson, represent the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the drama; but the premise of the poem is that conventional wisdom is inadequate for tragic experience. If it were otherwise, there would be no function for the tragedy; the community would already have been saved …” The Chorus (with Manoa) is impercipient; but the fact that it follows after Samson, noting his changes and his actions and often repeating his attitudes, attests to a unity between Samson and the Chorus which Professor Summers' otherwise excellent treatment misses. Christian heroism does not, as he seems to suggest, depend upon separation, but upon communion with others, even as a true relationship with God, for Milton, removes the obscurities from one's relationships with other men. Milton plays off Samson's former selfheroism — which does separate him from his people — against the true heroism of the ending; responsiveness to the latter pulls the Chorus and Samson together.

Paradox, a subject that has intrigued philosophers and scientists since ancient times, not long ago also captured the attention of many literary critics and historians of religion. A key analytic term among the old New Critics, paradox—along with irony and ambiguity—was for decades taken as central to poetic language, the force of which was understood to derive from the play of multiple, often contradictory meanings. In history of religions, a concept of paradox was essential in the monumental work of Mircea Eliade, who repeatedly pointed to the power of conjoined opposites in myth. To many scholars in both fields, these paradoxes of poetry and myth have by now become passe—taken for granted, perhaps, but no longer topics for further exploration. They gain new significance, however, with the increasing interest in the critical study of academic writing over the last few years. For despite the hard-minded academic stance found in much contemporary religio-historical writing, the paradoxes familiar from religion and literature still often come into play, indeed, sometimes to explore striking contradictions that are posed in the fashion of paradoxes from science.

Christianity always expressed the necessity of the proclamation of the gospel. During the second century, however, the different groups and churches were not able to agree on the nature of this proclamation. For some, the apostolic witness was constituted by a memory of fundamental salvific events, namely, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. For others, particularly the author of the Acts of Andrew, preaching the gospel meant communicating divine wisdom and proclaiming life-giving words.

Professor Bredvold's view of Dryden as a philosophic sceptic in the general tradition of Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, and Montaigne, or as a “fideist” after the fashion of certain Roman Catholic apologists, continues to be the generally accepted one. Samuel Monk, in summing up the direction that Dryden studies have taken, says: “Dryden's naturally sceptical temper found support in the various scepticisms of Montaigne, of the Royal Society, and of Catholic apologetics.” It is this scepticism, so the story goes, which drove Dryden to the shelter of the Roman Catholic Church.

There is a good deal of very interesting material preserved in the Armenian tradition belonging to the general category of Canon Lists. Some of this has been published and some not; very little of it has been translated into European languages. The series of studies of which the present note is the first will make available in a single place some of the most interesting of those lists which have been published in Armenian, as well as certain new materials recently discovered in the manuscript traditions. The translations and notes, it is hoped, will make this material readily accessible to scholars concerned with Canon Lists and the Biblical Canon.

Modern German thought owed much to classical Greece. Yet in philosophy and theology, beginning with Hegel and his contemporaries, the debt to Platonic idealism was radically modified by insistence on the reality of history. Construed dialectically, history became a key to overcoming difficulties with both Platonic and Cartesian dualism left unresolved by Kant. In theology, after World War I dialectical theologians, including Barth and Tillich, embraced in varying degrees the existentialists' critique of Hegelian essentialism and belief in progress. This affected how they understood incarnation in christology, sacramental presence in ecclesiology, and Christian responses to what they saw as the demonic threat of German National Socialism. Anglo-American critics, especially of Tillich, often miss the dialectical nuances of his admittedly abstract theology and his religious socialist response to Marxism.

Of the changes that have taken place in theology since the Renaissance, none is more striking than the re-interpretation of the Mosaic account of the creation and fall of man, which has passed from the realm of history to that of ‘myth.’ Equally impressive, however, are the changes that have taken place in eschatology. This disagreement with our ancestors is not revolutionary on every point, since at least one fundamental idea, affirmed by George Hakewill in the earlier seventeenth century, still holds true. “That the world shall haue an end,” wrote Hakewill, “is as cleere to Christianity, as that there is a Sun in the firmament: And therefore, whereas there can hardly be named any other article of our faith, which some Heretiques haue not presumed to impugne or call into question; yet to my remembrance I never met with any who questioned this; & though at this day many & eager be the differences among Christians in other points of Religion, yet in this they all agree & ever did, that the world shall haue an end.” If on this, however, all Christians are agreed, the exact time of the Day of the Lord has been the subject of speculation ever since the advent of Christianity, not to mention Jewish apocalyptic thought.

Among New Testament apocrypha few have been more consistently neglected by modern scholarship than the so-called Apocalypse of Paul. This represents a strange reversal in the fortunes of the book, since at one time it ruled an almost universal favorite. Diverse tokens of this its original popularity still exist. The first will be found in the multiplicity of its ancient versions, manuscripts of which have been coming to light with some regularity since the eighteenth century, when Assemani indicated the existence of Syriac and Arabic codices in the Vatican Library.

No city has had so many desolations as Jerusalem, no land has experienced so many devastations. They are so many that it is not easy to register them all, nor to say which is exactly the fluctus decumanus that submerged most completely the national life and prosperity. We can, however, see that all the series of disasters have a similarity; each of them is written in terms of wholesale slaughter, deportation, and slavery; if at any time a decree of restoration is issued, the document is a palimpsest with the under-writing betraying a decree of exile.