The Hebrew Bible prohibits lending at interest. This is usually linked to care for the poor. A similar connection is found in post-biblical literature as well. In Deut 23:20–21, however, usury is disconnected from the poverty laws. Classical rabbinic literature (second to sixth centuries) follows Deuteronomy in sharply de-coupling usury from poverty: the usury prohibition in that corpus regulates commerce and property, and is not intended to benefit the poor. In a sharp break with classical rabbinic tradition, the usury prohibition is reassociated with the poor in piyyut and in the Tanhuma midrashim, two late antique genres of Jewish literature associated but not entirely contiguous with classical rabbinic literature. Both genres bring this tradition to the fore through the use of earlier rabbinic materials, which do not espouse it. This combination of usury and care for the poor mirrors fourth-century Christian writings on usury.

Hans Jonas began his 1961 Ingersoll Lecture by acknowledging the “undeniable fact” “that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality.”1 Jonas nonetheless concluded his lecture by affirming that “although the hereafter is not ours … we can have immortality … when in our brief span we serve our threatened mortal affairs and help the suffering immortal God.”2 While he may not have realized it, Jonas's words capture what I shall argue is the dominant view of immortality in modern Jewish thought. Underlying this view is an effort to refute materialist conceptions of human existence without committing to any particularly theological or traditionally metaphysical notion of immortality.

Is it possible to believe that the implications of the Christian Gospel are of such a kind that it cannot be communicated directly, and that the implications of the Christian Gospel are of such a kind that it ought to be preached on the street? Whether such a view is indeed “possible” did not bother the great paradoxical thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, who appeared to hold it. Indeed, one of the most enduring elements of Kierkegaard's theological legacy is his rigorously dialectical approach to Christian communication. For the reader of Kierkegaard, comprehending his (in)direct communication is typically both a frustrating and inspirational affair. On the one hand, Kierkegaard believed that the Gospel—precisely because of its unique existential consequences—cannot be preached directly; and on the other hand, he believed in the impassioned proclamation of this very same Gospel for the very same reasons. Traveling through his enigmatic authorship, one finds both of these aspects side by side, back to front, or sometimes one on top of the other. It is well noted that although Kierkegaard displays different stages of emphasis, he never totally relinquishes the importance of either method. It is the question of this article to re-engage this dialectical quandary, and to see how the paradoxical juxtaposition might prove both directly and indirectly instructive to a theology of Christian proclamation.

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.

This article proposes that Jonas’s understanding of gnosticism differs substantially from the account typically associated with him. That standard account takes the basic tenets of existentialism as the foundation to its discussion of alienated individuality, whereas Jonas’s system uses neo-Kantian epistemology to construct both alienation and individuality out of a unified field of human interaction. Within his framework, gnosticism is a single historical-philosophical episode of inauthenticity, highly influential yet isolated in time, unlike the ubiquitous understanding of it. This article reviews Jonas’s system, elements of its early and later acceptance, along with selected issues raised by critics, from Heidegger and Scholem to Colpe, Yamauchi, Williams, and King.

The Hexateuchal narrative arc begins with Abram’s encounter with Yhwh in Shechem in Gen 12:6–7 and ends with Joshua’s covenant at the same place in Josh 24:25–26. These “bookends” make mention of a particular tree in Shechem, which also features in Gen 35:1–4. The inherited Priestly tradition claimed that none of the ancestors in Genesis knew the name Yhwh, but the Hexateuchal editors of the Persian period insist that both El and Yhwh were known in Shechem and Bethel. In effect, these editors defend northern Yahwism against its southern detractors, and resist any supersessionist proposal that would turn the ancestral memories of the Samarian province into mere history. Israel was born in the house of El, and the ancestors of Israel, who came from beyond the riverine borders of the Euphrates and the Nile, had no clear understanding of Yhwh until they set foot in Canaanite country.

Paul was an original thinker, and his epistles are full of novel, at times paradoxical, ideas. Christology stands at the center of Paul's system, and his Christological teaching is unique among Jewish writings of the Second Temple period. Some, especially non-Christological, elements of Pauline theology do, however, have illuminating parallels in earlier Jewish teachings, which seem to have been modified and adapted by Paul to fit his own revolutionary thought. While Paul's theology cannot be reduced to these elements, they might help to explain (at least partly) its emergence. After all, even the ideas of the most original thinkers owe their emergence to prevailing conceptions of the culture in which those thinkers operated, taking some of them for granted and incorporating them naturally into their thought, while struggling with and reacting to others. In Paul's case, Jewish concepts played a significant role in shaping some central features of his theology. Thus, reading Paul in the light of the Dead Sea scrolls and rabbinic writings is important both for understanding Paul as well as for dating and interpreting rabbinic parallels.

Divine names are linguistic objects that underlie the grammar of religious language. They serve as both representations and presentations of the divine. As representations, divine names carry information pertaining to God’s nature or actions, and his unique will, in a manner that adequately represents him. As presentations, divine names are believed to somehow effect divine presence in proximity to the believer, opening a path of direct connection to God. This paper seeks to analyze the interaction between presentation and representation concerning divine names in major trends within Judaism and Islam, from the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an to medieval theological debates. It aims to demonstrate how central currents within both traditions shaped the intricate relation between divine presentation and representation through the prism of divine names. Whereas positions in philosophy of language focus on either the representational or the presentational functions of proper names, Jewish and Islamic theologies suggest ways to combine the two functions with regard to divine names.

Many scholars of religion who teach today in nondenominational schools may take it for granted that these schools have no institutional mandate to espouse a particular religious agenda. Yet, how did this relatively new approach become common during the last century, when in the preceding era the opposite was true? A close reading of one context or institution can reveal broader trends applicable in many other realms. The evolution of the approach to religious scholarship at nineteenth-century Harvard can serve as one such specific, but widely illuminating, point of inquiry. The deliberate shift away from instruction in doctrinal theology toward a more modern approach to religion as an academic field of study became a prominent trend in American higher education, with Harvard leading the way. But why did Harvard pursue this particular agenda in advance of other institutions? This article suggests that the answer lies largely in political concerns. Harvard was concerned with issues of perception and the practical consequences resulting from public expression of disapprobation.

Two recent publications that appeared during the Coleridge bi-centennial prompt this bibliographical survey of Coleridge's reputation as a religious thinker. Neither Norman Fruman's Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel nor René Wellek's contribution to the latest edition of The English Romantic Poets gives an adequate picture of Coleridge's ideas on religion and the profound effect they had on the English-speaking theological tradition. More concerned with debunking Coleridge's originality, both writers appear generally indifferent and unsympathetic to the large body of Coleridge's later writings that constitute by far the greater part of his canon and are the source of his wide influence on succeeding generations.

It is well-nigh an article of faith, repeated from one manual to another, that at the end of the third day of the Anthesteria at Athens, the Chytroi, the Athenians used to say θύραζε κῆρες, οὐκέτ᾽ ᾿Ανθεστήρια and that this meant “go away, ghosts, the Anthesteria are over.” It is the more interesting because, if κῆρες means “ghosts” here, it is the only passage in all literature where it does so; and also because this is far from being the only account of the saying, be it an old liturgical formula or not, that has come down to us. In what seems the better tradition of Zenobios the paroemiographer we have Kᾶρες, which probably goes back to Didymos and through him to some older author still, it may be Demon, i.e., to early Hellenistic times. It is accompanied by a silly, pseudohistorical explanation, clearly coined to suit the occasion, that in old days a part of Attica was held by Karians, who were allowed to come into Athens for the festival and then told to go away when it was over. A later MS. tradition, still in Zenobios, says that “some” said κῆρες, but offers no explanation. Photios in his lexicon and Suidas copying him quote the saying in both forms, but this time with a different explanation of Kᾶρες it means “Karian slaves” and bids them go about their work (presumably in the fields) now that the festival, in which they were allowed to share, is at an end.

At the end of the nineteenth century Louis Duchesne's Fastes épiscopaux de l'ancienne Gaule decisively undermined the foundation for maintaining the apostolicity of Gallic sees. This epochal study proved that, of the twenty-five lists of Gallic bishops which were credible and could be verified, only that of the church at Lyon reached back as far as the second century, and only four others as far as the third century. Thus it effectively discredited the pious medieval myths which had been created to prove that the Gallic episcopal traditions derived from the apostles, and led Duchesne confidently to conclude that, except for the “mother-church” at Lyon, established probably in the middle of the second century, no other church was founded in the Gallic provinces of Belgica, Lugdunensis, Aquitania, and Germania much before A.D. 230.

Historians of religion in America, as enamored of marking “watersheds” in our culture as other scholars, have long used the famous “Briggs Case” as an event for marking that cultural moment when American mainline Protestants, mostly kicking and screaming, began to confront officially the higher criticism of the Bible. Charles Augustus Briggs, as students of Gilded Age religion know well, was a professor of scripture at New York's Union Theological Seminary who, between 1891 and 1893, underwent a peripatetic heresy trial in various Presbyterian church courts—“the most notorious event in 19th century American church history,” as one of its chroniclers has described it—for advocating the application of modern historical-critical methods to the biblical record.

Dr. Williams' Library in London has a copy of Bishop John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, interleaved with pages on which the divine and hymn-writer Isaac Watts made hundreds of notes — concerning the books he studied at Thomas Rowe's Dissenting academy in London, the comments of leading figures in London's nonconformist circles, and his own maturing opinions and judgments. Dates on various notes range from 1690 to 1709. The document should be of interest to all students of English religious nonconformity in the seventeenth century; it is in effect a manuscript record of an education for the Dissenting ministry, written by one of the foremost ministers of the age, which further reveals the influence of that education on his thinking and his pastoral activities in the most active years of his public leadership. Through a combination of circumstances, Watts' copy of Wilkins has remained obscure, unidentified and virtually untouched in the Dr. Williams archives for well over a century. Now that it has come to light again,2 and has been identified as Watts's,3 perhaps it can gain the attention it merits

The work of the School of Edessa was put under strictures of ever increasing severity, and led finally to its liquidation under Zeno in 489. The torch of higher learning was then transplanted to Nisibis, a center that had been the pride of Byzantium before it was annexed by the Persians in 361. In Narsai's person and those of his co-workers, the tradition returned to Nisibis from which stimuli once had gone out giving birth to the School of Edessa. The question of time of the founding of the School of Nisibis which has been the subject of disagreement, can now due to an important document be dated with greater precision namely — soon after the year 471. Narsai became the first director. Soon after its appearance upon the scene, the school was accorded an extraordinary élan. It took over the leadership among other radii of intellectual and spiritual life, the best that Christianity under the Sassanides had produced. The life that emanated from it constitutes the most beautiful page in the history of Christianity in this part of the world. Its statutes also occupy a place of honor in the tradition regarding the legislative sources.

The Short-Title Catalogue includes in its list of Tyndale's works a pamphlet called ‘The Supper of the Lord,’ which was originally published anonymously on the continent in 1533, under the fictitious imprint of Nicholas Twonson of Nuremberg. But there are serious objections against accepting Tyndale's authorship. Although the pamphlet was reprinted several times during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, it did not finally appear under Tyndale's name until 1573, when John Foxe included it in his edition of the works of Tyndale, Frith and Barnes. During the sixteenth century it was widely believed that ‘The Supper of the Lord’ was the work of George Joye, one of the lesser figures of the English reformation who is now largely forgotten. But although the weight of the evidence seems to support this belief, the glamor of Tyndale's name has prevented the question from being investigated properly.

Prefatory Note: In July, 1976, Rudolf Bultmann, the last of the great Protestant theologians of this century, died in Marburg, Germany, a few weeks before his 92d birthday. An almost life-long friendship, beginning with my being his student in the 1920s, bound me to this man of towering scholarship, clarity of mind, purity of character, and deep — if troubled — piety. In November, 1976, the Theological Faculty of Marburg University held a memorial for its longtime professor of New Testament studies, which was attended by many persons from all over Germany and neighboring countries this side of the iron curtain. Of the two academic lectures delivered before that audience, one was by a New Testament theologian and erstwhile student of Bultmann, Professor Erich Dinkler from Heidelberg, the other by me, not a theologian but a philosopher, not a Christian but a Jew. The complete proceedings of the memorial meeting have been published under the title Gedenken an Rudolf Bultmann by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen, 1977. Only part of what I had prepared in writing was orally presented at the occasion, but the whole was printed. I here submit my own English version of the unabridged German essay, which in the spirit of Bultmann's own openmindedness pushes some of his theoretical concerns beyond the point which he himself had reached.

One of the most important contributions to the textual criticism of Athanasius was published last year in the Revue d' histoire ecclésiastique, xxi, pp. 525 ff., by Professor J. Lebon. In it he announced the discovery in a late manuscript on Mt. Athos (Dochiariou 78) of a text of the De Incarnatione of Athanasius which differs so much from the ordinary text that it amounts to a separate recension. He pointed out that the antiquity of this recension is proved by conclusive evidence that it was known to Theodoret and to Leontius of Byzantium, and that it appears to have been akin to the Greek translated into Syriac in Cod. Vat. Syr. 104 in Rome, a manuscript of the sixth century. By the time that this number of the Review is published it is probable that Professor Lebon's edition of Dochiariou 78 will have appeared in the Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense.

In various mediaeval authors, writing in different localities and at different periods, there are a goodly number of quotations which obviously derive ultimately from a biblical text. These quotations, however, either are not found in exactly the form, in which they are quoted, in MSS. of the Bible, whether of Old Latin or of Vulgate versions, or, if they do occur in MSS., these are of a later date than the earliest author who uses the quotation. Since these quotations do appear in the liturgy of the Church, or in other texts which were used in worship, such as sermons, homilies, Saints' Lives, it is not illogical to suppose that their source is to be found, not in any special type of Bible text, but in the liturgy. As an illustration of this possibility I presented in this Review (XXXI, 1938, 41–51) a study of one of these quotations, the phrase viam universae carnis ingressurus, which occurs frequently in documents from the 11th century on. It does not occur in precisely this form in any biblical MS., although the substitution of carnis for terrae of the early MSS. is found in a MS. of the 13th century, but does occur in at least one liturgical text of the 11th century and in another which dates from the 13th century, if not earlier. The conclusion is certainly justified therefore that authors were indebted to the liturgy for this phrase and that the liturgical form influenced the reading in later biblical MSS.