Fifteen years ago when some two million Americans of Norwegian ancestry were celebrating the centennial of the first migration from Norway to America I published in these pages an account of the Quaker antecedents of the famous voyage of the sloop Restaurationen. From English, Norwegian and American sources it was possible to recount the story of a group of Norwegian prisoners of war in prison ships on the Thames who were befriended and converted by English Quakers and returned home in 1814 to Stavanger and elsewhere to establish Quaker meetings. One of these men, Lars Larsen, with men of like independence, such as Cleng Peersen who preceded him and Knud Andersen Slogvig who followed, organized an escape from the clerical oppressions in Norway, purchased a small ship, and landing in New York in October 1825, proceeded inland to found in western New York the first of many Norwegian settlements in the United States. The following scattered data are now collected to indicate some earlier contacts between the English Quakers and Norway.

In a previous article I have dealt with the striking parallels between the Dead Sea Manual of Discipline (iQS) and the Book of Acts and the special material of Matthew. The organization of early Christianity in Jerusalem, particularly its conservative or Judaizing wing, strongly suggests the Dead Sea sect at several points. The more liberal Christianity of Stephen and the Epistle to the Hebrews may, however, also have contacts with the Qumran sect's idea of spiritual sacrifices and its protest against the Jerusalem Temple. In addition there are parallels between the Dead Sea literature and the Pauline epistles but they are very different from the ones just named.

No passage of the Synoptic Gospels throws so much light upon Jesus’ sense of his own mission as that which deals with Knowing the Father and Being Known of Him in Mt. 11 25-27, Lk. 10 21-22. It belongs to the common element of Matthew and Luke unknown in Mark, and in the judgment of the great majority of critics must therefore be referred to a common source of high antiquity. In short, as respects attestation, its claims to authenticity are unexcelled. As respects content, it deals with the all-important matter of Jesus’ doctrine of divine sonship, and yet it seems to stand alone among Synoptic sayings, and to be paralleled only by utterances ascribed to Jesus by the fourth evangelist. But the Johannine discourses give every indication of having been composed by the evangelist himself in order to expound in dialogue form his own deutero-pauline Christology. The only instance in all Synoptic tradition of anything comparable to this apposition of “the Son…the Father,” is Mk. 13 32, Mt. 24 36.

Of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

One of the most striking and pathetic figures of the nineteenth century was Friedrich Nietzsche. A radical aristocrat, a radical enemy of religion, a prophet, he shared the fate of the prophet and the radical man. He was a poet rather than a philosopher, not one calmly to weigh the issues of his mind. He was a zealot with a mission, a fiery genius, whose torch, unsteady at times, flared into madness in his latter years. So great was the strain of thought that his mind was literally consumed by his zeal for a vast, a revolutionary cause.

Philosophers have long debated the question of the existence of God. This is one of many philosophical issues in which the motivation for inquiry has come more perhaps from the side of human feeling than from disinterested scientific curiosity. Powerful emotions appear to prompt thinkers to devote effort to the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God. The urgency of this task has made some of these philosophers pay less than adequate heed to the concepts they employ. It appears to have escaped the attention of many of them that the word “God” does not have a single meaning either in religious language generally or in philosophical theology. It is obvious that one of the important ways in which religious traditions differ is in their conceptions of the Deity. But a considerable number of different God-concepts may be distinguished in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition itself, and not even in Christian theology proper is the word “God” free of ambiguity.

The current essays to disentangle the literary history of the material which now forms our Gospel of Mark were described in an article by Professor Moulton in a recent number of this Review. Of the attempts to solve the problem there mentioned two seem plausible enough to warrant fuller exposition in these pages. They are the reconstructions by which Professor Hermann von Soden, of Berlin, and Professor Emil Wendling, of Zabern, have tried to resolve our Gospel into its constituent elements.

It is generally held that these three names apply to one person, who was the chief of the Twelve Apostles and the first witness to the Resurrection. It is, of course, recognized that there was another apostle named Simon, but he plays only a small part in Christian tradition.

Le tome X du recueil des “Papiri della Società italiana,” où ont déjà paru tant de morceaux précieux, contient sous le n° 1162 le texte mutilé d'un serment que son éditeur, M. V. Bartoletti, a jugé “plutôt juif que chrétien.” Evidemment ce caractère lui a paru résulter des premières lignes, restituées par lui avec une grande vraisemblance et où il s'agit d'un dieu créateur. Mais les fonnules employées n'ont qu'une analogie très vague avec les premiers versets de la Genèse. Elles s'en rapprochent beaucoup moins que la teneur de certaine cosmogonie hermétique, où l'influence juive se décèle immédiatement. Comme j'avais suggéré à M. Vitelli, sous toutes réserves, la possibilité d'une autre interprétation, ce maître incontesté de la papyrologie m'a courtoisement invité dans les additions au tome X à exposer moi-même cette explication nouvelle. Je cède donc à son exhortation, malgré certains doutes qui, on le verra, subsistent dans mon esprit, car, si je comprends bien ce texte tronqué, il prendra une valeur singulière et méritera qu'on s'attache à l'étudier.

Recent studies of Ignatius the bishop of Antioch have been fresh and varied, upon the whole. Some of his theological ideas have been reconsidered, as for example his conceptions of the Trinity by Jules Lebreton (Recherches de Science Religieuse, 1925, 97 f., 393 f.) and Loofs (Theophilus von Antiochien adversus Marcionem, 1930, 194 f.). His relation to the gnostic movement occupies H. Schlier's Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu den Ignatiusbriefen (1929), and emerges in Lietzmann's Geschichte der Alten Kirche, I (1932, 251 f.) and Walter Bauer's Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christenthum (1934, 65 f.). The psychological interest crops up in Dr. Streeter's ingenious account of his attitude towards church-orders (The Primitive Church, 1929), while wider surveys are furnished by Dr. F. A. Schilling (Mysticism of Ignatius of Antioch, 1932) and Dr. Cyril Richardson (The Christianity of Ignatius of Antioch, 1935). These monographs represent an advance upon the old-fashioned practice of grouping Ignatius among the so-called ‘apostolic fathers,’ or of estimating him in the wake of a ‘mystical succession’ headed by the apostles Paul and John.

In the Review for January, 1909, an account was given of the excavations carried on by Harvard University at Samaria in the summer of 1908. The work of that year extended, with serious interruptions, from April 24 to August 21, and was confined mainly to the summit of the hill and to a building beside the threshing-floor near the village of Sebastiyeh. At the summit, and only a few inches below the surface, a paved platform, or floor, was uncovered, with a broad stairway of seventeen steps leading up to it from the north. On the stairway was found an inscribed stele, and a few feet in front of the foot of the stairway a large altar with another inscribed stele standing beside it. Near this altar lay a fine statue of heroic size, carved in white marble, representing a Roman emperor. Massive foundation-walls resting on the rock were uncovered on the south of the platform. Several periods of construction were recognized in these buildings, and one of these periods was believed to be that of Herod the Great.

When, in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, Eve reveals her unsettling dream, in which she saw herself eating the forbidden fruit at the prompting of a mysterious stranger, Adam dismisses it as an experience of no importance. Since her will was not involved, he believes, she incurred no guilt. His argument that the dream is without significance persuades her but not us, who have beheld Satan, during the couple's sleep, causing the dream in Eve in order to taint her faculties and perhaps to probe her weaknesses:

Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve;

Assaying by his Devilish art to reach

The Organs of her Fancy, and with them forge

Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams.

(IV, 800–03)

I received a letter from the God-beloved Bishop Eusebius enjoining me to write again to the bishops of the West concerning certain ecclesiastical affairs. He wanted me to write the letter, which is to be signed by all who are in (our) communion; but, since I do not see how I could write about the matters which he mentioned, I have sent the memorandum to Your Reverence, so that you yourself, after reading it and hearing the reports of the most beloved brother Sanctissimus, our fellow-priest, may deign to write about these matters as will seem best to yourself. I am ready to subscribe my signature to this letter and to have it carried quickly to those who are in (our) communion, so that the one who is to go to the bishops of the West may have all the signatures when he sets out. Give orders that I be informed immediately of what Your Holiness has in mind, so that I may not be ignorant of your decisions.

In the continuing debate over the question of the independence of morality and religion there is a set of issues pertaining to the relation of moral obligation and the expressed will of God which would benefit from some further conceptual clarification. Most often the debate amounts to a defense of one form or another of the following alternatives: either it is true by definition that whatever God wills ought to be obeyed because an expression like “ought to be obeyed” means “willed or commanded by God” (in which case morality is entirely dependent on religion) or it is only a contingent truth that whatever God wills ought to be obeyed because an antecedent moral judgment as to the goodness of God's will is required for its assertion (in which case morality is entirely independent of religion). It is my contention, however, that so long as the debate is carried on in these limited terms we will necessarily be dissatisfied with whichever way the argument goes, for neither alternative can be made fully to harmonize either with our common moral and religious sensibilities or with the facts of our moral and religious usage.

Legal historians have given considerable attention to the question of intention in rabbinic law. Solomon Zeitlin, in the early years of the present century, published a number of articles touching on this matter, in which his chief purpose was to show that the legal significance of intention was one of the central points of contention between the two great Tannaitic schools, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. A little later, Michael Higger wrote a doctoral dissertation for Columbia University which he entitled Intention in Talmudic Law. Still more recently, Louis Finkelstein sought to push the dispute over intention back to the days of the Pharisees and Sadducees, attributing to the Sadducees the view that intention by itself has no legal consequence, and as usual explaining this view in terms of the Sadducees' social position.

The district which constituted the field of our investigation is situated on the western slope of central Sinai facing the Gulf of Suez. The remains of ancient mine-workings are divided into two groups of unequal importance: the northern group, of which the numerous openings lie north and south of the upper course of Wadi Baba, and to which belong the mines of the plateau of Serabit, and the southern group, confined to the turquoise galleries of Maghara. The two groups are included in a rectangle which measures about 35 kilometers from east to west and 25 from north to south.

During the last quarter-century more investigation than ever before has been going on into the unconscious activities of the human mind, or, as the investigators have preferred to call it, the sub-conscious mind. This has led in psychology to the study of apparitions and the various forms of telepathy, and in religion to a revival of Quietism. Religious bodies as far from Quakerism as the Episcopal Church are holding retreats for meditation, silent prayer, “the practice of the presence of God.” The exclusion of worldly thought is pointed to as the means for the opening of the soul to the incoming of the Divine; and some are following the Mystic Way through its steps of Purgation, Illumination, and Ecstasy to its goal of absorption into God in the Unitive Life.

The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews was published early in 1909, and before the year was out its author was being requisitioned by dissidents from Christianity of the most incongruous types as a promising instrument for the general anti-christian propaganda. Few more remarkable spectacles have ever been witnessed than the exploitation throughout Germany in the opening months of 1910 of this hyper-idealistic metaphysician, disciple of von Hartmann and convinced adherent of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” by an Alliance the declared basis of whose organization is a determinate materialism. As, under the auspices of the Monistenbund, he made his progress from city to city, lecturing and debating, he drew a tidal-wave of sensation along with him. A violent literary war was inaugurated. It seemed as if all theological Germany were aroused.