Until the last few years we had scanty information on the cult of Apollo at Actium, which, after the victory of Augustus won there in 31 B.C., became very popular in the Greek and Roman world. The games of Actium, reorganized and elevated to panhellenistic rank, flourished for a long time in the Roman empire. The lucky discovery of an inscription at Olympia, from the end of the third century B.C., has now brought us new light on the earlier history of this cult.

For some time past I have been impressed with the importance of the so-called gnostic gems, more accurately called syncretistic amulets, as an aid to the study of Greek magical papyri, and have examined them wherever I could find them. During the summer of 1931 I was permitted to study the large collection in the British Museum, a favor for which I am indebted to the courtesy of Dr. George F. Hill, the Director, and Mr. Sidney Smith, the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. Mr. Smith and his associates in the Department gave me every facility for a minute examination of the stones and allowed me to have casts made from several of them. I have in preparation a group of studies of some amulets in the British Museum and others in various American collections, which I hope to publish with illustrations and interpretations. A preliminary account of two of the British Museum specimens seems to fall within the province of this Review.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

For more than seventy years these important terms of Greek sacred vocabulary have been discussed back and forth. Recently French scholars have adduced new arguments to make their meaning clearer. Although the textual evidence, both epigraphical and literary, is not yet sufficiently plentiful to eliminate all possible doubts, it is evident that progress in the understanding of ritual terminology has been made. I should like to add some observations on the problem and to discuss some of the texts which, in the opinion of many scholars, need clarification.

This article focuses on the meeting of faith traditions—interfaith dialogue—from the perspective of mystical consciousness. In doing so, it aims to understand the dynamics and potentialities of interfaith mysticism. The contribution of this article to religious studies, in combination with theological inquiry, is threefold: first, it illuminates how the Trinity is directly experienced in interfaith contexts; second, it provides an interfaith framework that accounts for the possibilities, complexity, and challenges of interfaith encounters; third, it shows how Gavin Flood’s three orders of discourse—traditions’ experience and texts, interpretation within traditions, and academic inquiry—can be applied to the study of interfaith mysticism, employing a phenomenological emphasis on hermeneutics. The inquiry is located within the context of representatives of Hindu mystical consciousness (Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo) and the Christian interfaith tradition (Henri Le Saux, Bede Griffiths, David Steindl-Rast), in conversation with Raimon Panikkar’s and Francis X. Clooney’s approaches to interreligious studies.

Isaiah 16:3–4, part of an obscure prophecy about ancient Moab, appeared frequently in nineteenth-century writings about slavery in the United States, particularly in the context of opposition to fugitive slave laws. The verses were linked with other biblical passages to create a network of proof texts to justify assisting persons who escaped slavery. Eventually, the line “hide the outcast” from verse 3 took on a life of its own as an abolitionist slogan, largely independently of its biblical context. Rebuttals of these uses of the texts by anti-abolitionist writers, which began to appear in the 1850s, criticized the decontextualization of the verses, and one novel response attempted to link the text to interracial intimacy. Despite these rebuttals, the use of the text continued apace throughout the 1850s–1860s in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the execution of John Brown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.