Whoever reads the meditations of Marcus Aurelius must be impressed with the constant self-examination which the writer practised. Far on the northern boundaries of his empire, among the Quadi, on the banks of the Gran, he composed his first book, analyzing his own nature, gratefully recounting his obligations to his kin, his teachers, and his friends. All the succeeding books grow out of a similar self-examination, accompanied by self-directed exhortations to fidelity, constancy, and patience. The title which the work bears is indeed the only possible one—To Himself—for self is alike the subject and the object of the author's meditations. The emperor's simple humility, his high desire to fulfil in every way his duty, his patient humanity, shut out effectively all priggishness and offensive egotism from his pages. Marcus Aurelius was not alone in his concern for self. If we look into other ranks of life in the second century, we find the same interest. With all its peace, calm, and nobility, the age of the Antonines was an age of egoism, of valetudinarianism both of body and of soul. Aristides the rhetorician has left us an account of his long and impassioned search for health, which for him was a religious quest. Apuleius, in his anxiety for his soul, had himself initiated into all possible sacred mysteries, until he at last found rest in the holy brotherhood of the servants of Isis. The emperor, the rhetorician, and the superstitious mystic furnish three striking illustrations of the tendency of the time.

Recent investigations into the law of fugitives and suppliants in hellenistic Egypt, a law which was based upon the procedure of classic Greece and so was generally like hellenistic law throughout the east, have thrown much light upon the subject, and suggest a reconsideration of the case, of Onesimus and his relations with Paul and Philemon. According to the law of Athens a slave whose life was in danger might flee to an altar and claim sanctuary. The first altar available was frequently the hearth of some private family, with its associations of the family religion. If a refugee rushed into the house and claimed sanctuary, the householder was under legal obligations to give him protection, at least temporarily, while following one of two possible courses. Either he must reconcile the slave to going back to the master, probably by giving the wretch some assurance that the master's wrath was mollified, or, if the slave persisted in refusing to trust himself with the master, the householder was obliged to put the slave up for sale in the market, and pay to the slave's owner the price received. The latter alternative was fraught with serious possibilities for the slave, since in a sale of this kind the circumstances would prejudice prospective buyers against him, and he would probably be purchased only for the roughest sort of service, such as the galleys or the mines. Rather than face such an uncertainty the slave would certainly be glad to go back to the first master if there were any reasonable hope of clemency.

The corpus of early Hebrew poetry, to which these two lengthy poems belong, has been the subject of a great deal of critical discussion, both because of the many problems involved and because of the contribution which these poems make to the history of Hebrew prosody, grammar, lexicography, and religion. It is thus not without value that further efforts at solution of some of the difficulties be made. The following brief notes deal with two passages that have been the subject of extended investigation by various scholars.

Currently there is no widespread agreement on what constitutes gnosis or the gnostic identity in the ancient world. The best option, it seems, is to offer a polythetic classification wherein gnostic thinkers or groups possess a range of characteristics without any one group or thinker possessing all of them. Yet even if widespread agreement on a set of characteristics were attained, it still would not explain how gnostic groups emerged, developed, and crafted their own specific identities.

This article examines the development and transformation of the holy spirit within Jewish mysticism. It begins with a brief analysis of primary trends concerning the holy spirit in biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish texts that served as crucial material for the holy spirit’s ascendence in sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. Following, it examines the writings of leading Jewish mystics: Moses Cordovero, Elijah de Vidas, and Ḥayyim Vital, who resided in the remote Galilean town of Safed. These luminaries each developed the concept of the holy spirit along a spectrum of pneumatic, fusionary, mystical, and revelatory experiences. Ultimately, they transformed the holy spirit into the peak experience of Jewish mystical life— experienced as prophecy, sanctification, and embodiment. This article highlights an important, yet understudied, Jewish mystical phenomenon.

Paul’s speech to the Areopagus in Acts 17 places the apostle in philosophical dialogue with Stoics and Epicureans. This article identifies important points of contact between Paul’s speech and Middle Platonic exegesis of a famous Platonic phrase from Timaeus 28c. There, the philosopher declares that the maker and father of the world is hard to find, and even more difficult to talk about. Many later interpreters of Plato commented on the dictum. Middle Platonists such as Plutarch mused about the theological implications of naming god both “maker” and “father.” Jewish and Christian interpreters like Philo and Justin employed Plato’s phrase to describe their access to divine revelation. The first portion of this article argues that the Areopagus speech contains evidence of similar exegesis, both in its references to god’s roles as maker and father and in Paul’s claim to declare the unknown god. These resonances do more than clarify the author’s philosophical background; they also have previously unexplored implications for our understanding of Paul’s characterization in Acts 17. The second half of the article argues that in aligning Paul with the Platonic tradition, the author participates in an established Greco-Roman practice of depicting the Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans in theological dialogue.

In the seminal work, Direction to the Duties of the Hearts, Baḥya ibn Paqūda (flourished 11th century) aimed to reconstruct Jewish existence on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” and the “duties of the hearts.” Baḥya’s intent was to instigate a transition towards the internalization of Jewish religious life. This paradigm shift was to take place not only by the shaping of an ideational formation and a new set of distinctions that Baḥya aimed at integrating in Jewish life, but also through a reflective consideration of the state of the Jewish tradition, its transmission mechanisms, historical trajectory, and contemporaneous challenges. As I will demonstrate in this article, in order to realize this transformation, Baḥya utilized a distinction that cross-cuts his work: the distinction between ẓāhir (“external” or “manifest”) and bāṭin (“inner” or “hidden”), that mostly indicates the relation between the manifest sphere of one’s actions and the activity that takes place only in one’s mental space. However, as I argue, this distinction is also applied by Baḥya to the expanse of Jewish “tradition,” pertaining to what was disclosed in it and what was left unimparted, what was communicated and what was kept unsaid, what was remembered and what was neglected.

This article argues that Henry David Thoreau believed in the essential unity of the five senses and privileged each as a source of wild and divine knowledge, which, when combined, created a full picture that might result in a true approximation of God in and beyond nature—the hallmark of Thoreau’s fundamentally incarnational theology. Thoreau treated each sense not only as a source of divine knowledge but as a site of theological discourse: for touch, the relationship between sin and grace; for smell, the conundrum of an eternal divinity acting in historical time; for taste, the efficacy of sacraments; for hearing, the possibility of continuing revelation; and for sight, the ability for human beings to actually see God. The senses were the practical entry point to Thoreau’s theological system, which was concerned with the discovery and redemption of internal “wildness” and reconnection to the mysterious, divine source of that wildness, to the unaccountable in nature.

The schismatic “Church of the martyrs” which arose in Egypt after the last persecution possessed, at the time of Nicaea, twenty-eight bishops besides its founder Meletius. Nothing survives to tell us with what rites these men were made bishops. But the schism was so nationalist in character that it is likely to have followed Egyptian church tradition. It has been contended that this tradition, as regards episcopal succession, was peculiar, and followed a pattern different from that established for the propagation of a Catholic hierarchy by the Fourth Canon of Nicaea. The aim of this article is to show that this contention finds support in the Meletian story.

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l'épître aux Hébreux.1 The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye's study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century.

“The most ancient of the philosophers,” wrote Clement of Alexandria, “were not carried away to disputing and doubting, and much less are we who are attached to the really true philosophy, and on whom the Scripture enjoins examination and investigation…. The point proposed for inquiry and answer knocks at the door of truth…. To those who thus ask questions in the Scriptures is granted that at which they aim, the gift of God-given knowledge, by way of comprehension, through the true illumination of their intellectual search…. It becomes him who is at once a lover and a disciple of truth to be pacific even in investigation, advancing by intellectual demonstration, without love of self but with love of truth, to the knowledge of comprehension.”

It has sometimes been maintained that the old polytheism of Greece and Rome was already moribund by the reign of Augustus; that, although its forms still persisted, they persisted only as conventions of literature and art, or as political conveniences; that genuine religious emotion had either ebbed away or found other channels,—the Eastern religions, Judaism, Christianity, or the moral philosophies. This thesis, however, ceases to appeal, when we realize how vigorous the old idiom still was. It is not simply that things once expressed in it continued to be repeated. It was still used to express what was actually being thought and felt in the present. What is true is that it was now used to express something different from its earlier contents. It is this ‘something different’ that I wish to explore in this paper.

In the official formulation of Tillich's theology, the ontological polarity of dynamics and form, together with the other polarities, provides the basic symbolic material for the description of the divine life. In that life dynamics and form are balanced, with the tensions and disruptions characteristic of finite life wholly overcome. “Being comprises becoming and rest, becoming as an implication of dynamics and rest as an implication of form. If we say that God is being-itself, this includes both rest and becoming, both the static and the dynamic elements” (ST I 247). At the same time, however, we find that Tillich identifies God or being-itself with the power of being (ST I 110, 180, 2O5f., 230, 236f., 272; ST II 10f.). Although he does not and perhaps would not identify dynamics with the power of being, we find that they have extremely similar characteristics. In fact we are driven to ask why the element of dynamics within the divine life is not identified with the power of being, and to speculate on the consequences of such an identification. It is our contention that the internal logic of Tillich's analysis of this polarity is such that he cannot finally avoid identifying divine dynamics with the creative power of being. This, in turn, entails that God is a being rather than beyond being, himself an instance of the power of being pervasively inherent in all beings. In the first section we shall consider the polarity of dynamics and form as it functions in finite beings. Then we shall examine its role in the divine life and its relationship to the power of being.

This article investigates an uncharted facet of Martin Luther’s Hebrew translation method. It is one of the more fascinating aspects of his translation, which demonstrates both the complexity of how he translated Hebrew and the lasting impact of the Hebrew on his German, neither of which has been fully appreciated by scholars. This article demonstrates how he sometimes blended Hebrew and German idioms in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the Minor Prophets. It further shows how he used this translation method to convey various linguistic features of the Hebrew language to his German audience. Finally, it shows how this has a number of important implications for Luther studies, Hebrew and German linguistics, and medieval and early modern history.

There has been much talk in religious circles about the condition of theology. It is frequently charged that its language is no longer viable; and thus, if for no other reason, the theologian must seek a more contemporary idiom. Furthermore, with the need expressed over and over again for new translations of everything old, we seem to reinforce our claim that all of theology must be continually re-translated too. But words are one thing and concepts perhaps another. With the great enthusiasm today for a certain kind of linguistic study on the part of students of the Bible and with what looks like a strong growing interest in linguistic philosophy, there are bound to be a few confusions generated. These notes are intended to head them off.

Despite the persistence of significant differences over the interpretation of humilitas in Luther's early works, an apparent consensus is afoot on both the nature of the problem which drove him to his Reformation theology and the nature of the discovery which forms the heart of this theology. As the picture now comes into focus in the secondary literature, the problem Luther apparently confronted so despairingly might be summarized as the viator-status of Christian life within the traditional medieval ordo salutis.

More than once the doctrine of the Spirit (Pneumatology) has been called the Cinderella of Theology. If this was so in the past, and is perhaps still, it now requires our full attention. At the risk of viewing the situation through ‘continental’ eyes, but hoping you will recognize this, I would say that the nineteenth century, impressed by the advance of science, confronted theology in the first place with problems raised by natural science. Its first question concerned the nature of God, especially in connection with creation. Scientific historical inquiry paid attention to the Bible, and in the New Testament focussed its interest upon the question of the historical Jesus. This work culminated and came to a temporary halt in Albert Schweitzer's, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A revival of Systematic Theology and Dogmatics followed, and in the opinion of the dogmatists the connecting lines between theology viewed from a cosmic standpoint and the Gospel were too long. The same thing was seen happening in the historical study of religions which came to cover an ever-widening field. On flle other hand, however, they could not be satisfied with a ‘life of Jesus,’ so that Christology began to occupy a central place which it has held during the last few decades. And, if Pneumatology received any attention at all, its allotted place was small.

Any wise psychologist will insist that a period of personal depression is not an appropriate time for meditation on the meaning of life. Yet it is such times that most individuals select. A period of social depression, retrogression, and catastrophe is hardly opportune for the deliberate and detached examination of the meaning of history. Yet it is in “times of trouble” that men seem most inclined to somber meditation on the subject. Numerous current publications testify that the relationship of Christianity and its doctrine of revelation to history is one of the most serious problems that the present generation of theologians has to face. Paul Tillich has characterized history as the problem of our age.