The Temple Scroll (11 QTemple), the last of the known scrolls from Qumran to be published, is a heterogeneous document whose contents cover various topics of cult, architecture, ritual purity, and civil law. Nonetheless, most exegetes have treated the scroll as the work of a single author. The question whether there might be several independent literary sources behind the document will be the subject of this study.

A good deal of information is being collected about the potter's craft in many parts of the world. Some work has been done on the analysis of potmaking in antiquity, but as far as the present writer knows, the importance of this type of analysis for archaeological studies has not been critically investigated. This paper intends to present the reader with the results of research into the methods of potmaking in two cultural periods in Palestine, as well as with some of the problems that came up during this research. The two periods concerned are the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–1000 B.C.) and the Medieval period from the beginning of the Islamic conquest to ca. 1500 A.D.

Although Meister Eckhart himself might have been puzzled by the term, he is traditionally known as a mystic. The designation surely does apply, in the sense that Eckhart sought and recommended a kind of union between the soul and God. But as soon as one proceeds to analyze the precise nature of that union, difficulties abound. In recent literature it has become clear that the Christian mystical tradition has employed various distinct concepts of union with God, and scholars have inquired what sort of union one or another mystic sought. This effort has been made, for example, in studies of John Tauler and The Cloud of Unknowing. In examining these and other mystics, particularly those of the Western medieval tradition, scholars have asked whether they viewed union with God as a momentary experience or as an ongoing way of life, and whether they saw this union as continuous and compatible with ordinary religious experience and knowledge or as discontinuous and incompatible. The present article will attempt to answer such questions in regard to Meister Eckhart, in hopes of clarifying an aspect of his thought which, though fundamental, is most commonly approached only tangentially in the literature.

This article argues that early and later rabbinic texts, as well as Babylonian and Palestinian sources, express different attitudes toward minim (“heretics”) and Christians, and that these differing attitudes are useful in reconstructing the histories of diverse rabbinic communities. In evaluating the historicity of the rabbinic sources, it is important to bear in mind that early sources do not necessarily provide reliable information about early periods, nor do Palestinian materials necessarily depict Palestinian reality more accurately than do Babylonian materials. Portrayals of minim and Christians in talmudic sources may tell us much about relations between Jews and Christians in the Persian and Roman empires of late antiquity, but they perhaps tell us more about the desires and prejudices of rabbinic authors and editors.

Athanasius of Alexandria's thirty-ninth Festal Letter remains one of the most significant documents in the history of the Christian Bible. Athanasius wrote the letter, which contains the first extant list of precisely the twenty-seven books of the current New Testament canon, in 367 c.e., during the final decade of his life. Like many of his annual Easter letters, the thirty-ninth was fairly long, but only a small portion of the text survives in Greek.1 The Greek excerpt contains Athanasius's lists of the books of the Old and New Testaments, which he calls “canonized,” and a list of a few additional books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which he says are not canonized, but are useful in the instruction of catechumens. Most studies of the formation of the Christian canon, including very recent ones, examine only this Greek fragment and so discuss only the contents of the lists. But already in the late-nineteenth-century fragments of the much more extensive Coptic translation had been published, and a few scholars, such as Carl Schmidt and Theodor Zahn, used them to write penetrating studies of the letter.2 In 1955 Lefort published all the then-known Coptic fragments in his book of Coptic Athanasiana, and then in 1984 Coquin published another long fragment.3 These served as the basis for my 1995 translation and my 1994 article in this journal on the social context of canon formation in fourth-century Egypt.4

In 1936 Henry Lucks could write of Athenagoras' treatise On the Resurrection of the Dead that “it is rather singular that there is no questioning of the authorship of this work, and no hesitancy evident in attributing it to Athenagoras.” On the other hand, in 1950 P. Keseling made the following statement after speaking of Athenagoras' Legatio:

Demselben Verfasser weist eine von der Hand des Erzbischof Arethas selbst herrühende (so Stählin bei Harnack, Lit. 2 1, 317, 4) Eintragung in dem massgebenden Codex Paris, graecus 451 v J. 914 einen Λόγος περὶ ἀναστάεως τῶν νεκρῶν (Oratio de resurrectione mortuorum), also eine Schrift über die Auferstehung der Toten zu, die jedoch, sonst nirgends bezeugt und aus inneren Gründen nicht unverdächtig, hier ausser Betracht geblieben ist.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the reasons for believing that Athenagoras could not have written the treatise De resurrectione.

In the Preface to the Retractationes, Augustine suggests: “Perhaps whoever will read my works in the order in which they were written will discover how I made progress while writing them.” The present essay is an attempt to carry out this suggestion of Augustine, with particular attention to his ideas on society, from the earliest Dialogues of 386 up to the time, shortly after 400 A.D., when the Donatist controversy introduces a new period in Augustine's thought.

What has Paul to do with Quintilian? For a host of scholars this question would answer itself, rhetorically. A stock device, the rhetorical question has long been favored in argument. Even Paul is no exception. “Where is the wise man?” he asks. “Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor 1:20). Paul would appear to be dismissing everything his contemporary, Quintilian, stood for. Yet one point remains. As Cicero once wrote of Plato, “it was when making fun of orators that he himself seemed to be the consummate orator.” The following, a rhetorical study of the letter to Philemon, will suggest that Paul too employed basic tactics of persuasion taught and widely practiced in his day.

The French scholar P. Veyne has recently classified a number of phenomena, which clearly prove that the person of the Roman emperor occupied a predominant position in the minds of the average Roman and Greek. He shows that the imperial ideology both reflected certain sentiments current among the people, and contributed toward the shaping of those sentiments.

When I wandered into the “vast ocean of the Talmud” a decade or so ago, unaware of the warning within the same texts that Gentiles who undertake the study of Jewish sacred literature should be put to death, I finally found what I had been seeking for years. Here at last was a glimpse of God's personality–His likes and dislikes, His idiosyncracies, His religious observances. To my delight, I also dis-covered in the tractate 'Abodah Zarah the answer to another mystery. What does God do all day?

Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”

Is Origen of Alexandria the inventor of the eschatological doctrine of apokatastasis— of the eventual return of all creatures to the Good, that is, God, and thus universal salvation? Certainly, he is one of its chief supporters in all of history, and he is, as far as we know, the first to have maintained it in a complete and coherent way, so that all of his philosophy of history, protology, and anthropology is oriented toward this telos.1 There are, however, significant antecedents to his mature and articulate theorization, at least some of which he surely knew very well, and there is even a possible parallel. For this conception did not appear ex nihilo, but in a cultural context rich in suggestions and premises, and in a philosophical framework of lively discussions concerning fate, free will, theodicy, and the eternal destiny of rational creatures.

One hundred and ninety-one years ago, in 1808, Johann Leonhard Hug's Introduction to the New Testament carried statements that, in part, may strike textual critics as being far ahead of their time. Hug laments the loss of all the original manuscripts of the New Testament writings “so important to the church” and wonders: “How shall we explain this singular fact?” Next, he observes that Paul and others employed secretaries, but Hug views the closing salutation, written in the author's own hand, as “sufficient to give them the value of originals.” Then, referring to the further role that scribes and correctors must have played after such a Christian writing had been dictated by its author, he says:

Let us now suppose, as it is very natural to do, that the same librarius [copyist] who was employed to make this copy, made copies likewise for opulent individuals and other churches—and there was no original at all, or there were perhaps ten or more [originals] of which none could claim superiority.

In order to establish a negative answer to this question, one would simply have to show either that pragmatism itself is not tenable, or else that it can afford theology no adequate support. To establish the affirmative, however, it would be necessary to show in the first place that pragmatism is in itself tenable, and in the second place that it is compatible with and gives some real support to theology. But for the would-be theological pragmatist himself neither of these positions can be readily accepted as established without the other. On the one hand he cannot say that pragmatism supports theology unless it is itself tenable, for, if untenable, so far from being the philosophical basis of theology, it cannot be a real basis for anything. On the other hand the person who finds religion essential cannot, on pragmatic principles, accept pragmatism, if it is not at least compatible with the fundamentals of religion and theology—unless, indeed, he needs pragmatism more than he needs religion. While beginning, then, by inquiring whether pragmatism is tenable or not, it must be recognized that a final affirmative answer cannot be given until we have considered the question of the bearing of pragmatism upon the essential affirmations of religious faith.

The Middle Bronze I period, ca. 2150–1900 B.C., has been regarded until recently as something of a “Dark Age” in the history of Palestine. That this period has yielded so slowly and stubbornly to the probings of the archaeologist now appears to have been due to its basic character: it represents a largely non-urban, transitional culture which (taken together with “EB IV”) spans the interlude of several centuries between the great urban eras of the Early Bronze and the Middle Bronze Ages. Semi-nomads and transitory settlers leave frustratingly few traces for the archaeologist. Nevertheless, intensive research in recent years enables us finally to draw a provisional picture of the material culture of MB I in Palestine (see the sketch in Section B).

This study presents and analyzes evidence for the social location and organization of Jewish groups in the environs of Rome, specifically from the port city of Ostia. Scholars have generally recognized that the presence of a thriving Jewish community in Rome, as elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, is a crucial element to understanding developments in the Christian movement throughout the first centuries CE. Such discussions have become more common in recent studies. Still, one will look long and hard in New Testament and early Christian studies to find direct discussion of the primary data for the Jewish communities of metropolitan Rome.

The interpretation of Adam and Eve's sexual life was a matter of some concern for early Jewish and Christian exegetes. As Louis Ginzberg observed, several Jewish pseudepigraphical works as well as the writings of many of the early Church Fathers “presuppose that not only the birth of the children of Adam and Eve took place after the explusion from paradise (Gen 4:1ff), but that the first ‘human pair’ lived in paradise without sexual intercourse.” The reasons for such an exegesis are not difficult to discern. The Garden of Eden was not simply a story about the primeval world; it could also function as a metaphor for the world-to-come. Hence the Garden was a paradigm for the ideal world of the eschaton, a world one should attempt to actualize or bring into existence now. Because Christians believed that the next world was devoid of marriage (Luke 20:27–40), it followed that the Garden was as well. In addition to this reason, Christians were also exhorted to abstain from marriage as a concession to the apocalyptic ferment of the present world (1 Corinthians 7).

Throughout the history of Christian thought the theological role of scripture as source of transcendent meaning has exercised considerable influence on the art and manner of biblical interpretation. In the early church the problems revolved mostly around the canon, specifically although not exclusively the New Testament, as defining the confines of scripture. The question arose, therefore, which biblical writings were divinely inspired and which were of doubtful origin. The latter were unacceptable for the Christian communities that had broken away from their ancestral Judaic religion. Even before the canon was fixed, however, the problems shifted from the divinely inspired composition of the Bible to its intrinsic signification; interpreters saw scriptural language itself as infused with theological content. As exegetical positions led to the development of credal statements that solidified into theological dogma, the early church established a link between biblical interpretation and sound doctrine. By enforcing sanctioned interpretations through effective excommunication, an ever more powerful church sealed the dominance of orthodoxy over heresy with the nearly divine force of ecclesiastical authority. In the church-dominated culture of the Middle Ages, the adequacy of scriptural interpretation—its method, its content, the credentials of its practitioners—often depended on its conformity with an expanding theological tradition.

The field of Christian ethics has been the location of a debate over the past decades between roughly delineated parties representing an allegiance to the use of formal prescriptive principles on the one hand, and those representing the cause of the more existential response to a particular situation on the other hand. The debate has taken place in Europe and the United States, it has taken place in Catholicism and in Protestantism. In European Protestant literature Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, particularly Volume II/2, Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and Niels Søe's Kristelig Etik, have represented what has been called a “contextual” approach. More traditional Lutheran theologians who stress the importance of ethics under the law have a larger place for traditional ethical principles. Werner Elert and Walter Künneth would be representative of this group. In Catholic literature there was a movement in the early years after World War II that came to be called “situational morality.” A critic has typified it in the following terms, “The ultimate differences between this new morality and traditional morality come down then to this: In an objective system of ethics the moral judgment is submitted to an extrinsic norm, an ontological norm founded on the principles of being. In situational ethics the moral judgment is measured only by the subjective, immanent light of the individual in question.” In contrast to the situational emphasis is the whole tradition of natural law ethics and moral theology as this developed in Roman Catholicism. It should be noted that some of the recent Catholic ethics continues to be influenced by a situational approach, though not in the extreme way of earlier materials.