In the introduction to my first article (Harvard Theological Review, October 1921) I have already remarked that it is neither necessary nor possible to present the literature of mediaeval church history with the fullness which is desirable for the history of the early church. In a general survey everything that has only a local interest must be omitted, and even in what remains the wheat must be winnowed from the chaff. The reviewer need not complain of lack of material; indeed what is valuable greatly exceeds in amount what is unimportant. This is especially true of those comprehensive treatises which deal either with the Middle Ages as a whole or with special periods.

In an examination of the influence of the Book of Enoch on certain motifs in Milton's Paradise Lost, Mr. Grant McColley challenges the commonly accepted belief that Bruce was the first to restore to Western Civilization the knowledge of the existence of I Enoch, which had passed out of circulation during the early centuries of Christianity. Mr. McColley's belief that at least the existence of I Enoch was known to certain persons in the mid-seventeenth century and before rests on quotations from three popular travel books of the time: Sandys' Relation of a Journey (1615), Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), and Peter Heylyn's Cosmography (1652). These authors all agree that the Ethiopians, or Abyssinians, had books containing the ‘oracles’ or ‘writings’ of the patriarch Enoch.

In the West, the best known Armenian Canon lists are those transmitted by Mechitar of Ayrivank˓, an Armenian savant of the thirteenth century (1222-1307 C.E.). The translation of these lists, which was first publicised in Europe by Theodor Zahn, has been reprinted in various works.

It often happens that the papers of a departed master are gathered and winnowed by a faithful disciple in search of one last harvest of truth: an act of respect mingled with a desire for reflected glory. But in Jonathan Edwards's editing of the diary of David Brainerd the elder served the younger.

One of the most inclusive of the Armenian Canon lists is that compiled by Gregory of Tatʿew (1346–1410 C.E.). He was a man of great and comprehensive learning, head of the monastery of Tatʿew, in the province of Siunikʿ. This was a most important center of Armenian learning, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The mysticism of the seventeenth-century French cardinal, Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629), contains an extended treatment of the relationship of the human and the divine in mystical union. Bérulle explores the nature of mystical union in detail and gives attention to the combination of the apparently incompatible elements of the human and divine and the historical and eternal. He prefers not to begin with the opposition between these elements but instead, by exploring the relationship between them, to use relational language, which brings together unity and difference. For this task, he draws on the tools of late medieval mysticism, which entail especially the metaphors of interior poverty, nuptial mutuality, and neoplatonic emanation. At the same time, he applies the categories of Christology to the problem of mystical relationality and difference. Christology deepens the ways in which to assert and to combine unity and difference between the human and the divine in mystical union. For the reader today, this provides an intriguing perspective on the question of mystical relationality.1 I intend here to set out Bérulle's understanding of mystical relationality and to focus on his christological development of questions of unity and difference.

In Jesus the Magician I argued that the earliest pagan reports of persecutions of Christians—those in Suetonius, Tacitus, and Pliny the younger—indicate that the persecutors believed the Christians were practicing magic. Here I want to explain their belief by reviewing the eariest evidence for Christian congregational practices and indicating how these practices would have been understood by the ancient Christians' neighbors. This does not imply that there were not other grounds for the persecutors' belief. Magic seems to have figured in the charges for which Jesus was condemned; it certainly was prominent in the propaganda against his cult that was spread by rival Jewish groups. Such propaganda doubtless shaped the expectations with which many outsiders viewed early Christianity, and people are apt to see what they expect to see. Nevertheless, Pliny's famous letter shows that Roman authorities sometimes tried to get beyond rumor to the facts. Accordingly we should ask what the facts would have looked like to men of the Greco-Roman world in the late first and early second centuries, a world in which magic was practiced on all levels of society and almost universally believed to be effective. As “the facts” we may take, with some reservations, the evidence about Christian congregations to be found in Paul's relatively unquestioned letters—Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, or Philippians, and Philemon.

Luke 14:26 has commonly been viewed as an example of hyperbole. This article applies modern studies on hyperbole that hold as its principle criteria both a scalar property and an evaluative/expressive function. We apply these criteria, analyzing Luke 14:26 in terms of encoded language, co-text, and context. We argue that hyperbole arises from the choice to use “hate” rather than “love more than” but also that the hyperbolic usage relies on a cause for effect (emotion for emotional response) metonym.1 In terms of language, we show that “hate” has variant meanings that may be different in their degrees of encoding. In terms of co-text, we argue that Luke’s use of “hate” and Matthew’s use of “love more than” are relevantly chosen; in other words, they are suited to and to be interpreted against their co-texts.

Francis Greenwood Peabody, lecturer in ethics and professor of theology at Harvard University from 1880 to 1912, introduced the teaching of social ethics at Harvard and ranks as one of the foremost interpreters of German theological thought in America. As academic teacher he brought about the abolition of compulsory worship at Harvard College, helped transform the Harvard Divinity School from a denominational seminary into a non-denominational professional school of theology, and introduced studies in contemporary social problems at the Divinity School and at Harvard College. His pioneering work on social problems secured for him a leading rôle in the Social Gospel movement of his time.

Christianity arose in an environment which was, on the one hand, still dependent upon the traditions of the Jewish Church but, on the other, wide open to Hellenistic civilization. There exists today a strong and in many respects very healthy tendency to test the Gospels for Aramaic origin, the results of which are at the same time stimulating and challenging. However, even if the view that major portions of the four canonical Gospels are translations from the Aramaic be accepted, we are still faced with the question where the ideas behind the words came from. For it is not only risky to assume that the translations themselves were uncritical, quasi-mechanical versions, especially in view of the fact that the contemporary Greek translations of the Old Testament as well as the early translations of the Greek New Testament into other languages show a fair amount of skill; but also the Aramaic original itself may have been influenced by Greek ideas and in this way may have determined the translator's method. The original Aramaic language does not also guarantee the Semitic origin of the thought expressed thereby.

The anonymous “Incipit fides Nicaena” is a unique, though much ignored, Latin text from the later fourth century. Its only critical edition, from a sole ninth century codex, was first prepared in 1913 by Cuthbert H. Turner, under the title of Commentarius in Symbolum Nicaeanum.1 Turner's version was reprinted in the first volume of the Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum (1958).2 There has been almost no further scholarly work done on this text since Turner's edition, nor has it been translated into any European language.3 As a result, no questions have been asked about the bearing of this work on post-Nicene doctrinal history as our understanding of the Nicene-“Arian” conflicts has been reformulated over the last two decades. In this essay, I want to address this gap in our understanding, although it must be said that there are more questions than answers raised by the existence of this small document. Specifically, we will see how this unique text sheds light on the theological influence that the Nicene Creed began to have in western churches in the second half of the fourth century. An attempt will also be made to demonstrate how this primitive explanation of the Creed offers an indication of its own approximate date and context.

This study draws on critical spatial theory to analyze the earliest archaeological and literary evidence of the triclinium, or Roman dining room, in Early Roman Palestine. It begins by examining the archaeological evidence of triclinia and similar banqueting spaces in Palestine, addressing their dating, their differing settings, and how their appearance and diffusion reflects socioeconomic and cultural changes under Roman influence. Next, it examines literary constructions of banqueting spaces in the Parables of Enoch, Testament of Moses, and “Q Sayings Gospel.” It demonstrates that these sources all seem to envision a triclinium setting in which elites eat, drink, and engage in all sorts of revelry while reclining on couches. The final section is devoted to critical spatial analysis of both the archaeological and literary data. It argues that these sources all evince, in varying ways, the interpenetration of local and global spaces rather than the unilateral “Romanization” of provincial space.

When I shared an earlier draft of this article with a colleague who spends much more time in the modern theological world than I do, his reply was simple: “So, angels are a thing? And people want to talk about them?” Angels receive fairly short shrift in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology, but in late antique Christianity they certainly were “a thing,” if by “a thing” we mean an essential part of religious discourse, manifest in textual and material sources that testify to the significance of angels in theological speculation, popular piety, and ascetic practice.

Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner offered a concerted critique of N. T. Wright’s account of Israel’s election as well as Wright’s description of the apostle Paul’s messianic atonement theology. They allege that Wright treats Israel’s election as instrumental rather than intrinsic and his exegesis of Rom 5:20‒21 results in a rehearsal of anti-Jewish tropes. This essay responds to them by 1) claiming that many of their criticisms are inaccurate representations of Wright’s views; 2) defending a missional perspective of Israel’s view of election; 3) asserting that Wright’s reading of Rom 5:20 about the Torah multiplying sin within Israel is neither immoral, nor implausible, nor idiosyncratic; and 4) offering some final thoughts about Wright and Jewish-Christian relations.

This rejoinder to Michael Bird’s critique of our argument in Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner, “The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul,” HTR 112 (2019) 421–46, acknowledges that Wright recognizes a dimension of intrinsic value in God’s election of Israel, while it shows how Wright’s metanarrative is not only unduly skewed toward an instrumental view of Israel’s election but also, in effect, totally redefines Israel. Our rebuttal first reiterates some of our original claims and also presents new arguments against an exegesis of Second Isaiah that portrays Israel as divinely called to bring light or Torah to the nations. Later Second Temple sources also did not understand Israel as failing to fulfill a divine call to missionize the gentiles. Bird’s own inconsistency on the mission orientation of Israel weakens his defense of Wright here. Wright’s exegesis of Rom 5:20–21 as teaching that God intentionally gave Torah to draw the world’s sins onto Israel and Bird’s defense of this on the basis of Isaiah 53 are anomalous and untenable in the light of other scholars’ readings of Romans and the rest of the New Testament. Finally, against Bird, Wright does indeed read non-Christ-confessing Jews out of Israel in a highly problematic way. Bird’s agreement with us against Wright that “all Israel” in Rom 11:26 refers to corporeal Israel strengthens our original critique of Wright’s redefinition of Israel in Rom 9–11.

In Laws 8.835b–842a Plato puzzles over the question of how the lawgiver is to inculcate proper behavior in matters of sexual activity. The problem is made more difficult by the fact that he would like to define proper sexual activity much more narrowly than any Greek legislator before him ever had. He would limit it to acts between man and wife which are capable of resulting in conception (838e–39a). Every other sexual manifestation, homosexual or heterosexual, is to be forbidden.

A note of mine written under war conditions may now be supplemented from literature to which I recently had access. I had proved, with the help of a Greek coin of Phalanna in Thessaly which is preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, that the Zeus of the Thessalian Peloria had the name Peloris, not Pelorios. The latter is only the reading of the Epitome of Athenaeus against the best Athenaeus MS, the Codex Marcianus 447. I learned now that Professor Paul Maas had already demonstrated most plausibly in 1935 and 1936 that the so-called Athenaeus-Epitome is nothing more than an abbreviated revision, a metagraphe, of a MS of the type of Codex Marcianus 447. It is therefore without value here for reconstituting Athenaeus' text. We now have a primary document that decisively supports Professor Maas' thesis, and it is a rare occasion in textual criticism that the decisive primary document is a coin. Professor Maas' suggestion however that Πɛλώρι, which occurs in Cod. Marc. 447 has the nominative Πέλωρ, can now be slightly corrected by the evidence of our coin. It can be said with certainty that the nominative is in fact Peloris.

Precisely a hundred years ago Preller called attention to a curious passage in the Confession of St. Cyprian describing certain Greek mysteries and printed the text adding a few brief notes. This Cyprian was a famous magician who was converted to Christianity, the prototype of Dr. Faust, and is often confused with his namesake, the bishop of Carthage. His legend became very popular, there are Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic versions, and it has been much discussed. The Confession, so called because in it Cyprian speaks in his own words, was originally independent and later, but before Eudocia's metaphrasis, was inserted between the first book, the Conversion, and the third book, the Martyrdom, of the Greek version. The Empress Eudocia who married Theodosius II in A.D. 421 put the legend into verse, presumably in her old age; she included the Confession, which also was known to Gregory Nazianzen who in A.D. 379 delivered a sermon on St. Cyprian.4 This is valuable because it determines the time in which the Confession was composed, somewhat before A.D. 379. Thus it is roughly contemporary with the Neoplatonic circle of the Emperor Julian and was written at a time when paganism was still a living reality, a fact which adds to the importance of the passage.