Three women in Josephus's Antiquities are well known for their purported devotion to Jewish religious practices: Poppaea Sabina, the consort/wife of the emperor Nero, whom Josephus describes as “God-fearing” (θɛοσɛβής); Fulvia, a Roman convert of consular rank whom he pegs as the source of the expulsion of Jews from Rome under Tiberius; and Helena, Queen of Adiabene, also a convert to Judaism. In this article, I show that the stories of these three Gentile noble women, who share an interest in Jewish religious practices, are part of a larger narrative pattern in the Antiquities that repeatedly characterizes Gentile women of high standing as saviors and benefactors of the Jewish people. According to Josephus, imperial women intercede on behalf of Jewish aristocrats before every Julio-Claudian emperor, often with ramifications for the entire Jewish people. He also claims that Domitia, the wife of the emperor Domitian, was one of his own patrons. Patronage on behalf of the Jewish community is integral to the stories of both Fulvia and Queen Helena of Adiabene. Furthermore, the salvific acts of foreign noblewomen feature prominently in Josephus's retelling of the story of Moses early in the Antiquities.

It is one of the ironies of American religious history that the most thoroughly anti-Catholic work to appear after the Civil War was published in the unlikely decade after the Second World War, when the last good war had been fought and won, and what Gibson Winter termed “the suburban captivity of the churches” was well underway, a “captivity” in which questions of crabgrass ostensibly replaced theology as the major topic of conversation. A series of articles that had begun to appear in the Nation, a staunchly libertarian journal, in November 1947, was published by Beacon Press in 1949 as American Freedom and Catholic Power—a work that would set the stage for increasingly neuralgic exchanges between Catholics and Protestants during a decade in which sociologist Will Herberg announced that the “American Way of Life” was now acceptably packaged in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish forms. The author of that book, Paul Blanshard, understood himself to be issuing a timely call to protect the First Amendment of the Constitution against the encroachments of a Catholic hierarchy living within the very fortress of the free world, but hostile to American democratic and political values.

This paper and the two responses to it were presented as part of “Evangelical Perspectives on Biblical Authority,” a conference held at Harvard Divinity School on 9 and 10 March 2001. The conference was sponsored by the School under the auspices of the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Visiting Professorship of Evangelical Theological Studies.

Although he considered himself set apart from the world, a man through whom the Spirit revealed a higher truth, Jones Very has consistently provided his critics with an irresistible challenge to classify him historically in a tradition that would explain his unique poetry and personality. Histories and descriptions of American Transcendentalism usually list him hesitatingly as a peripheral member of the movement, but Very seems to worry recent historians in much the same way he worried Emerson and the other members of “Hedge's Club,” who were both attracted and repelled by his spiritual intensity. His association with Emerson was undoubtedly a fortunate historical accident for him—Emerson both encouraged him in his poetry, valiantly tried to give him editorial assistance, and used his influence to find a publisher for the only collection of poems Very was to publish in his lifetime. Yet this close personal association has helped to perpetuate the historical assumption of Very's ties with Transcendentalism. This assumption, both when it has been affirmed or vigorously rejected, has obscured the kind of objective reading that is necessary to our understanding of Very's poetry and his place in American letters.

A remarkable phenomenon in African Christianity occurred between about 1912 and 1930 when, mostly out of the ferment of indigenous reaction to Western Christian missions, local “prophets” emerged and founded African Independent Churches. “Independency” is the term employed to characterize this phenomenon which came to embrace both the charismatic prophet figures and the separatist churches they or their followers created. Over six thousand such movements were identified throughout Africa in 1968, with the situation still in considerable flux. By the end of the twentieth century it is estimated that some 350 million Africans will have converted to one form or another of the various types of Christian practice now active on the continent.

The oracular writings of the “Christian Socrates” of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), have attracted a number of important philosophers, theologians, and men of letters since the time of Immanuel Kant. Some insist that Hamann was a profound and heroic mystic, and some conclude that he was an impossible obscurantist. A figure of conspicuous protest against prevailing Enlightenment attitudes, Hamann's own views exhibit a strange alliance between religious (Lutheran) faith and sceptical (Humean) empiricism.

Origen's understanding of the epinoiai (aspects or concepts) of Christ is certainly one of the most fascinating and unique facets of his theology. By no means a marginal element in his Logos-Christology, a treatment, mention, or application of the epinoiai can be found in most of Origen's surviving texts. Scholarship on this topic has justifiably focused upon the two primary sources of the epinoiai in Origen's writings: Book I of his Commentary on John and Book I, Chapter 2 of On First Principles. While referencing these texts because of their systematic and definitional character, I intend to focus this article upon the substantial and multifaceted role of the epinoiai Christou in Origen's Commentary on Romans, the oldest extant commentary on this Pauline epistle. In doing so, my thesis is two-fold: first, I will argue that the epinoiai Christou play a considerable role in Origen's exegesis of Paul's epistle. If correct, this conclusion will be crucial for anyone seeking to gain a comprehensive account of Origen's concept of the epinoiai. Such is especially the case insofar as I will propose that the Commentary on Romans accentuates specifically the virtues as epinoiai, thereby offering a noteworthy glimpse into this particular aspect of Origen's epinoiai teaching. Second, I will argue that the results of Origen's application of the epinoiai concept to his exegesis constitute a compelling reading of the Pauline text that is worthy of contemporary engagement.

In a letter to a colleague with whom he was having a serious philosophical disagreement, William James reflected on how wondrous it is that the universe is full of such rich diversity that it could nourish opinions as divergent as theirs. This is the kind of epistemological humility that T. M. Luhrmann hopes to stir in her readers, particularly those non-religious readers who occasionally find themselves in mid-conversation with an evangelical Christian neighbor who seamlessly shifts the topic from lawnmowers to “the exciting things that God is doing” in his life—and doing in his lawn, presumably. For among the evangelicals where Luhrmann conducts fieldwork, nothing in one's life is too mundane as to escape God's warm regard or to occasion “His” real presence. How God becomes really real to people—sensible people, people like us—is for Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford, the burning question.

The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as well as the methodological approach of the small group of young scholars and students in Berlin who founded the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in 1819. Although outside the walls of the German university, these scholars endeavored to make inroads within the discipline of Orientalistik while standing firm in their hope that the Hegelian spirit of the day might give Judaism its determinate recognition in the light of Absolute Spirit and give the Jews their citizenship.

Beginning with Flinders Petrie scholars have been struck by the similarity between the script of these inscriptions and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As the inscriptions were found in the neighborhood of numerous Egyptian monuments, an attempt was naturally made to read them as in the Egyptian language; but this proved unsuccessful, and it was evident that although the signs show close relationship with hieroglyphs, the language is not Egyptian. On Sinai, it was natural to think of a Semitic language. Further, the Egyptian phonetic value of the signs does not yield Semitic words, so that it appears that not only the language but the phonetic value of the signs is Semitic, not Egyptian.

One manner in which to investigate the life of Jesus' sayings in the early church is to ask how communities preserved and transmitted their memory. I ask here, however, a somewhat different question, namely, what did Christians accomplish by remembering certain words and actions specifically as those of Jesus. In particular, I inquire in this article into the consequences of remembering Jesus' words and actions as authoritative within the cultic context of the Corinthian community. What is the memory of Jesus that informs chapters 10 and 11 of 1 Corinthians? What light, moreover, might an answer to this question shed upon the formation of a narrative about Jesus? To this end, I present a reading of materials in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 that attends to cult, both its ritual and its narrative, and to the function of authoritative speech in cultic context.

Was there a “Q community”? There are many who think that any quest for a “Q community” is a fool's errand. In this paper, I revisit this vexing question by focusing on several distinctive textual coordinates with which we can map Q's author within the social, textual, and theological landscape(s) of Second Temple Judaism. Since the author of Q was capable of crafting innovative scriptural allusions and adapting inherited Jesus traditions, I suggest that Q is not an isolated “Galilean” phenomenon but a textual production that combines Galilean Jesus traditions in conversation with contemporary Jewish apocalyptic traditions and can be located alongside the wider “Essenic” networks that pre-dated and co-existed with the Palestinian Jewish Jesus movement.

In Book Two of De Specialibus Legibus (Special Laws), Philo of Alexandria presents his readers with a “festival manual”: a list of ten holidays, their origins, and the practices associated with each one. Philo names the first festival in his list ἡμέρα πσα, “every day,” about which he muses: “If all the forces of the virtues remained unvanquished throughout, then the time from birth to death would be one continuous feast.” In what historical, intellectual, and literary context might we best understand Philo's “every day festival”? And how can we understand Philo's view of quotidian time in the context of his conception of time and temporality more generally? In this paper, I argue that Philo's presentation of this festival of the every day, and, more generally, his perspective on daily time, is an engagement not only with biblical texts but also with contemporaneous Stoic perspectives about time, especially those articulated by the philosopher Seneca the Younger. I thus read Philo's De Specialibus Legibus in conversation with Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life), analyzing their similar perspectives on daily time and suggesting several ways of understanding the connections between the two texts. I conclude by explaining how appreciating the similarities between Philo and Seneca's ideas about quotidian time also allows us better to understand Philo's exposition of the other festivals, especially his presentation of the Sabbath.

Eloisa, the medieval nun torn between “grace and nature” in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, has proved to be one of the poet's most fascinating and popular female creations among religious scholars as well as literary critics. Yet there appears in Pope's masterpiece another female figure who has been largely ignored and whose nature and function in the poem have never been accurately described. In the midst of Eloisa's spiritual and emotional conflict between her carnal memories of Abelard and her religious obligations as a nun, she imagines that she sees sitting in front of her the figure of “Black Melancholy,” a woman spreading spiritual gloom over the entire scene:

But o'er the twilight groves, and dusky caves,

Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves,

Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws

A death-like silence, and a dread repose;

Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,

Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,

Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,

And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

Our study criticizes the respective theodicies and methodologies of Joseph Washington, James Cone, and Albert Cleage. Our argument is reducible to the following propositions. (1) On the basis of their own presuppositions, the point of departure for black theology must be the question: Is God a white racist? (2) Accordingly, a viable theodicy, one which refutes the charge of divine racism, must be the foundation for the edifice of black theology. (3) The theodicies of the above theologians leave the issue of God's racism essentially unresolved. Consequently, the remainder of the theological system lacks adequate support.