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.

The Immortality of Man was one of the fundamental creeds of the philosophical religion of Platonism that was in part adopted by the Christian church and that thus became one of the foundations of the Christian civilization of the Eastern and Western world. Ever since Paul in the 15th chapter of I Corinthians made resurrection the cornerstone of the Christian faith the Church has had a profound interest in the ancient philosophers who taught that man's soul is immortal and does not perish along with its mortal companion the body. Although this belief in the immortality of the soul, the ψυχή, is not the same as the Christian idea of man's resurrection in the flesh or in a transfigured body, both religious ideas have a natural affinity with each other; and it is therefore easy to understand that the Platonic belief in immortality was regarded as an anticipation of the Christian resurrection and helpful to the faithful who might wish to check their emotional expectations of a future life after death by rational reflection. Thus we find attempts to compare both things or to look for natural phenomena that could be interpreted as analogies of resurrection in nature.

The scholar concerned with the pre-Islamic religious history of Iran is beset with many difficulties, not the least of which is the great paucity of native sources. Consequently, he frequently must have recourse to India for parallels in the early period, and to Classical, Syriac and Armenian sources for much of his material in Parthian and Sassanian times. Furthermore, the temptation to import whole patterns of religious thought from neighboring religions, and to interpret earlier information from conditions obtaining in Iran at later periods of its history, is at times very strong indeed. With the fragmentary, often contradictory, data about Iranian religions at hand, there is also a tendency to fill in the blanks, and by so doing to create a finished and consistent whole picture of the pre-Islamic religions of Iran. It may be commendable to have a large canvas with bold, sweeping strokes, but when the details are so uncertain one may be understandably cautious in accepting the theories of even such eminent scholars as Herzfeld, Nyberg, and others.

The old and very illegible inscription from Athens containing the charter of the Eleusinian Mysteries was happily completed by a few small fragments discovered during the American excavations on the Agora. It was not an easy task for Professor B. D. Meritt to bring together the broken pieces and the stone bearing the inscription (now in the British Museum). He did it with his usual epigraphical expertness and contributed very much to the reading and to the restoration of a document which has been a real problem to many scholars for a long time. Of course, the inscription so old and so badly preserved will continue to be debated by specialists in different fields of Classical studies, but the part of Professor Meritt in elucidating this important testimony of the ancient Greek cult always will be gratefully appreciated. I should like to discuss some passages of the document in question in the hope that small changes in certain lines may perhaps make it more intelligible.

Lying against the Alpine foothills, the land from which Catullus departed for Rome was the home of many and varied local cults. Inscriptions from the first three centuries of the Empire give laconic testimony to the names of comparatively unknown gods and goddesses or to strange divine epithets which may have been an inheritance of the original Raeti or their Celtic successors who held sway until the Roman conquest. The sphere of religious life revealed in fragmentary form in these monuments was a world removed from that illuminated by the pages of ancient belles lettres; the members of the Roman poetic coteries either exalted the official pantheon or culled less-familiar divine names from the Hellenistic tradition. The reader who expects that an author not native to the city of Rome may shed some light on the religious milieu of his place of origin is therefore fated to an early disappointment.

The problem of the two Messiahs in Apocryphal literature, especially in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and in the Damascus Covenant, occupied scholars at the beginning of the present century and has revealed new facets with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Especially pertinent to this problem are some of the texts from Qumran Cave 1, and some fragments from Qumran Cave 4, recently published. We shall here endeavor to make clear the distinctive features of these Messiahs, their status and their tasks at the end of days, and to elucidate the historical setting from which the doctrine of the two Messiahs sprang.

When in 1825 Bishop Charles Sumner published the text and his translation of Milton's long-lost theological study, the Christian Doctrine, the results were in a way disastrous for the reputation of the poet. Instead of being the great composer of the orthodox epic of Protestantism, Milton became in the eyes of the nineteenth century and even of our own day the heretic who advocated the belief in an unequal Trinity—a heresy originally associated with the fourth century church leader Arius. In the light especially of the fifth chapter of the Christian Doctrine, critics reread Paradise Lost and discovered that this same doctrine was implied in passages of the poem which had been accepted for a century and a half as entirely orthodox. The shock to critical and religious sensibilities was considerable; Milton's fame underwent an eclipse from which it perhaps has never really recovered. Although our own century may be less susceptible to disturbance from the presentation of heterodox views, much the same conception of Milton continues; all critics echo Masson's stern judgment that Milton's views of the nature of Christ “are expressly and emphatically those of high Arianism.”

Papias of Hierapolis has suffered from the fact that his work, Exposition of the Words of the Lord, in five books, has been lost, and that so little or, if preferred, just so much, has been preserved, that the fragments confront us with difficult problems. These are many and may easily overshadow the text. The following comments are primarily of an exegetic nature and serve to shed light on Papias and his work.

The Journey of the Divine Comedy begins with a conversion. The pilgrim “comes to” after somehow having lost his way in a dark wood. He looks up from that tangle and sees the rays of the sun striking upon a mountain-top, and knows that he must attain the summit. From that moment, the problem is no longer where to go, but rather how to get there, and the problem proves to be insoluble. Try as he may, he cannot achieve the goal which is the beginning and the cause of all joy, for three formidable beasts drive him back into the wood from which he has come, and he retreats, no longer able to help himself, exhausted, and very nearly defeated.

All scholars who have been concerned with the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople have noticed that different sources sometimes give it different names, or different forms of the same name. A certain number of examples of the usage of the ancient writers have been collected and have been available in the current works of reference, but these published lists are not exhaustive. Having had occasion to make a study of the name of the church as given by Nikolaos Mesarites, the present writer has made a collection of examples which appears to be larger than any hitherto published, and it is hoped that the testimonia assembled here may give scholars a better understanding of the conception which the ancient writers had of the dedication of the church and the significance of the designations which were applied to it.

The use of the term άλεεῖς άνθρώπων, “fishers of men” at Mark 1:17 (on which depends Matthew 4:19 but only indirectly Luke 5:10) has often been treated as a self-evident metaphor. “The words of Jesus summon Simon and Andrew to become disciples and heralds of the Kingdom of God,” Vincent Taylor says. Other figures might have sufficed for this dual purpose and the peculiar nature of the metaphor is not explored when the terms “disciples” and “heralds” are used. What is the relationship of disciples to Jesus and how heralds were related to the Kingdom is not made clear although the Markan term may have been intended to do something of this kind. It is insufficient to observe that, since the four men are depicted as fishermen, the summons is appropriately phrased.The metaphor has a Biblical background which provides some clue to the nature of their new calling or, since they are already fishermen, to a new type of fishing and a new catch. Riesenfeld underlines the importance of the phrasing of the call but does not enquire into its meaning.

In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

Greek manuscript II A 7 in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples is an unpublished minuscule codex from around the eleventh century containing the Acts of the Apostles, the Catholic epistles, fourteen epistles of St. Paul (including the Pastorals and Hebrews) and the Apocalypse through chapter three, verse thirteen. The codex was described in detail by Salvator Cyrillus, royal librarian of what was then the Bourbon Library, now the public library in Naples, and more recently and briefly by Gregory and von Soden. The MS. is furnished with a form of the “Euthalian” apparatus including prologues; the Martyrium Pauli; tables of lections, Old Testament quotations, and chapter summaries. The codex also contains a colophon which states, among other things, that the MS. was written by Evagrius

It is difficult in our day to understand the appeal of late medieval nominalism for it seems almost schizophrenic in the way it alternates between opposing emphases. It looked at every theological problem from two radically different points of view: from the perspective of God's absolute power, and from the viewpoint of what he has in fact ordained. In the first context, nominalism relied completely on the power of philosophy and logic to define (though not to prove) omnipotence, and insisted on the radically individualistic isolation of man before a God of absolute and arbitrary power; but in the second context, these emphases are in effect reversed and stress is laid on fideism, the community and its authority, and, in the case of many nominalists, on the moral autonomy of man vis à vis God. Furthermore, the reconciliation of these contrary tendencies is primarily logical, or even verbal. Yet nominalism so captivated the minds of many theologians that they were quite content with what seems to us a purely external and artificial unity and consistency.

Johannes Gaertner recently published an article on Latin verse-translations of Psalms in which he described at length the history of a “buried and forgotten literary genre” that reached the height of its popularity during the sixteenth century. Psalms, however, was not the only book of the Bible to find itself arrayed in this curious dress, and one may accordingly add a bibliographical footnote to Professor Gaertner's article by noting some of the most important Latin verse-translations of individual books and also of large portions of the Bible, almost invariably written by Germans or Dutchmen: the practice seems to have been largely a phenomenon of the northern Protestant reformation.

Recent published allusions to Platonism in the minds of Calvinists, and the compatibility of its position there, brings back the memory of Professor William Wallace Fenn's interpretation of the thought of Jonathan Edwards, in lectures more than twenty-five years ago at the Harvard Theological School. Since this interpretation is no longer popular among writers, it might be of interest to mention it again. Professor Fenn liked to picture Edwards as the protagonist of a New England Tragedy. There was tragedy in the outward failures of his life. But the more devastating tragedy was his inward failure as a Christian philosopher. This, according to Fenn's interpretation, arose from Edwards' self-conscious awareness of being unable to reconcile his Platonism with his Calvinism.