Ancient China of the first century B.C., like ancient Greece, possessed more than one religion. There was the national state religion, worshipping the Supreme One (Tai-yi—, also called Heaven [Tien] and the Lord on High [Shang-di]), the Five Lords on High (Wu-di or Wu-shang-di), the imperial ancestors, and other divinities, whose sacrifices were supported by the imperial government. For the educated, there were two philosophical religions, Confucianism and Daoism. For the common people, there were gods, spirits, and ghosts of various sorts, whose care was attended to by such professionals as shamans (mostly female), fortune-tellers, physiognomists, mediums, and exorcists. Such animistic cults were despised by the more intelligent Confucians, who considered them as mere superstition. The famous Confucian, Sün-dz (ca. 320–ca. 235 B.C.), had indeed denied the existence of all spirits.

The appearance of a new volume of Dio Chrysostom in the Loeb Classical Library seems to be an appropriate occasion to discuss a curious problem in the first oration addressed to the people of Tarsus. It has puzzled the translator, Professor H. Lamar Crosby, and there was little to help him in the work done by earlier students of Dio. The passages that bear most directly upon the point are not to be found in the books and articles that deal with the orator, and it is only because the demands of other studies have led me to explore a number of patristic texts that I am able to go somewhat beyond previous writers in explaining an odd and unrefreshing phenomenon of ancient manners.

The Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan has recently acquired a small collection of engraved stones, with a few metal objects; most of them are amulets of the kind conventionally called gnostic — a description which, as is now recognized, is usually misleading. The collection was assembled in the Levant, chiefly in Syria. One of the stones, the occasion of this note, is now a mere fragment, probably a little more than half its original size. It is a piece of haematite, 27 mm. high, 10 mm. wide, and 5 mm. in thickness. When entire it was rectangular, as is shown by the fact that a borderdesign, a sort of feather pattern, is preserved at the top and right side, and makes a right angle at the upper right-hand corner. After the left side of the stone was broken away the remaining fragment was rounded off at the bottom, perhaps to remove a rough edge and make the piece into a more convenient shape. The fact that the fragment was preserved and re-shaped is not without interest as showing how tenaciously their possessors clung to amulets of this kind. Something of the same sort happened to a rather elaborately carved haematite which came into my own collection from Egypt. It was originally a fairly broad oval, but at some time a splinter was broken off the right side, after which loss the rough edge was ground down and an approximately oval shape restored. In the University's collection there is still another haematite which, after a part of the stone had been lost, was set in a protecting mounting fitted to its altered shape. All collectors, of course, are aware that haematite is peculiarly liable to splintering fracture.

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 Gospel according to St. Luke the late Professor Creed accepted the view of Welhausen and Meyer that the original version of Mark was intended to close with the words ἐϕοβοῦντο γάρ. The view avoids the difficulty of explaining the fact that neither Matthew nor Luke knows any other ending; it is certainly hard to see how a document could have gained so wide a circulation that the authors of these two Gospels knew it, and yet had at some previous date been so little known that the only surviving copy had lost its original ending.

In “Philo on Free Will,” n. 48 (preceding issue of this Review, p. 140), with regard to the fourfold classification of the ten plagues in Philo and the Shibbale ha-Leḳet, the same classification is to be found in Tanḥuma, Wa-Era 14, and Shemot Rabbah 12. 4 and 15. 27. See Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, V, p. 426, n. 170.

The writers on Mormonism have with one exception assumed that shortly after the assassination of Joseph Smith, the founder and leader, the membership of that sect quitted Nauvoo and made their way to Utah. Although the spectacular usurpation of Brigham Young as the leader is carefully noted, the subsequent stay of the Mormons in Illinois is slurred over.

There are two important chronological questions in the history of the Fourth Gospel: the date of its composition and the date of its acceptance by the church. The solution of the first depends in large measure on the question of John's use of the synoptic gospels. Did he use them at all? And, if he did, in what way? There can be no doubt that if he knew them he had little interest in their historical value. But does this mean that he had more authentic historical data? Or that he was interested not in history but in theology?

Jonathan Edwards believed that the crucial point which divided Calvinists and Arminians was the freedom of the will; that by establishing the doctrine of moral necessity, the Calvinists would have a firm basis from which to confute Arminian objections to the doctrines of total depravity, efficacious grace, absolute, eternal, and particular election, and the perseverance of the saints. His treatise on the Freedom of the Will was intended to give a final and crushing reply to his opponents, and in preparation for it he read widely and thought deeply. He believed that he had answered all objections, stopped all crevices in the argument, and written an unanswerable work. It appeared in 1754.

In his essay, “On God and the Absolute,” F. H. Bradley declares that the “assertor of an imperfect God is, whether he knows it or not, face to face with a desperate task or a forlorn alternative. He must try to show (how I cannot tell) that the entire rest of the Universe, outside his limited God, is known to be still weaker and more limited. Or he must appeal to us to follow our Leader blindly and, for all we know, to a common and overwhelming defeat.” The appeal of the second course, even when it is set forth in the spirited and heroic manner of William James, cannot survive a full realization of what is involved in such a prospect. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that most of the more sober-minded theologians who hold the idea of a limited God attempt to do so in the first form suggested by Bradley. F. R. Tennant belongs to this group. And it is his attempt to accomplish the “desperate task” that we propose to examine.

William James's essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ written in 1910, at the end of his life, has received an increasing amount of attention during the last thirty years. This paper would raise two questions about its relation to the main body of James's work. We recall that in the essay James argues for the worthwhileness of the martial virtues in themselves and claims that, since it would in any case be difficult to get rid of them, some way of expressing them in peaceful channels should be found. A few phrases have a peculiarly modern ring. “It would be preposterous,” he says, “if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.” Instead of military life, a conscription of youth for the battle against nature is therefore recommended. “A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”

It is my intention to discuss one question only, and not all the problems which are connected with the group of documents published as ‘The Adler Papyri’ by Mr. E. N. Adler together with his collaborators, the late Professor F. Ll. Griffith, Dr. F. M. Heichelheim and Mr. J. G. Tait in 1939. This question is: Are there any traces of Jewish religious influence to be found in the Adler Archive, as has been suggested by the editors?

One of the great handicaps confronting the student of Christian origins is the paucity of specific information about Palestine in the period of Jesus and the early Church. The student can learn much that has an indirect bearing upon Palestine by acquainting himself with the history and antiquities of Syria, Transjordan and Egypt. He can obtain an adequate picture of the general course of events in Palestine itself from Josephus, and can recreate the outlines of its changing scene and changing conditions by piecing together many bits of unrelated information from earlier and later periods. But when it comes to strictly contemporary Palestinian remains and specific contemporary Palestinian events, he has to admit that his knowledge is regrettably limited and fragmentary. The cities, the towns, the public buildings, the private houses and their household effects in the Palestine of the days of Jesus and his apostles are known only imperfectly and vaguely, in the main from literary sources. The complete excavation of even one site with datable contemporary strata would clarify the picture tremendously. For a knowledge of contemporary events our most productive source is still Josephus, and from the allimportant procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, 26–36 A.D., Josephus has only three episodes to narrate. They are the episode of the standards, the episode of the new aqueduct, and the episode of the sacred vessels supposedly buried on Mt. Gerizim.

The mystagogical catecheses of Theodore of Mopsuestia which were published for the first time in the year 1933 by Mingana have enriched our knowledge of the Eastern Liturgy in an unexpected way. Investigations have been made concerning the Eucharistic service which he describes. The rite of Baptism which he presents is of no less importance, as we find the more we study its details.

In Philo, as in any other philosopher, the problem of the freedom of the will in man is but a special phase of the more general problems of the existence of immutable laws in nature and the relation of mind to body. Now with regard to laws of nature Philo's view is clear. There are, according to him, certain unalterable laws by which the universe is governed, but these laws were established in the universe by God at the time of its creation. This view is expressed by him in a variety of ways in such statements as that there are “ordinances and laws which God laid down in the universe as unalterable” and that “this world is the Megalopolis and it has a single polity and a single law.” These laws of nature are sometimes designated by him in their totality by the general term Logos, by which he means an immanent Logos in the created physical universe, conceiving of it as part of that incorporeal Logos which existed prior to the creation of the universe. It is this immanent Logos which is described by him as “the bond of all existence,” which “holds and knits together all the parts” and which also “administers all things.”

Nineteenth century students strongly tended to study mythology apart from associated rituals (and indeed apart from the life of the people generally). Myths were held to be symbolic descriptions of phenomena of nature. One prominent school, in fact, tried to find an astral basis for all mythic tales. Others, among whom Andrew Lang was prominent, saw in the myth a kind of primitive scientific theory. Mythology answered the insistent human How? and Why? How and why was the world made? How and why were living creatures brought into being? Why, if there was life must there be death? To early psychoanalysts such as Abraham and Rank myths were “group phantasies,” wish-fulfillments for a society strictly analogous to the dream and day-dream of individuals. Mythology for these psychoanalysts was also a symbolic structure par excellence, but the symbolism which required interpretation was primarily a sex symbolism which was postulated as universal and all-pervasive. Reik recognized a connection between rite and myth, and he, with Freud, verbally agreed to Robertson Smith's proposition that mythology was mainly a description of ritual. To the psychoanalysts, however, mythology was essentially (so far as what they did with it is concerned) societal phantasy material which reflected impulse repression. There was no attempt to discover the practical function of mythology in the daily behaviors of the members of a society nor to demonstrate specific interactions of mythology and ceremonials.

In this Journal, Vol. XXXIV, 1941, page 79, Mr. Welles published with a scholarly commentary the interesting epitaph of the tribune Terentius from Dura. The place in which it was found, in a private house, presents difficulties to him. He supposes that the stone was set into the epistyle and smashed when falling down from it and takes great pains to prove that Terentius was not buried in the house. This is evident. I think the solution is very simple. Only the first seven lines and the first half of the eighth are incised, from the word θεαί the letters are painted in red. It is a well-known ancient custom to paint the letters in order to guide the stone-cutter in his work.

In an article published in the Harvard Theological Review, XXXI, pp. 291–317, I endeavored to show that the Midrash based on Deuteronomy 26. 5–8, which forms the core of the Passover Haggadah (hereinafter M) was composed in pre-Maccabean times, probably in the third century B.C., when Palestine was ruled by the Ptolemies. I propose in the present article to consider three other parts of the Haggadah, which I believe are likewise pre-Maccabean. They are (1) the opening passage (hereinafter A); (2) the alternative opening (hereinafter B) prescribed by Rab in the third century of the Christian Era, and included in extant rituals after A; and (3) the poem Dayyenu, “it would have been ample for us” (hereinafter D). Evidence will be presented associating B and D particularly with the high priesthood of Jason, the son of Simeon the Righteous, and high priest in Jerusalem from 175 to 172 B.C. In connection with the discussion of these passages, it will be necessary to study also (4) the Baraita of the Four Sons (hereinafter E), which has also been incorporated into the Passover Haggadah. (A baraita is a formulated, normative statement, originating with the earlier Rabbinic scholars, i.e. those of the Mishnaic or tannaitic period, ending about the year 220 of the Christian Era; but not included in the Mishna itself.)