Prefatory Note: In July, 1976, Rudolf Bultmann, the last of the great Protestant theologians of this century, died in Marburg, Germany, a few weeks before his 92d birthday. An almost life-long friendship, beginning with my being his student in the 1920s, bound me to this man of towering scholarship, clarity of mind, purity of character, and deep — if troubled — piety. In November, 1976, the Theological Faculty of Marburg University held a memorial for its longtime professor of New Testament studies, which was attended by many persons from all over Germany and neighboring countries this side of the iron curtain. Of the two academic lectures delivered before that audience, one was by a New Testament theologian and erstwhile student of Bultmann, Professor Erich Dinkler from Heidelberg, the other by me, not a theologian but a philosopher, not a Christian but a Jew. The complete proceedings of the memorial meeting have been published under the title Gedenken an Rudolf Bultmann by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen, 1977. Only part of what I had prepared in writing was orally presented at the occasion, but the whole was printed. I here submit my own English version of the unabridged German essay, which in the spirit of Bultmann's own openmindedness pushes some of his theoretical concerns beyond the point which he himself had reached.

In his third prescribed lecture out of four, for each of a Harvard student's year in College, Judge Paul Dudley, in parlous times for New England, with the Catholic French and their Indian allies a constant threat, asked that his Lecturer be mindful that the Seer of Revelation, carried away in the Spirit into a wilderness (17:3), saw a woman “and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: Babylon the great, mother of harlots” (17:5). He expressly identified “the Romish Church with that mystical Babylon.” The first Hollis Professor of Divinity, Edward Wigglesworth (1693–1765), gave the initial anti-Popery lecture in 1757, and he more than adequately fulfilled the Donor's intentions.

Conscious of the dignity of this occasion and of the honor bestowed upon me to speak to this convocation, I prepared an address which, I hoped, responded to a major religious concern we Americans share. This weekend, when the Rosh Hashanah celebration ended, I learned of the massacre at Shatila and Sabra. The event and the response to it by Jewish leaders have filled me with such moral anguish that I find the text I have ready inadequate to this time of pain. But I have not found the wisdom, or the power, perhaps because I have not had the courage, to discard what I wrote and address myself to this spiritual calamity. I hope you will understand and that God will forgive my yielding to prudence rather than heeding my conscience. For I have decided to continue now with the address I wrote for this occasion.

Herodotus, in the course of his account of the customs of the Scythians, describes the treatment which the inhabitants of the Tauric peninsula reserve for their enemies: after consecration to Iphigeneia, they are struck on the head with a club and decapitated; their bodies are either buried or precipitated from the temple rock, and their heads are impaled on stakes. The head of a prisoner of war is stuck on a long pole which is hoisted over his victor's house. These heads of their enemies, the Taurians say, now watch over their captors' houses, guarding them from their high vantage-point (Herodotus 4.103).

Old Testament textual criticism focuses on variant readings (such as “on the seventh day” in the MT of Gen 2:2 as opposed to “on the sixth day” in the Samaritan Pentateuch and in the LXX and the Peshitta) and these readings must be evaluated carefully. Ever since the seventeenth century, abstract rules have been formulated for the evaluation of textual readings. These abstract rules are of different types and each generation of OT scholars has a different approach to them. In the seventeenth century only a few such rules were suggested, but after that time one notices a growing appreciation for and employment of textual rules. In the present century one discovers a frequent reliance on–and often a blind belief in–textual rules.

In a very interesting and perceptive article, John J. Collins has reexamined Theodotus' epic Περι ᾽Iουδαίων. As opposed to the opinion that was prevalent until recently, i.e., that Theodotus was a Samaritan, Collins attempts to show that he was not only not a Samaritan, but that, on the contrary, his poem was directed against the latter group. He characterizes Theodotus as “a militant and exclusivist Jew” (p. 102) who nevertheless “composed one of only two surviving Jewish epics in the Greek language” (p. 102); this confirms, according to Collins, Tcherikover's view that the Hasmoneans were opposed to the Greeks for political reasons but did not reject Greek culture. Theodotus defends his Jewish nationalism through the medium of Greek epic poetry.

Here in this particular world—of our Divinity School, the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Committee on the Study of Religions and all who are associated with us — we devote ourselves to the understanding of the spiritual and social laws which govern what authors of old called the sense of divinity and the religion that is born from it, making us beings who seek what is of surpassing worth, seek that which is and does not come into being or pass away, seek that which can bestow on us fullness of life and arouse us to adoration and imitation. The identification and the interpretation of these laws is the guiding purpose both of the study of religion and of theology, which also criticizes them. The appropriation of these laws, the incarnating of them into our spiritual reason, is the serious purpose of religion or of the communal and personal faith, into a full measure of which we aspire to grow. But what we call the serious work of appropriation—the task of realizing and becoming the faithful, religious beings we are in potentiality—also involves an element of play. That, at least, is the observation of the historian Johan Huizinga; and it is an observation that many of us have come to accept. The word “play,” however, here signifies something other than the simple copying of exemplars or obeying of rules of action; “play” means participating in the actualization of the ideal realities'that summon us. Hence, our spiritual propensity to retreat into ourselves and to venture out beyond ourselves in order to discover and to celebrate such being as constrains our whole-hearted respect and love, subordinating all our other inclinations and tendencies: that propensity is our spiritual play by which we help to actualize the supreme worth we seek. And in nothing characterizing our human nature does this native propensity show itself more plainly than in the imagination's play with symbols. It is about this play of symbols that I propose to speak— as a tragic play.

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.

When we deal with religious phenomena, we are not always fortunate enough to find explanatory texts. That is particularly true of the mystery religions and thus should be expected when we look at the materials concerning Isis, Sarapis and Demeter at Antioch of Syria. But in this instance we are faced with special problems. First, the texts are so meager that we are forced to turn to the artifacts in order to grasp at all the influence of these religions within the third largest city of the ancient world. Second, and more important, the effort to collate all the artifacts is at present impossible. The reports of the excavations in Antioch from 1932–39 were only published in a shortened preliminary form. For that we must be thankful, but it does mean that exact locations and dates of certain finds are quite difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the collections of materials primarily are divided between the McCormick Art Museum at Princeton University, the Louvre in Paris, and the local museum in Antakya, Turkey. Separate pieces, however, are scattered over the world. The materials at Princeton and Paris are accessible, but those at Antakya are limited in most instances to the ones on display. The major difficulty in retrieving the excavated materials comes not from bureaucratic obstinacy in Turkey. I received significant assistance from both Selhattin Asim, cultural director of the Hatay region, and Nizamettin Bati, director of the museum, during two visits to Antakya in 1976 and 1977. The major problem lies in the fact that the serial numbers recorded in Antakya bear no resemblance to those published in the preliminary reports. Literally hundreds of artifacts are housed in the Antakya museum which have not been studied in any thorough way. If this serial number conundrum could be broken, much more light could be shed on conditions in Antioch. For now, only preliminary studies of available pieces can be offered. Within such studies, arguments from silence are quite questionable. The task in this article is to discuss the texts and artifacts known to me in order to correct some inaccuracies of interpretation and to add color to the picture of Hellenistic religion in Antioch of Syria.

Late Spring of 1982 will see the tenth anniversary of the full publication of Clement's letter and its gospel fragments. Accordingly, this seems an appropriate occasion to review the discussion of them to date. The following review is based on about 150 published items that have come to my attention. No doubt some have been missed, but I trust these are representative.

Isa 52:13–53:12 has long served Jews and Christians as a source for the resolution of questions resulting from seemingly inexplicable human suffering and death. The fact that such suffering affected the primary links between God and humankind, the people Israel for the Jew and Jesus of Nazareth for the Christian, proved to be an especially perplexing problem that could have undermined fundamental religious beliefs. From the patristic age Isaiah 53 was interpreted so as to provide a rationale for Jesus' suffering on the cross. Medieval and modern Jewish exegetes saw in this prophecy an explanation for the tragedies which the Jews experienced in the exile. Interestingly, in adapting the so-called Suffering Servant passage for their own purposes, Jewish interpreters, of both the medieval and the modern periods, incorporated certain Christian concepts into their exegesis. This study will trace the transference of elements of a Christian exegetical tradition regarding Isaiah 53 into medieval and modern Jewish biblical interpretation.

The major purpose of this article is to study the dynamics of biblical poetry, especially in terms of its dominant device, parallelism. The goal of poetic analysis is to understand the ways in which a poet strengthens his message through effects engendered by formal devices. The process of analysis needs a principled and reasoned method of study which can be applied to poetic materials. In poetry, as in music, a disciplined approach will deepen not only one's understanding but also one's appreciation of the poetic system as a whole and of individual poems.

In Frazer's Golden Bough the leading instance of the central figure whom he called “the dying god” was Adonis, famous from Greco-Roman literature and art but firmly localized in Semitic Phoenicia, Syria, and Cyprus. Since Frazer wrote, his other Near Eastern instances have been so transformed by increasing knowledge that it can be doubted whether they severally belong to the same type or indeed whether any general type exists. Adonis has hardly shared in these discoveries and debates, for research has emphasized instead the large developments which overtook his worship within the Greco-Roman world. Most of this research does not bear at all on the origins of Adonis, but scholars have sometimes been so bemused by the Greek elements as to forget or deny the Semitic. Everything has been called into question at different times. Such features of his myth as the boar and the myrrh tree and the incest are discounted as Greek embroidery; his peculiar festival, with mourning women and miniature gardens of lettuce, is traced to the preoccupations of Greek urban society; even the Semitic derivation derivation of his name is disputed. This Greek exclusivism cannot be sustained. All accounts of Adonis' life and lineage, and all analogies for his worship converge in the Levant — not in a single site or land, but in Phoenicia, coastal Syria and Cyprus together, lands which from the Late Bronze Age onward display a distinctive common culture, above all with respect to religion. This is where Adonis is at home, and where we may look for evidence to explain the figure of the dying god.

If the book of Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon) was written in Alexandria in the Late Ptolemaic or early Imperial period, as seems most probable, it is a priori likely that its author and intended audience were familiar with the Egyptian goddess Isis, at least in her hellenized form. This is all the more likely since, as many critics have acknowledged, the author of Wisdom was cognizant of other aspects of Hellenism and was able to adopt some of these in his presentation of Jewish theology. Thus, for example, there are reminiscences of Homer and Hesiod, allusions to Egyptian religious practices, and Greek philosophical vocabulary. That the author was aware of Isis and her mythology need not mean, of course, that this influenced his representation of Sophia to any significant degree. But given the popularity of the goddess, this possibility can scarcely be excluded. It will be the purpose of this article to examine the evidence for the influence of Isis upon Sophia and to inquire into the function of the reshaping of Jewish wisdom speculation as it is encountered in the Wisdom of Solomon.

Whether the phrase ‘Son of God’ should be included in the first verse of Mark is one of the thorniest New Testament textual cruxes. Nineteenth-century scholars, overawed by its omission in the newly discovered codex Sinaiticus (ℵ = 01) and wary of theological features that did not appear to be primitive, tended to view the phrase with suspicion. Thus Tischendorf, Westcott-Hort, and Nestle banished it from their Greek testament texts, while von Soden placed it in brackets. Although all modern English translations include the phrase (as do the Greek editions of Lachmann, Tregelles, Souter, Merk, and NEB Greek), it is placed in brackets by the widely used United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament and is omitted by the British and Foreign Bible Society's Greek, Aland's Greek Synopsis, Nestle's 25th edition, and some current European vernaculars (including the French version by Jean Grosjean in La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [Paris, 1971], and the Dutch version of the Netherlands Bible Society, 1951). Three recent discussions of the text reflect the same variety of opinion. Cranfield adduces five “very strong reasons for regarding [the longer text] as original.”

In a handbook of 1607 for students of divinity and lightly learned clergymen, the puritan Richard Bernard gave pride of place to the works of continental theologians. For the best catechisms he cited Calvin and Ursinus; for “the definitions and distributions of the principal heads of theology,” Polanus; for commonplaces, Musculus, Martyr, and Szegedinus; for commentaries, Calvin, Martyr, and Musculus. These writers had each contributed to the systematizing of covenant exegesis and doctrine (though Bernard did not pick them for that reason), and it was no accident that this naming of great names did not include a single Englishman.

Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originality as a theologian. Apparently this New Englander's mind was no match for that of Jonathan Edwards: most of Taylor's theological ideas were not only orthodox, but commonplace. Yet the poet's religious anthropology would seem to be one notable exception. In both prose and verse, Taylor is continually breaking into chants of heartfelt wonder over the exalted state bestowed upon human nature by Christ's redemption: “The Highest Design of Divine Wisdom, and the richest, and the most Glorious Design of Divine Grace … is pitched upon Mankinde, and Humane Nature. For higher exaltation Created Nature seems utterly incapable of than to be made partaker of all the Fulness of the Godheads, bodily.”

While the discovery of the Manichaean, and then the Gnostic, MS collections in Coptic has provoked a number of studies on the broad cultural context of these two religious movements, the specific Egyptian environment in which the MSS were transmitted remains largely unknown. Lack of documentation generally accounts for this ignorance. Especially in the case of the Coptic Gnostic library, all sorts of ideas and religious sects have been called forth to comment upon the corpus and to explain, it seems, everything except what was common in the Nile valley in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

The question of whether there existed “Forerunners of the Reformation” is of considerable interest both to historians and theologians. The significance of the historical aspect of the question will be evident to any student of the history of ideas. It is clearly important to establish whether precursors of the distinctive teachings associated with the Reformation of the sixteenth century exist, and if they can be thus identified, to establish what influence, if any, they had upon the Reformers. However, it was the theological aspect of the question which was considered more relevant at the time of the Reformation itself, and which still has considerable significance today. The central theological question concerning the existence or otherwise of the Forerunners is this: Can the distinctive teachings of the churches of the Reformation be considered to be truly catholic? It can be shown without difficulty that it was the desire to demonstrate the catholicity of the Lutheran Reformation which led to the search for such Forerunners in the first instance.