Ancient gospels, canonical and noncanonical, present the resurrection of Jesus with varying degrees of thoroughness and detail. While the Gospel of Peter vividly describes the actual moment that Jesus rises (9.34–10.45), the Gospel of Mark excludes even a postresurrection appearance of Jesus—ifthe common opinion is correct that Mark ends at 16:8. Luke, by contrast, so fully documents Jesus' postresurrection activity that the events extend into the book of Acts. The Gospel of John distinguishes itself from the others as well, not only by uniquely depicting Jesus' postresurrection appearances, but also by portraying Jesus as the resurrected one prior to the crucifixion. Even before he meets Pilate, Jesus proclaims, “I have overcome the world” (16:33). And even before he ascends the cross, Jesus has ascended to the Father and announces, “I am no longer in the world” (17:11). This feature ofthe Fourth Gospel has received various historical, literary, and theological interpretations. The following paper will offer a literary interpretation based ona comparison of the Gospel of John with Greek tragedy. The argument will proceed in two phases, first demonstrating basic connections with the tragic evidence,and then exploring how the Fourth Gospel twists tragic techniques to its own purposes.

One of the most intriguing narratives in the Hekhalot and Merkavah (HM) literature is the account of Enoch/Meṭaṭron, included in an elaborated form in 3 Enoch. This version, attributed to the fifth or sixth century C.E., draws together threads inherited from a variety of sources. These include, for example, “angel of the Lord” traditions (e.g., Exod 23:20–21, b. Sanh. 38b, Apocalypse of Abraham), Enochic material found in 1 Enoch and 2 Enoch, and traditions of divinized angelomorphic humans and exalted figures found in Daniel 7 as well as in a host of pseudepigraphic sources (e.g., T. Levi, Ascen. Isa. 6–11, and Apoc. Ab. 15–19). They include, as well, traditions found in several Qumran texts (e.g., 4QShirShabb, 11QMelch), talmudic and midrashic polemics against beliefs in a second deity or an angelic vice-regent (e.g., b. Ḥag. 14a; b. Sanh. 38b), traditions of Meṭaṭron, and uncensored, nontalmudic speculation concerning the angel Meṭaṭron as an enthroned vice-regent in heaven.

How do we learn from religious traditions other than our own? How are we to assess what happens when that learning leads to affirmation and empathy, and thereafter affects how one lives one's life? We can wonder whether there is coherence in what we learn, what we think, how we feel, and how we choose to act. Optimism is not necessarily justified since it may be that due to the strictures of logic and religious commitment, religious reasoning and affective religious engagement diverge and even work at cross purposes. What is obviously and powerfully felt may not translate into explanations that observers, including theologians and scholars of religion, can understand or affirm. Conversely, the emotionally engaged practitioner who learns, feels, and acts in accord with what is learned across religious boundaries may not know what to say about this engagement, and often may not have mastered the appropriate technical language by which to explain and justify complex and extraordinary emotional engagements.

On 10 March 2005, Professor Bernard McGinn delivered the William James Lecture on Religious Experience at the Harvard Divinity School. The founding bequest of this annual lectureship was made for the purpose of having an outstanding scholar or scholars lecture on some aspect of this subject, which received classic treatment in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience. James's aim was not to defend religion by scientific proof, but to stake out his own position as a “piecemeal supernaturalist, one who admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and real worlds together” to locate where the “ideal region” interacts with “the real world's details” to cause experiences—prayer, epiphany, or visions—that generate faith.

The thesis of this paper is simple: we as critical readers of the New Testament often use John Rylands Greek Papyrus 3.457, also known as P52, ininappropriate ways, and we should stop doing so. A recent example will illustrate the problem. In what is on the whole a superb commentary on John's gospel, D. Moody Smith writes the following about the date of John:

For a time, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, the possibility that John was not written, or at least not published, until [the] mid-second century was a viable one. At that time Justin Martyr espoused a logos Christology, without citing the Fourth Gospel explicitly. Such an omission by Justin would seem strange if the Gospel of John had already been written and was in circulation. Then the discovery and publication in the1930s of two papyrus fragments made such a late dating difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. The first and most important is the fragment of John chapter 18 … [P52], dated by paleographers to the second quarter of the second century (125–150); the other is a fragment of a hithertounknown gospel called Egerton Papyrus 2 from the same period, which obviously reflects knowledge of the Gospel of John…. For the Gospel of Johnto have been written and circulated in Egypt, where these fragments were found, a date nolater than the first decade of the second century must be presumed.

Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.”

Paul, Romans 11:25–26I have generally adhered to the RSV except where the wording of biblical quotations in the works of patristic or medieval authors mandates otherwise. Citations of chapter and verse in the Hebrew Bible, however, generally follow the numbering in the Masoretic Text.

This text is the basis of the common opinion that, at the end of the world, the Jews will return to the faith. However, it is so obscure that, unless one is willing to accept the judgment of the fathers who expound the apostle in this way, no one can, so it would seem, obtain a clear conviction from this text.

Luther, Lectures on RomansMartin Luther, Scholien—Epistola ad Romanos (vol. 56 of Werke; Weimar: H. Bohlaus Nachf, 1883–1983) 436–37; Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (trans. Wilhem Pauck; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961) 315.

Scholars in all fields should hold themselves morally responsible for what they publish and teach. One would think that everyone would take this for granted, but Hilary Putnam, for one, has earnestly warned that we dare not. As he writes, “To-day, as we face the twenty-first century, our task is not to repeat the mistakes of the twentieth century.” He sounded this warning at the conclusion of his analysis of Jacques Derrida's philosophical works. Putnam regrets that philosophers reside among the all too numerous scholars whose publications and instruction aided and abetted the development of the “political tragedy” exemplified by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Derrida the philosopher counts among current scholars whose thinking raises the specter of repeating those mistakes of the twentieth century and their horrendous aftermath. Taking the renewal of philosophy as the theme for his Gifford Lectures of 1990, Putnam characterized the writings of Derrida as not only philosophically unsound, but also as dangerous and irresponsible.

The demon of acedia holds an important place in early monastic demonology and psychology. Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345–399), for example, characterizes it as “the most troublesome of all” of the eight genera of demonic thoughts (). He goes so far as to characterize it as the commander of the demonic host arrayed against the monastic, which distracts the monastic with persistent thoughts. From the monastic demonology of Evagrius, especially as transmitted through his Latin-speaking protégé John Cassian, acedia—equated by Evagrius with the “noonday demon” () of Ps 90:6 In the medieval Latin tradition of the seven deadly sins, acedia has generally been understood as the sin of sloth. Moral theologians, intellectual historians, and cultural critics have variously construed acedia—or “accidie,” among other English spellings—as the ancient depiction of a variety of psychological states, behaviors, or existential conditions: primarily laziness, ennui, or boredom. Still others have attempted to place acedia within the context of Evagrius's highly idiosyncratic anthropology, or they have tried to situate it in the controversies over monastic itinerancy. More recently, acedia has been considered analogous to the modern clinical condition of depression. Andrew Solomon, notably, draws explicitly on the Evagrian monastic tradition for the title of his recent study, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

In Palestine, Christian monasticism began early in the fourth century C.E. The first monks known to us by name are Hilarion of Thavata, who lived in the region of Gaza; Epiphanius, who settled near Eleutheropolis, in the Shephelah; and Chariton, a native of Iconium in Asia Minor who became the founder of monasticism in the Judean Desert. The monastic movement spread throughout Palestine during the Byzantine period (324–642 C.E.), and the remains ofmonasteries have been found in diverse areas. Many monasteries were establishedin or around large cities, or at holy places and sites of pilgrimage, while others were set in desert areas.

In the late 1960s, African American children in Boston were asked to draw maps of their neighborhood, near the old Mission Hill housing project. The housing project, largely white at the time, took up a large part of their hand-drawn maps, but was figured in various ways as a big blank: a no-man's land, a topography absent of marks or monuments. The streets around it, as well as schools, restaurants, and stores, were often carefully and clearly articulated, but the housing project itself was an open, unmarked rectangle. Recent critical geographers have been interested in the way “people's spatial behaviour is shaped by the hills and valleys of the invisible information and environmental stress surfaces over them.” Landscape and the built environment of the city are not neutral, but have their own rhetoric, exerting influence on the bodies of those who move through them. And humans map and interpret space, understanding and defining the limits of their known world through the movements of their bodies.

Some years ago a rectangular ceramic panel appeared at auction in London and made its way to Boston (fig. 1). The object was purchased by Cornelius C. Vermeule III, who placed it on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The technical term in English to describe the fabric of this kind of ceramic is “African Red Slip” ware—abbreviated ARS. The term was coined by John Hayes, a scholar who has done important work in classifying these wares. In Italian, the name that is used is “terra sigillata chiara” or “light terra sigillata,” to distinguish it from “terra sigillata,” its counterpart in Italy and Gaul. The latter has a deep-red color and a high-gloss surface, while the African variety is less shiny and light orange in color.

Eldon J. Epp recently asserted that “the greater the ambiguity in the variant readings in a given variation unit, the more clearly we are able to grasp the concerns of the early church.” I agree with this principle and submit that the famous text-critical problem regarding the authenticity of Luke 22:43–44—the agony of Jesus on the Mount of Olives, which mentions the angel and the sweat “like drops of blood”—has not yet yielded its store of information about early Christianity, particularly in Alex-andria. This article has the modest purpose of presenting two technical notes on the complex question of the external evidence (from the manuscripts) bearing on Luke 22:43–44. These findings provide some of the groundwork for a reappraisal of the Lukan account of Jesus' prayer on the Mount of Olives. This article has the modest purpose of presenting two technical notes on the complex question of the external evidence in the manuscripts bearing on Luke 22:43–44.

Simone Weil's essay “La personne et le sacré,” known in English as “Human Personality,” is a remarkable piece of philosophy that has not, I think, received as much attention as it deserves among analytic philosophers. And when it has been discussed by such philosophers, they have not always gotten to the root of its oddities and peculiar interest. Granted, it is in some ways extremely difficult to translate Weil's approach to her themes into the kind of discourse characteristic of present-day Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Also, those who are attracted by Weil's writings tend to read her on her own terms, which leaves one with a sense that the hardest questions have not been put to her, and that the difficulties of her work have not been fully brought to the surface. Be that as it may, I wish here to take seriously the central claims that Weil makes and to explore them from an analytic perspective, not least because “Human Personality” contains, in nuce, most of the themes that preoccupied Weil.

“We shall at length be really and fully united to Thee [Almighty God] through Christ our Lord.”

What did the Reformation do for sodomy? The more or less established view, developed by social and cultural historians and contributors to the history of sexuality, is that it did relatively little. The evidence of the normative discourses of theology and law suggests that definitions and understandings of sodomy after the Reformation movements of the early and middle sixteenth century differed little from what had been proffered in the legal and moral writings of the medieval period. According to these defi nitions, which varied in their particulars, sodomy was a sin of unnatural lust which included, but was often not limited to, sexual contact between persons of the same sex. It was a sin whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants' penchant for unnatural sex led directly to their destruction in a hail of sulfur and fire—a dramatic event that was to stand as a warning both to those tempted to indulge in this vice and to those innocent of that particular sin who would nonetheless tolerate it in their neighbors. This view is found reflected in a wide range of writings from homiletic, exegetical, and penitential productions of late antiquity and the early, high, and late Middle Ages. And, indeed, while Protestant reforming ideas and practices changed many things in Europe of the sixteenth century, they seem to have left untouched this conception of the sin of the Sodomites. Confessions divided on many theological issues appear to have had no quarrel over what sodomy was, where it had come from, and what ought to be done about it. Definitions, then, remained more or less the same through the course of the Reformations; what changed was the capacity of local and regional jurisdictions to enforce legal proscriptions. And so, if the Reformation movements had any impact on the public discourse on sodomy, that impact was limited to the contribution the reforms made to the development of instruments of moral discipline and their facilitation (in some instances) of harsher responses to persons accused and convicted of the crime of sodomy.

In 1986, Michel van Esbroeck published a remarkable new Life of the Virgin that not only is among the most profound and eloquent Mariological writings of early Byzantium but also presents a useful compendium of early apocryphal traditions about Mary. Some of the Life's episodes are already well known from their original sources, such as the Protevangelium of James and the early dormition apocrypha, but many other extrabiblical traditions appearing in this Life of the Virgin are not otherwise attested in early Christian literature. This is true especially of the section that overlaps with the gospels, where the Life expands the canonical narratives in ways unprecedented (to my knowledge) in Christian apocryphal literature. By writing Mary into the story at key points and augmenting several of her more minor appearances, the Life portrays Mary as a central figure in her son's ministry and also as a leader of the nascent church. The result is a veritable “Gospel of Mary” in the section of the Life that emphasizes Mary's essential contributions to her son's earthly mission and her leadership of the apostles in the early Christian community: the Life gives a brief account of the same events recorded in the canonical gospels, but with the Virgin Mary brought to the fore at nearly every instance. The origins of these traditions are not entirely clear, and while they may be the work of the Life's author, it is equally possible that they reflect now lost apocryphal traditions about Mary that once circulated in late antiquity. In any case, the attention that this earliest Life of the Virgin lavishes on the activities of Mary and other women as important leaders in the formation of Christianity is rather striking and quite exceptional among the literature of Christian late antiquity. In its emphasis on the roles played by these women it represents a surprising ancient predecessor to much of the recent work in New Testament scholarship to recover the importance of women in the early Christian movement.

Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil never met, and only once exchanged letters. Maritain never cites Weil; she, on the other hand, cites him explicitly in at least three places, but disparagingly. Despite their limited contact, which may have left Weil slightly vindictive, Maritain nevertheless played a significant role for Weil. However, it was one in which he chiefly inspired her to rise to a new level of thought by her conscious attempt to contradict him.

The scathing insults that fill texts by sixteenth-century Christian reformers can shock even a jaded modern reader. In the prefatory letter to the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), for example, Martin Luther begins by wishing for “grace and peace in Christ” before launching his attack on the “brainless and illiterate beast in papist form” and its “whole filthy pack of … asses,” and concludes by exhorting his reader to rise up against the Catholic hierarchy: “Continue courageously, noble sir; in this way the disgrace of the Bohemian name will be abolished, and the sludge of the harlot's lies and whoring shall again be taken up in her breast.” Or consider the nasty invectives by the English Lord Chancellor and future Catholic martyr, Thomas More, against not only Luther but also Matthew Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English. More calls these men the “devil's disciples”: Luther “a pimp, an apostate, a rustic, and a friar”; and Tyndale “a babbler, and a devil's ape.” Even Desiderius Erasmus, the erudite Catholic humanist, filled his writings with insults both satirical and blunt and proclaimed that theologians “are more stupid than any pig” (sue stupidiores). Fierce words commonly appear in the midst of religious controversies, and one may choose to skim past this hyperbolic outrage in search of the real message. Insulting rhetoric, however, does provide a sensitive barometer of religious concerns in the sixteenth century and yields unexpectedly complex answers to a simple question. What does negative speech accomplish?

In the ancient church, human bodies were contested commodities. Early Christian writers frequently wrangled over the ethical implications of dress and bodily adornment, and sought to regiment various forms of physical interaction and movement within their communities, from sexual contact to pilgrimage travel. Bodies—and how they were used—functioned as privileged markers of Christian identity, as valuable capital in the complex economies of Christian discourse and practice. Nowhere was this more the case than in discussions about Christ's body and its relation to his divinity. While such christological discussions took place throughout the Mediterranean world, in this article I have a keen interest in the ways in which the body of Christ was represented in Alexandria and Egypt from the fourth through the eighth century. Specifically, I want to explore late antique Coptic Christian understandings of the incarnation, and I propose to do so from a new theoretical perspective.

In October 1687, the Parisian publisher Michallet was granted the right to produce an anonymous work entitled Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle. The first edition of the Caractères went on sale in March 1688, and the work became an instant classic. By 1696, Parisian readers hadpurchased eight editions, while an additional three editions had ap-peared in Lyon, and yet another in Brussels. In these later editions, the identity of the author was revealed: Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696), who had been hired by the Duke of Condé as a tutor for his son and stayed on as librarian in the duke's palace at Chantilly.