Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

An inscription from the Areopagus recently published by Meritt in Hesperia (XI, 1942, 282 ff.) has thrown new light on the structure of the type of association of which the members were called orgeones. The occasion thus presents itself to bring together what we now know about this obscure Athenian institution.

This paper is a study of the second volume of The Nature and Destiny of Man with a view to deriving Niebuhr's philosophy of history. It may be said that the one thing which Niebuhr has uppermost in mind is to set forth such a philosophy of history; we shall attempt to catch it within the scope of this paper, and having delineated the structure in its main elements, we shall criticize it from the point of view of Christian Naturalism and attempt a constructive interpretation of our own.

On several counts, Esther is the strangest book in the Bible. Few of those who read it realize what a variety of curious problems it presents, and how little has been done toward solving them. As a preliminary to the following study, a few of the most troublesome questions raised by the book may be briefly stated.

The diffusion of Christianity during the first two centuries and a half of its existence is a subject as full of interest as it is beset with problems and difficulties. Curiously enough, there are few provinces of the Roman Empire concerning which our evidence, in this respect, is more unsatisfactory than Egypt, about which we might expect to be particularly well informed. From Egypt we have not only the usual crop of inscriptions (which, being of a public nature, cannot be expected to be very informative here) but a vast mass of papyri, more abundant for the second century than for any other, and quite plentiful for the third. And these would seem to be precisely the sort of material which we require. They are selected by no official process of sifting but by the mere accidents of preservation and discovery, they include documents of every kind, and they touch all classes of society, in town and country. Official documents and legal contracts are not, indeed, likely to yield much evidence; but on the private letters and perhaps the accounts, possibly even the wills, Christianity should, one would think, have left some trace.

In the first part of this verse it is said that Herod feared John the Baptist, knowing him to be a just and holy man, and protected him; the second part presents some difficulties which can best be discussed with the text before us. In the Textus Receptus the words are καὶ ἀκούσας αὐτοῦ πολλὰ ἐποίει, καὶ ἡδέως αὐτοῦ ἤκουεν. The authorities for the words with which we are concerned are reported as follows from Legg's critical apparatus, somewhat abbreviated:

ηπορει και א ΒLΘ Cop(bo), item ηπορειτο και W: εποιει και ACDNΠΣΦ ל Minusc. omn. Vss. pler.

On O. Mich. I, 657 a large, “epigraphic” hand has written five lines, of which three obviously contain the names of Greek gods. The same hand is responsible also for O. Mich. I, 658. Since the editor is inclined to relate these ostraca as parts of a single text, his transcripts of both are repeated here.

There is a persistent tradition in the Eastern Christian Churches, often referred to by Oriental Christians even at the present day, to the effect that early in the VIIIth century there was an exchange of letters on the question of the respective merits of Christianity and Islam, between the Umayyad Caliph ʻUmar II (717–720) and the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the Isaurian (717–741), in which the Emperor gloriously refuted the claims of Islam. If this is so, it will represent one of the earliest documents in the Muslim-Christian Controversy known to us. Carl Güterbock rightly states that the beginnings of literary discussions concerning Islam among the Greeks can be traced back to the middle of the VIIIth century, when Leo III was succeeded by his son Constantine V (741–775), but he begins his account of the Byzantine polemists with John of Damascus (†754) and his pupil Theodore Abū Qurra (c. 825). A polemical epistle of Leo III to ʻUmar must have been written before 720, and would thus be earlier than any known Byzantine tractate on this controversy.

The text discussed p. 73 ff. is a measure to ensure equitable and uncontentious distribution of the flesh of the two ‘fullgrown victims,’ and presumably of the young pig also. There is no mention of the burning of portions in honor of the heroines or of the hero, and outside Greece we know of sacrifices in which the worshippers took all. Such detail would be irrelevant to the purpose of our inscription, which is not a lex sacra; and the use of θύειν and the presence of an altar (for the restoration in line 6 is almost certain) strongly suggest that conventional symbolic offerings were made by fire.

By 1800 the Puritan experiment in theocracy was over. It had been a great adventure in Utopianism, like none other in the centuries since Christ, noble in the magnitude of its vision of a Christian State, extraordinary in the accidental circumstance of its situation, the fertile unspoiled wilderness of a new world in which to work, and for a time successful in awakening in men's souls a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.

Few passages of Virgil have led to the expending of more ink than the above (Aen. VI, 743), and, to my mind, it is seldom that a crux has less deserved the name. I wish to show that the sense is perfectly clear and ordinary Latin, observing a usual convention of verse, and further, that it was taken as such within about a century of Virgil's death, and that this continued to be the interpretation of the soundest exegetes, as it is now.

The last few decades of research concerning Luther have been clearly characterized by the close attention paid to his early development. Aided by some remarkable discoveries of hitherto unknown early Luther material, scholars have investigated particularly the important period from roughly 1513 to 1517/18, during which the ‘new’ religion of Luther evolved and reached its first flowering. The largely uncharted years before 1513, however, still remain in comparative darkness, despite Otto Scheel's notable work which, for all its completeness, is peripheral rather than central so far as the figure of Luther himself is concerned. While Scheel has succeeded in recreating the environment, physical as well as intellectual, in which the boy and youth lived and moved, he has been able to tell us but little of Luther's early spiritual development. The sources available to us unfortunately do not permit our going much beyond what Scheel has so competently presented. A few early letters and the marginal notes of 1509/10 constitute practically the whole body of direct Luther records before 1513. This situation is most regrettable indeed since we do not really know, aside from the general religious background in which Luther grew up, the all-important specific and personal elements characteristic of his early religion. In other words, we do not actually know the individual and intimate features of the religion from which Luther developed into the ‘new’ religion so wholly and unmistakably his own.

By the editor's kindness I am permitted to present here some corrections and supplements to papers and notes previously published in this Review. I had hesitated to claim the attention of readers again for matters of minor importance; but justice to other scholars seemed to demand an additional word about some of the following topics, and the interest of the supplementary matter must be my excuse for reverting to the others.

“But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the Law highly regarded by all the people, got up in the council and ordered the men to be removed for a while, and then said, ‘Men of Israel, take care what you propose to do with these men. For some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be a person of importance, and a group of men numbering some four hundred joined him. But he was killed and all his followers were dispersed and disappeared. After him, at the time of the census, Judas of Galilee appeared, and raised a great following, but he too perished and all his followers were scattered. So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this idea or movement is of human origin, it will come to naught, but if it is from God, you will not be able to stop it. You may actually find yourselves fighting against God!’” — Acts V, 34–39 (tr. Goodspeed).

The device of using a Christian straw man as an intermediary, for the purpose of evading the usury laws, which is mentioned in the three thirteenth century Hebrew documents quoted in Heichelheim's article, also appears in a case decided by the Court of The Exchequer of The Jews in 1272. In this case a Jew borrowed money from another Jew at interest, using the above device, and gave the creditor a mortgage on a certain house as security for the debt. The debtor then sold the mortgaged house to a Christian. Upon default by the debtor the creditor sought to recover the debt from the mortgaged property which was then in the hands of the Christian purchaser. The case is interesting because the court refused to be misled by the evasive practice and adjudged the transaction usurious, and also because of the insight it affords into the working of the medieval mind with regard to the question of usury. An English court, consisting of Christian judges, apparently held that although it was permissible for a Jew to take usury from a Christian, it was unlawful for him to take usury from another Jew.

L. Ziehen has already observed that we have no certain evidence handed down to us concerning the exact name of the god to whom the festival of the Thessalian Peloria was dedicated and who was most probably a personification of Zeus. Most MSS of Athenaeus have Πελωρíῳ, and Πελώριος is therefore accepted as the likely version by most scholars; but the Codex Marcianus of Athenaeus has the dative Πέλωρι, and Eustath, Il. 1101, 12 f. has Πελωρóς, the same name as that of the human messenger whose good news was said to have initiated the festival. Leake published a unique bronze coin of Phalanna in Northern Thessaly which is preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and probably solves this question. The obverse of this much discussed coin, which was issued in the late fourth or the third century B.C. when the native dialects were used everywhere in Thessaly, shows the head of a bearded Zeus laureate or of a similar god, and has as his name ]λορις. There is only room ‘off flan’ for two or three missing letters at the beginning of this word in the original die. Under these circumstances the restoration [Πέ] λορις or, more exactly, [Πέ] λο(υ)ρις is, in my opinion, very probable, if not certain, ου instead of ω being a peculiarity of the Thessalian dialect.