In his Advice to the Bride and Groom, Plutarch famously pronounces: “A married woman should therefore worship and recognize the gods whom her husband holds dear, and these alone. The door must be closed to strange cults and foreign superstitions. No god takes pleasure in cult performed furtively and in secret by a woman.”1 These comments represent a patriarchal ideology that the wife (along with the whole household) should follow the worship practices of the husband. It also suggests the possibility that this counsel was not always followed and that wives might bring their own gods into a marriage, attempting to maintain ritual practices in their honor, perhaps secretly.

That the editorship of the Harvard Theological Review should take two individuals to succeed Prof. Bovon will come as no surprise to those who know him. A scholar's scholar, he has published a large number of learned and acclaimed studies. These studies include his four-volume commentary on the Gospel according to Luke, which has now appeared in four languages with a fifth to follow, and his groundbreaking studies on the apocryphal literature of early Christianity. He has written an important reconstruction of the last days of Jesus and how the early church interpreted them, as well as probing explorations of exegetical method. His works include three volumes, published for a more popular audience, and nearly two hundred articles and chapters that have appeared in scholarly books. Prof. Bovon does not limit his oeuvre to commenting with masterful erudition on published works. His work has taken him to the libraries of the monasteries on Mount Sinai and Mount Athos and to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in search of key documents from the early history of Christianity.

On 8 December 1854, Pius IX issued Ineffabilis Deus, in which he dogmatized the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The bull reads,

The Book of Isaiah is a wonderful work that is preserved from antiquity both in its Hebrew and its Greek version. It is a history written and reworked by many generations, covering the following periods: the Assyrian period (ca. 911–605 B.C.E.), the Neo-Babylonian period (ca. 625–539 B.C.E.), and the Persian period (ca. 550–333 B.C.E.).1

In the middle of the twentieth century biblical scholars claimed the unity of the human person as the core of biblical anthropology.1 The Hebrew term , “life,” “person,” was no longer to be translated as “soul,” and the best English equivalent for the Greek ψυχή was “person.” In the seventies and eighties, on both sides of the Atlantic, the pendulum swung even further, to the point of favoring the body. In Paris, in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Pierre Geoltrain offered a lecture course on the “body” in several texts of the New Testament, while in the United States Dale Martin worked on his book published under the title The Corinthian Body.2 In Geneva, where expression corporelle had become a form of instruction in dance and eurhythmic practice at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, some New Testament scholars incorporated bodily experience into their understanding of biblical passages.3 It was also this time that saw—in the secular realm—the creation of “body shops” and the continuous care of one's own body. With Merleau-Ponty we can say that this recent period witnesses a rediscovery of the body.4

Despite decades of research, it remains surprisingly difficult to identify the origins of the works preserved in the hoard of Coptic manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Even as unearthed “Gnostic” gospels continue to make headlines, many academics repent intoning these old, fiery heretics, and some have even called for an all-out dispensation of the term “Gnosticism.”2 Yet a felicitous piece of external evidence seems to offer a more stable foundation for identifying the date and sectarian provenance of several of the most difficult works discovered at Nag Hammadi, the so-called “Platonizing” treatises of the “Sethian school” of Gnosticism.3 Porphyry, the top pupil of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (third century C.E.), remarks that,

In the middle decades of the ninth century, Charles the Bald, the West Frankish Carolingian ruler, received two treatises on the subject of the Eucharist. Paschasius Radbertus (ca. 790–ca. 865) and Ratramnus (d. after 868), both monks from the royal monastery at Corbie in Neustria, composed treatises entitled De corpore et sanguine domini.1 That these were the very first Latin Christian treatises devoted solely to the Eucharist and, further, that they came to different conclusions, has attracted well-earned scholarly scrutiny from almost immediately after their appearance. I would like to return to the question of the difference between their views. Specifically, I will show that the doctrinal differences between the two treatises have their roots in different approaches to, or—perhaps better—interests in, sacraments in general. The two authors do not take opposed positions on the topic of the sacraments, or even mutually contradicting positions on the Eucharist, rather they choose to emphasize different aspects of the sacrament, different guiding themes which suggest to each different lines of analysis. Paschasius sees sacraments primarily as instruments of unity, while Ratramnus views sacraments principally as salvific tools. This recognition yields two insights. It recalibrates analysis of the eucharistic tracts, foregrounding the contemporary concerns of the authors, while deliberately deemphasizing the subsequent theological controversies and scholarly debates into which the treatises were drawn. For both Paschasius and Ratramnus, distinctive approaches to sacraments color not only their analyses of the Eucharist, but also their approaches to larger political and social questions. This recognition also emphasizes the vibrance and creativity characteristic of the Carolingian theological milieu, too often dismissed as a supposedly derivative and unoriginal era in Christian theology. To these ends, the paper will proceed in four stages. First, I situate my question in the long historiography of the Corbie eucharistic treatises. Second, I briefly set the authors and their treatises in historical context. Third, I compare their ‘sacramental’ theologies of the Eucharist, underscoring both Paschasius's emphasis on its horizontal or communal significance and Ratramnus's stress on its vertical or salvific importance. Fourth, I trace how each author's particular sacramental interests remain consistent across their other projects with ramifications for their theological and social opinions.

With its clear-glass, brightly-lit, whitewashed interior, Harvard Divinity School's Andover Chapel reflects all the values of elite Protestant culture in New England history: quiet prayer, thoughtful sermons, an approach to God through the heart rather than the senses, and a minimum of iconic reminders that the space is Christian. And it was here, in April 2007, that this author beheld the Voudoun spirits Danbala and Ogoun arrive through several experienced mediums. The ceremony had not really been intended to call down the spirits, only to praise them in a kind of broad sampling of Haitian Voudoun songs.1 But the altar was full of their treats, the room was full, the drummers were good, the singing was loud, and the mediums were expert. So the spirits arrived: various Danbalas slithering across the floor and a very martial Ogoun huffing and puffing around the altar to get his rum. And they were greeted, with awed interest by the Harvard students, familiarity by the Haitians, and annoyed tolerance by one Adventist woman.

Athanasius of Alexandria's thirty-ninth Festal Letter remains one of the most significant documents in the history of the Christian Bible. Athanasius wrote the letter, which contains the first extant list of precisely the twenty-seven books of the current New Testament canon, in 367 c.e., during the final decade of his life. Like many of his annual Easter letters, the thirty-ninth was fairly long, but only a small portion of the text survives in Greek.1 The Greek excerpt contains Athanasius's lists of the books of the Old and New Testaments, which he calls “canonized,” and a list of a few additional books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which he says are not canonized, but are useful in the instruction of catechumens. Most studies of the formation of the Christian canon, including very recent ones, examine only this Greek fragment and so discuss only the contents of the lists. But already in the late-nineteenth-century fragments of the much more extensive Coptic translation had been published, and a few scholars, such as Carl Schmidt and Theodor Zahn, used them to write penetrating studies of the letter.2 In 1955 Lefort published all the then-known Coptic fragments in his book of Coptic Athanasiana, and then in 1984 Coquin published another long fragment.3 These served as the basis for my 1995 translation and my 1994 article in this journal on the social context of canon formation in fourth-century Egypt.4

I have inherited a paradox. As the inaugural holder of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association chair, I am accountable in some sense to a man who once told the graduates of this school to “cast behind [them] all conformity” to what they had learned at school, relying on themselves rather than on the institutions of “historical Christianity.” But I am also accountable to one of those institutions—indeed, to the very denominational tradition that Emerson was leaving behind when he urged our students to “acquaint men at first hand with deity.”1 This level of institutional accountability in a Harvard chair has few precedents. Among my colleagues, only Francis Schussler Fiorenza has the name of a denomination in his title, and while the Charles Chauncy Stillman chair of Roman Catholic studies may contain its own paradoxes, I am guessing that the pope was not as intimately involved in its creation as Unitarian Universalist president Bill Sinkford was in the funding of the Emerson chair.

The engagement with Egypt and the Egyptian gods that transpired in the Hebrew Bible continued into the texts produced by rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic texts of late antiquity and the early medieval period frequently presented images of Egypt and its religion. One of the critical objectives of these portrayals of Egypt was to set boundaries of Jewish identity by presenting rabbinic Judaism in opposition to Egyptian culture. The Egyptian cultural icons in rabbinic texts also demonstrate that the rabbis were aware of cultures other than their own.1 The presence of Egyptian elements in midrash had previously been noted to a very limited extent by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism), and it has not escaped the attention of more recent scholarship.

The story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) has a long, complex history. Well-known in the Latin West, the story was neglected but not forgotten in the East. Incorporated within Late Antique and Early Medieval Gospel manuscripts, depicted in Christian art, East and West, and included within the developing liturgies of Rome and Constantinople, the passage has fascinated interpreters for centuries despite irregularities in its transmission.1 Throughout this long history, one narrative detail has been of particular interest: the content and significance of Jesus— writing. Discussed in sermons, elaborated in manuscripts, and depicted in magnificent illuminations, Jesus— writing has inspired interpreters at least since the fourth century, when Ambrose of Milan first mentioned it. Offering his opinion on the propriety of capital punishment, the bishop turned to the pericope in order to argue that Christians do well to advocate on behalf of the condemned since, by doing so, they imitate the mercy of Christ. Nevertheless, he averred, the imposition of capital punishment remains an option for Christian rulers and judges. After all, God also judges and condemns, as Christ showed when, responding to the men questioning him and accusing the adulteress, he wrote twice on the ground. Demonstrating that “the Jews were condemned by both testaments,” Christ bent over and wrote “with the finger with which he had written the law,” or so the bishop claimed.2 Ambrose offered a further conjecture in a subsequent letter: Jesus wrote “earth, earth, write that these men have been disowned,” a saying he attributes to Jeremiah (compare Jer 22:29),3. As Jeremiah also explains, “Those who have been disowned by their Father are written on the ground,” but the names of Christians are written in heaven.4

In Constantine P. Cavafy's 1917 poem, “Simeon,” a young cultured aesthete (probably from Antioch), writes his friend Mebis about a recent chance encounter with the famous stylite that left him “shattered, unnerved, and aghast,” and entirely unfit to resume his sophistic career in belles lettres:

The earliest extant public image of the crucifixion of Christ appears on a single relief panel on the early-fifth-century wooden doors of the Church of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill in Rome (figs. 1 and 2). General scholarly consensus dates the construction of the church to the pontificate of Pope Celestine I (422–433 c.e.) as stated in the surviving inscription on the church's interior west wall.1 Construction probably continued into the pontificate of Sixtus III (432–440 c.e.) when the church was formally consecrated.2 Although in the ensuing centuries the image of the Crucified Christ—the Crucifix—attained canonical status, scholars seeking precedents for Santa Sabina's crucifixion scene have failed to determine its pedigree satisfactorily within the Christian artistic tradition. We propose that broadening our understanding of artistic prototypes for the Santa Sabina crucifixion image to include both formal and theological elements allows for a more nuanced and promising investigation.

In this essay I take up cudgels against a central construct in the confessional historiography of the Protestant Reformation: The notion that there existed a clear, well-defined doctrine of justification shared by all the major reformers from the earliest stages of the conflagration and that this “Reformation doctrine of justification” served as the “material principle” in the formation of the emerging Protestant self-identity.1 In contrast with this traditional view, I argue that the first-generation reformers, galvanized by Luther's protest against the indulgence trade, adopted a common “rhetoric of dissent” aimed at critiquing the regnant Catholic orthopraxy of salvation in the interest of a common set of primarily existential-religious concerns. During the course of the next several decades following the initia Lutheri, however, an “orthodox” doctrine of justification quickly emerged'several of them, in fact. The Roman Catholic church and the emerging Protestant confessions, Lutheran and Reformed, quickly found it necessary to formulate their teachings in increasingly precise terms, so as both to integrate their central soteriological affirmations within a wider body of contested doctrines and practices and to demarcate clearly the boundaries of confessional identity in opposition to competing confessions. As with earlier periods of intense theological controversy within the Christian tradition, this conflict represented not a sudden breakthrough, but rather “a search for orthodoxy, a search conducted by the method of trial and error.”2 Unlike earlier debates, however, what emerged in the aftermath of the Reformation was not a single, dominant orthodoxy which carried the field, but rather multiple, competing orthodoxies, each one with its own Gospel.

Since the publication of Philip Hallie's book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed,1 and the release of Pierre Sauvage's documentary, Weapons of the Spirit,2 many North Americans have become familiar with the rescue efforts carried out in the French Vivarais-Lignon plateau during World War II. It is difficult to know the exact number of persons sheltered, and indeed this statistic has become a point of contention among historians, with some arguing that 700–1000 Jews were rescued, while a few of those who experienced and contributed to the effort estimate 3500 (in addition to approximately 1500 others).3 It is true that during the war a variety of individuals and groups in France assisted people at tremendous risk, but the number saved in the plateau, even if it does hover around 1000, is nonetheless striking.4 The residents of this region welcomed individuals and families from throughout France and Europe, providing food, housing, and assisting many over the border into Switzerland, some 300 kilometers away. Moreover, some local residents participated in the manufacture and distribution of false papers, a crime under Vichy law, but the provision of which aided in the survival of hundreds of persons during the period.5 Although not all of the inhabitants of the plateau were active in the armed Resistance, they resisted nonetheless by resolutely disobeying the Vichy authorities as well as the Germans. These people were the minority throughout France, for while some citizens actively collaborated with the Germans, the vast majority simply waited out the war, neither collaborating nor particularly opposing the changes brought by the Vichy government and the subsequent German occupying forces.6

The Nicene Creed and the subsequent development of Trinitarian orthodoxy have been regarded by many as essential to the apostolic faith of the churches. For example, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed without the filioque clause was made the starting point of the World Council of Churches' Commission on Faith and Order study program entitled, “Towards the Common Expression of the Apostolic Faith Today.” Not so well known, however, is the existence of a growing movement of Pentecostal Christians globally that seeks to preserve the apostolic faith of the churches in significant measure by rejecting the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed along with the Trinitarian dogma that historically it had supported. Commonly called Oneness or Apostolic Pentecostals, they are estimated to have from 14 to over 17 million followers globally and growing rapidly in Mexico, China, and the United States.1

In 1309 ecclesiastical leaders condemned as heresy Marguerite Porete's rejection of moral duty, her doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.”1 They also condemned her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes doctrines associated decades earlier with a “new spirit” heresy spreading “blasphemies” such as that “a person can become God” because “a soul united to God is made divine.”2 In his study, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, Robert E. Lerner identifies these two doctrines of annihilation and deification as characteristic of the “free spirit” heresy condemned at the 1311 Council of Vienne. The council claimed that this heresy's sympathizers belonged to an “abominable sect of certain evil men known as beghards and some faithless women called beguines.”3 Lerner found that this group was composed of a disproportionate number of women, including Marguerite Porete. Many of the men were also involved with the group of pious laywomen known as beguines.4 Lerner shows that among those charged with heresy, many sympathized with a “ ‘free-spirit style’ of affective mysticism particularly congenial to thirteenth century religious women.”5 He suggests that beguines in particular radicalized affective spirituality into what he calls an “extreme mysticism.”6 Here I wish to follow Lerner's suggestion that we ought to search for the roots of Porete's doctrines among the beguines. I will argue that distinctive doctrines of annihilation and deification sprouted from a fertile beguine imagination, one that nourished Porete's own distinctive and influential ideas in the Mirror of Simple Souls.7 It is among the beguines that we find the first instance in Christianity of a women's community creating an original form of theological discourse.

I continue to be preoccupied with the task of delineating the features of a distinctive tradition in American religious thought that I refer to as theosemiotic.1 It can be traced back through Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jonathan Edwards as an early exemplar. It achieves full flower in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and then bears fruit in the work of the later Josiah Royce and in some of H. Richard Niebuhr's writings. This essay focuses on Peirce and on the later Royce. Peirce's theosemiotic is most clearly discernible in his 1908 article “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” especially when one reads that article in the context of Peirce's developed theory of signs. I do not intend to engage here in any sort of detailed exegesis of the Neglected Argument.2 Instead, I wish to focus on the continuity between Peirce and Royce visible in the latter's book on The Problem of Christianity,3 with most of my attention being directed to the discussion in the second part of that work.

One sometimes has the experience of knowing two apparently unrelated bits of information—sometimes for years—until suddenly it occurs to one that they are in fact related and indeed illuminate each other in quite startling ways. I have had the good fortune to teach some of the Scots ballads for the last decade or so and have taught “Thomas Rhymer (A)” and ‘Tam Lin (A)” as exemplars of Scots Other World balladry. It is a truism (and the first piece of information) that the worldview of these ballads differs quite markedly from the medieval Catholic worldview that was current when these ballads may have originated and the Scots Presbyterian one that was the dominant ideology in the time and place when they were collected. Few ballad scholars would dispute this claim.