“The icon and the idol determine two manners of being … not two classes of beings.”1

One of the features distinguishing the work of Anselm of Canterbury is the systematic attempt to coordinate linguistic nuances with logical distinctions. At times this effort promotes subtle but provocative shifts in perspective that pass far beyond the frameworks of language and logic in their own right. Such a shift in perspective, I believe, marks Anselm's approach to a long-standing problem in Christian theology regarding the power of God. In seeking to clarify the ambiguous terminology of divine omnipotence, Anselm develops an intriguing sense of the “other side” of divine power—the susceptibilities and capacities of this world—that anticipates some of the most important philosophic tendencies of the twelfth century. It seems to me that Anselm's position in this respect has not been adequately recognized, and in this essay I would like briefly to try to situate him in that historic turn.

Early in 1646, an intriguing little book came forth from Giles Calvert's press. Free-Grace, or, The Flowings of Christ's Blood Freely to Sinners by John Saltmarsh—at that time rector of Brasted in Kent and shortly to assume a chaplaincy at headquarters of the New Model Army—evoked caustic rebuttals from divines of high caliber and prominent profile, each sporting a nose for troublemakers and a willingness to controvert and condemn. This, prima facie, is mildly perplexing. For the demeanor of Saltmarsh's book is not obviously contentious. Rather, Free-Grace is studied in its disinclination to engage argumentatively with specific protagonists; it is neither thunderous nor acidulous, and makes scant effort to situate itself in the to-and-fro of the paper wars conducted in the mangled mid-century terrain of English practical divinity.

Near the center of Anselm Kiefer's watercolor, Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven, stands an inverted half-globe in the middle of a field. We know that it is winter, for patches of snow partially obscure the bare ground, which is itself marked by receding, interrupted lines of exposed roots and clumps of dirt where crops once grew and could, one imagines, grow again. Within the clear blue dome a small human figure in a dark green military uniform raises his right arm. His apparent salute is directed at no one in particular, since he is utterly isolated.

One of the most frequently-made statements about Christianity concerns its “historical” character—its grounding in a set of episodes in the life of the Israelite people that culminated in the climactic Christ-event, an event that brought into sharper focus than before a redemptive process that has been going on since the beginning of times and will last till the end of times. The assertion of this central aspect of Christian self-understanding has often gone hand in hand with a statement of what the Hindu philosophical-religious traditions are alleged to have lacked, namely, a historical sense. It is charged that Hindu thinkers believed that individuals are chained to never-ending cycles that do not lead anywhere, with all sense of meaning or purpose thus drained from temporal existence.1 A clear statement of such a demarcation comes from Alan Richardson, who states, specifically in the European context, that “ ‘Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him’ (Rom 6:9) … is the text which changed the outlook of European man upon history…. The European mind was freed by the proclamation of God's saving act in history from the fatalistic theory of cyclical recurrence which had condemned Greek historiography to sterility.”2 The Christian faith is believed to have liberated humanity from the tortuous cosmological circles of eternal recurrence, once in the world of late antiquity when it was still a fledgling in the milieu of Hellenistic mystery cults and much later in colonial British India when it came into contact with the patterns of classical Hindu thought. It is almost as if as an appendix to Saint Augustine's famous remark, “God did not create the world in time, but with time,”3 Christian theologians in his wake had added, “Therefore, Christianity did not come into the world in history, but with history.”

This essay is about broadening the perspective from which we view the origins of Christianity. The vehicle is a gospel by now perhaps as familiar to students of the New Testament as the canonical four, the Gospel of Thomas. It is well known among specialists that the content of this gospel overlaps with that of the synoptic tradition roughly by half. Also well known, perhaps, is that it presents this commonly-held content in a very different form, the sayings collection, and by consequence, under the supposition of a different theological paradigm: wisdom theology. So, here is a different gospel, a wisdom gospel, in which the words (λóγοι) of Jesus take center stage. Since Helmut Koester and James M. Robinson placed it within the context of Walter Bauer's theory about the diverse nature of earliest Christianity,1 the Gospel of Thomas has become a prime illustration of that diversity. It can help us see the potential of the Jesus tradition to develop in directions we could scarcely fathom before. But can it tell us more?

In his influential 1954 study, Johannes Munck proposed that one of Paul's self-perceived purposes as a missionary was to hasten the parousia of Christ by bringing in the “full number of the nations” (Rom 11:25).1 Outside of this theory there have been few attempts to investigate what Paul understood his mission to be.2 Perhaps this is because it is notoriously difficult to study an author's intentions. Or, more probably, since the difficulty of interpreting authorial intentions has not deterred Munck or other Pauline critics, perhaps this is because some texts in the Pauline corpus seem to offer a very clear answer to the problem. These passages play a central role in scholarship on the “purpose problem.”3 One of them is Gal 1:16, wherein Paul reveals that he became an apostle in order to preach about Jesus τοῖϛ ἔθνεσιν (to the nations). This statement seems straightforward enough.4 Another text is 1 Cor 9:19–22, wherein Paul admits that his missionary tactics serve his (apparent) overall goal of “winning” (κερδήσω) individuals. These verses, and a few others like them, have been sufficient for L. J. Lietaert Peerbolte and John Knox to conclude that the apostle understood his task to be primarily one of preaching. Lietaert Peerbolte offers an abridged version of his position when he states, “for Paul the character of his work can be summarised as ‘preaching the gospel.’”5

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, a liturgical composition whose fragments were discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls, comprises thirteen songs that describe the heavenly temple and the angels who serve in it as priests and whose main ritual duty is to praise and glorify God.1 These topics are taken commonly to indicate that the Songs was composed in priestly circles, stems from classical priestly traditions, and reflects a priestly agenda and worldview. Thus, for instance, a priestly provenance of the Songs was entertained by Johann Maier.2 Israel Knohl also detected a continuation of priestly traditions and conceptions in the Songs.3 The prominent proponent of this view is Rachel Elior, who presented a sweeping synthesis according to which a direct and continuous tradition leads from biblical priestly literature, through sectarian writings from Qumran—and the Songs in particular—to Hekhalot literature. In her view, these texts exhibit numerous thematic, ideological, and terminological affinities that prove that they are parts of a single, well-defined stream of tradition, nurtured by priestly circles.4

The last few years have seen a renewed interest in the study of papyrological remains as a means of shedding light on early Christianity.1 To add further evidence to this discussion, I draw attention to two papyri in Yale University's Beinecke Library. In 1997, Yale acquired several papyri from Galerie Nefer in Zürich. The lot contained papyri ranging in date from the Ptolemaic era to the Medieval period. Two of these pieces (both, unfortunately, without specific provenance) appear to be Christian textual amulets.

The Serekh or “Community Rule” (in all its variant manuscript forms) is one of the most famous of all the Dead Sea scrolls. It is commonplace to see it as referring to a sect of celibate men; the assumption is that it “contains no allusions to the presence of women in the group which it regulates.”1 However, in an important study, Eyal Regev has recently challenged the notion that celibate men are the focus of the Serekh texts, or of any manuscript in the scrolls corpus, by stressing that there are no explicit statements that deal with the issue of sexual asceticism, unlike what is found in monastic rules, or among the Shakers. Rather, other yaḥad documents (e.g., 4Q502 Ritual of Marriage or 1QSa Rule of the Congregation) refer to marriage, reproduction, and children.2 If this is so, why assume that the Serekh can only refer to a group of celibate men, even without explicit mention of women and children? Regev's view has essentially been the position of Lawrence Schiffman for many years, given the numerous references to issues of women and family in the halakhic texts of the scrolls corpus.3

Paul's correspondence with the Corinthian congregation chronicles the story of an absent leader trying to encourage an often wayward congregation to hold fast to his message of God's reconciling action in Jesus. As the conclusion to 2 Cor 2:14–7:4,1 a unit in which Paul explores the nature of his apostolic relationship with the Corinthian congregation, 2 Cor 7:5–13a portrays Paul's pastoral relationship with the Corinthians as near its breaking point.2 In this passage, Paul looks back to a time (before his current tentative reconciliation with the Corinthians) when Paul's trusted associate Titus had brought him comforting news of the Corinthians’ repentance and renewed faithfulness to the Pauline apostolate.3 Previous studies of Paul's practice of pastoral care in 2 Corinthians have focused on comparing his approach with those advocated in Greco-Roman philosophy. Other studies of 2 Corinthians have attempted to uncover the background of Paul's theology of reconciliation in Isaiah and other texts from Israel's scriptures and have emphasized his appropriation here of the Isaianic motif of comfort from the so-called “Book of Consolation” (Isaiah 40–55). Through an examination of Paul's language of grief (λυπέω/λύπη) and comfort (παρακαλέω/παράκλησιϛ) in 2 Cor 7:5–13a, however, a more complex picture of the roots of Paul's approach to the care of the Corinthian congregation emerges. As I will show, Paul's language of grief and comfort in 2 Cor 7:5–13a differs from broader Greco-Roman understandings of these concepts, such as those we find in the writings of Epictetus. In this pericope Paul draws on his interpretation of the cycle of grief and comfort in not just Second Isaiah but also Lamentations 1–2 in order to call the Corinthians back to faithfulness to the gospel and to give voice to their own experience of loss and consolation.

The author of the Pentateuch is famously unknown. There are various ancient speculations about the relative roles of God and Moses in the production of the text,1 and there is a plethora of modern investigations into the Bible's constituent documents and the authors responsible for them, but the biblical text itself is silent. The biblical narrator never identifies himself or herself2 and never narrates in the first person; rather he or she speaks “out of the void, in an authoritative voice that masks any authorial presence.”3

A growing consensus recognizes that the differences among Christians in the late second and early third centuries were neither as obvious nor as great as representatives of later orthodoxy would have us believe, and that what divided Christians in this period were not so much different beliefs and ideas as different hermeneutical and ritual practices. This article approaches the same conclusion from a different angle: from the perspective of potential recruits to Christianity, drawing on social-scientific models of conversion. For them, the peculiarities of doctrine and even of practice that obsess ancient polemicists and modern scholars were often largely invisible. While those features could take center stage for mature converts—and hence in retrospective accounts of conversion—they seem to have played little role in bringing people to specific versions of the faith in the first place. Rather, for many Christian recruits, the road to “orthodoxy” or “heresy” began not in ideological attraction, but in attachments to family, friends, and patrons already inside the group.

Charles Thomson (1729–1824) is best known as the first translator of the Septuagint, or Greek Old Testament, into English—or for that matter into any modern language. He is less well known as the first American translator of the New Testament, for his four volumes included the New Testament as well as the Old.1 His achievements are remarkable, for he was no professional scholar but a layman—early American patriot, Secretary to the Continental Congress, and friend of Thomas Jefferson—who taught himself Greek in order to carry out the task. Born in Ireland in 1729, he arrived in America as an orphan at the age of ten, learned Latin, went into business, and became an activist in resisting the repressive measures of the British government, particularly the Stamp Act.

Apocalyptic studies flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. This interest probably had something to do with the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and their effects, but I won't go into that issue today. In 1970, Klaus Koch's book Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik was published in Germany. In 1972 it appeared in English under a title more friendly to scholars: The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic. The subtitle, however, preserved the edginess of the original: A Polemical Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and Philosophy.1 My favorite chapter is the one entitled “The Agonized Attempt to Save Jesus from Apocalyptic.” The main title of the English version, as well as the title of the chapter I just mentioned, unfortunately converted a respectable German noun into the substantive use of an adjective with a vague referent.

This essay seeks to put to rest the notion that John Milton was an antinomian, by offering a concise summation of the relevant chapters of De doctrina Christiana that discuss his views on the covenants, the law and the gospel, and Christian liberty.1 Defining antinomian is a difficult task, as its manifestations throughout history have not been monolithic.2 During the seventeenth century in England, two kinds, broadly speaking, existed: 1) doctrinal antinomianism; and 2) licentious antinomianism.

One salient characteristic of our current situation is the emergence of a growing consensus among theologians and biblical scholars alike that the time has come to “dethrone” historical criticism as the reigning paradigm of scriptural exegesis for the sake of recovering a theological interpretation of the Bible on behalf of the church.1 To illustrate this new development, I have chosen to focus on the arguments of three prominent biblical scholars, each of whom has made a sustained case about the negative effects of historical criticism upon theological exegesis: They are Brevard S. Childs, Christopher R. Seitz, and Dale B. Martin. All three scholars have close ties to Yale and, not surprisingly, they bear a sort of family resemblance to one another inasmuch as their work partakes of theological themes and concerns that have been prominent at that school in recent decades. Notwithstanding their antagonistic posture toward historical criticism, all three are gifted practitioners of the very method whose dominance they seek to overturn. Since I am not a biblical scholar, I must enter into discussion with them as a theologian who is equally concerned about the relations between biblical studies and theology. At the outset, however, it is necessary to clarify that my own theological orientation prevents me from embracing their call to depose historical criticism. As a liberal Protestant for whom historical-critical interpretation of both the biblical and the post-biblical tradition is constitutive of theology's proper task, their initial premise that historical criticism is somehow inimical to a theological treatment of the Bible strikes me as false and misleading. Contrary to the impression given by their explicit formulations, it appears that the real target of their polemics is not historical scholarship per se but, rather, the normative uses to which it is put in theologies informed by it.

In marked contrast to much of twentieth-century psychology and philosophy, prevailing accounts of affect, emotion, and sentiment in the eighteenth century took these phenomena to be rational and, to a certain extent, cognitive.1 Because of a combination of disciplinary diffusion and general lack of physicalist assumptions, accounts of affectivity in the eighteenth century also tended to be quite flexible and nuanced. This is particularly true of an influential stream of Anglo-Scottish and German thought on morality, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. Following Shaftesbury, many of the most prominent philosophers of the century regarded affective states and processes as playing a crucial role in accounts of value. In most cases, this tendency was combined with a sort of anti-rationalism, that is, with a tendency to minimize the role of reason in everything from common sense perceptual knowledge to religious belief. Hutcheson's moral sense theory and his well-known and influential criticisms of moral rationalism exemplify this trend.2 It is perhaps more pronounced in Lord Kames, who followed the lead of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in aesthetics, moral theory, philosophy of religion, anthropology, and history.3 In Germany, this stream of thought was quite well-received by philosophers both inside and outside the dominant Wolffian tradition.4 Particularly important and influential in this respect were Johann Georg Hamann, who drew upon Hutcheson, Hume, and the “Common Sense” school to defend a conception of faith as “sentiment (Empfindung),” and Johann Gottfried Herder, a polymath and philosophical pioneer whose work in psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, biblical criticism, and theology consistently stresses the fundamental role of passion, affect, and sensibility in every aspect of human culture.5

The anonymous “Incipit fides Nicaena” is a unique, though much ignored, Latin text from the later fourth century. Its only critical edition, from a sole ninth century codex, was first prepared in 1913 by Cuthbert H. Turner, under the title of Commentarius in Symbolum Nicaeanum.1 Turner's version was reprinted in the first volume of the Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum (1958).2 There has been almost no further scholarly work done on this text since Turner's edition, nor has it been translated into any European language.3 As a result, no questions have been asked about the bearing of this work on post-Nicene doctrinal history as our understanding of the Nicene-“Arian” conflicts has been reformulated over the last two decades. In this essay, I want to address this gap in our understanding, although it must be said that there are more questions than answers raised by the existence of this small document. Specifically, we will see how this unique text sheds light on the theological influence that the Nicene Creed began to have in western churches in the second half of the fourth century. An attempt will also be made to demonstrate how this primitive explanation of the Creed offers an indication of its own approximate date and context.

The present study constitutes the seventh member of a series of articles1 in which I publish Armenian lists of biblical books. This article contains, principally, the poetic list attributed to Aṙak‘el of Siwnik‘, a well-known medieval Armenian poet, savant, and scholar who lived from the mid-fourteenth century until 1409. Aṙak‘el was the nephew of the famed theologian and systematician Grigor Tat‘ewac‘i (1344?–1409), whose own canon list was published earlier in this series.2 I am basing my text of Aṙak‘el's list on that published in the work of Ter-Movsesian on the Armenian Bible, which I present in a somewhat emended form and with an English translation below. Ter-Movsesian apparently published Aṙak‘el's text from a manuscript that in his day was in the possession of the distinguished scholar Grigor Xalat‘eanc‘.3 The fate of this manuscript is unknown; it is not to be identified with any of the copies published here. Ter-Movsesian was also aware of another copy then in Eǰmiacin bearing the number 599. This Miscellany, copied in 1660 in an unknown place, is now preserved as number 702 in the Maštoc‘ Matenadaran in Erevan. The text appears on 186r–189v.4