“In art, as well as in poetry, the representation of these wild states of enthusiasm was apparently due to the imagination alone, for in prose literature we have very little evidence, in historic times, of women actually holding revels in the open air. Such a practice would have been alien to the spirit of seclusion which pervaded the life of womankind in Greece. … The festivals of the Thyiads were mainly confined to Parnassus.” Thus Sandys in the introduction to his justly admired edition of the Bacchae. Diodorus, on the other hand, tells us (4.3) that “In many Greek states congregations (βακχεῖα) of women assemble every second year, and the unmarried girls are allowed to carry the thyrsus and share the transports of the elders (συνενθουσιάζειν).” And since Sandys' day inscriptional evidence from various parts of the Greek world has confirmed Diodorus' statement. We know now that such biennial festivals (τριετηρíδες) existed at Thebes, Opus, Melos, Pergamum, Priene, Rhodes; and they are attested for Alea in Arcadia by Pausanias, for Mitylene by Aelian, for Crete by Firmicus Maternus. Their character may have varied a good deal from place to place, but we can hardly doubt that they normally included women's ὄργια of the ecstatic or quasi-ecstatic type described by Diodorus, and that these often, if not always, involved nocturnal ὀρειβασíα or mountain dancing.

It is a fact which is not justly appreciated that the Sun and the Moon had almost no cult in the early and classical age of Greece except for the Sun at Rhodes, a cult which is reasonably suspected to be of foreign origin. Helios and Selene were, of course, considered to be gods, but in mythology. Those scholars who have eagerly tried to find evidence for their cult ought to remember the statements of Aristophanes and Plato that Helios and Selene were barbarous gods. These two certainly knew the cults of their compatriots better than we do. On the other hand, the Sun cult was very popular and wide-spread in Roman times and became finally the last State religion of the Empire. It came from the Orient, and the mediator and the reason of its popularity was astrology. So the question arises: why did the Greeks accept the astrology which they rejected in an earlier age, and why did they begin to pay a cult to Helios to whom they had shown no veneration in earlier times? Did they simply succumb to a foreign religion or were there intrinsic reasons which contributed to this result?

Though Amos stands at the beginning of literary prophecy, the book that bears his name shows evidence of clear-cut, careful organization: (A) The great Judgment Speech against the nations (chapters 1 and 2); (B) Three addresses beginning with the phrase “Hear ye this word” (3: 1–15; 4: 1–13; 5: 1–6); (C) Three charges beginning with “Woe” (5: 7–17; 5: 18–27; 6: 1–14); (D) Five visions, four beginning with “Thus the Lord showed me” (7: 1, 4, 7; 8: 1), one with “I saw” (9: 1); and (E) An ending of consolation and hope (9: 11–15).

The Omri dynasty, in Israel, despite its relatively brief career of about half a century, is of unusual significance for the history of Judaism in general and of prophecy in particular. For the prophetic struggle against the House of Omri was motivated by principles that were inherent in prophecy.

This inscription, which was discovered some years ago in the Ceramicus, has been assigned on epigraphic grounds to the middle of the fifth century and Peek has conjectured with some probability that it is a memorial to the men who fell in the battle of Coronea. Their defeat and death is ascribed to supernatural intervention and the development of this topic has given the poem a form which bears little resemblance to that of the usual official epigram of the classical period. Apart from its historical and literary interest, the inscription is of importance as a religious document and the primary aim of this article is to examine its language in some detail, with a view to elucidating the religious ideas underlying it and to determining, if possible, its relation to the event which it records.

The commonly accepted idea of the evolution of the Delphian mantic may be outlined thus: There was first an oracle of the Mother Earth, working by incubation (cf. p. 16, later). Later on, Apollo took possession of it, but its character remained unchanged: the believers continued to receive revelation in dreams. Afterwards Dionysos went to Delphi and with him ecstasy entered into the cult. It was not until then that oracles were given by an inspired, i.e. ecstatic, priestess called Pythia.

There is hardly a point in the whole Quartodeciman question that has not, at one time or another, been vigorously contested. Since the days when the Tübingen school interpreted the struggle to support their separation of the Fourth Gospel from the Johannine Tradition, there has grown up a veritable library of controversial literature on the subject. Perhaps the most judicious statement of the problem in English appeared in Stanton's The Gospels as Historical Documents (Part I, pp. 173–197), which was dependent upon Schürer's De Controversiis Paschalibus (1869). Since that time, however, the question has been re-opened by Schmidt's learned Excursus appended to his text of the Epistola Apostolorum. Dating this work in the 60's of the second century, he claimed that in Chapter 15 there was a reference to the Paschal controversy that confirmed his view. Furthermore, he contended that this section of the Epistola had once for all settled a number of uncertain problems. Chief among these was the significance attached by the Asiatic Church to the 14th of Nisan. Schmidt concluded from the words, “But do ye commemorate my death,” that on this day the Easterners celebrated the Passion. Henceforth it would be impossible to claim that the Quartodeciman rite implied a Christian “Passover” which commemorated the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist (pp. 600–601). Indeed, he went so far as to urge that the whole Asiatic practice was centered in the Passion to the exclusion of the Resurrection. Contrasting the Quartodeciman with the Catholic custom he wrote, “Dort Passah, hier Ostern!” (p. 579).

The history of the Church in North Africa, so far at least as the sources are concerned, begins for us in the year 180, and it begins with martyrdoms. At Carthage on July 17, Namphano of Madaura, called “Protomartyr” by Augustine, Miggin, Sanam, and six other Christians from Scili in Numidia were sentenced to death by the proconsul Saturninus and beheaded. The official record of their trial has been preserved to us in Greek and Latin and constitutes the oldest document in Africa's Church History.

In various mediaeval authors, writing in different localities and at different periods, there are a goodly number of quotations which obviously derive ultimately from a biblical text. These quotations, however, either are not found in exactly the form, in which they are quoted, in MSS. of the Bible, whether of Old Latin or of Vulgate versions, or, if they do occur in MSS., these are of a later date than the earliest author who uses the quotation. Since these quotations do appear in the liturgy of the Church, or in other texts which were used in worship, such as sermons, homilies, Saints' Lives, it is not illogical to suppose that their source is to be found, not in any special type of Bible text, but in the liturgy. As an illustration of this possibility I presented in this Review (XXXI, 1938, 41–51) a study of one of these quotations, the phrase viam universae carnis ingressurus, which occurs frequently in documents from the 11th century on. It does not occur in precisely this form in any biblical MS., although the substitution of carnis for terrae of the early MSS. is found in a MS. of the 13th century, but does occur in at least one liturgical text of the 11th century and in another which dates from the 13th century, if not earlier. The conclusion is certainly justified therefore that authors were indebted to the liturgy for this phrase and that the liturgical form influenced the reading in later biblical MSS.

My Design in these pages is to discuss, not the Incarnation, but the philosophy of incarnation as such, the word “incarnation” being interpreted very widely. What is commonly called the Incarnation in Christendom, at any rate when interpreted in the common way, is the birth and life of Christ more than 1900 years ago, that is to say a historical occasion, supposed to be unique in kind, in which one of the persons in the Godhead, although always God, actually became a man. To those who take their stand upon this historical fact (as they deem it) I have nothing to say. I cannot see that philosophers are compelled to accept such a datum, and I am not specially interested in the question whether, accepting it, they could accommodate it to their philosophical theology. Anything that is said about incarnation in general will presumably have a certain bearing, direct or indirect, upon the Incarnation and upon any problems that may remain when that is accepted as a datum; but I shall not try to draw the moral if there is one. What I want to discuss is whether there is any sense of “incarnation” in which incarnation is, metaphysically speaking, necessary, probable or plausible. Would a theologian who had never heard of Palestinian history incline from the natural (or inevitable) trend of his closer reflection upon deity towards the opinion (or constraining inference) that there must be some sort of incarnation of the Godhead? That seems to me to be a general philosophical problem of some interest to philosophical theologians. In any case it is the problem that I want to discuss here.

The pilgrim-diaries associated with Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (990–994), and Nikolás, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Munkaþverá, Iceland (1155–1159), commend themselves to historians of ecclesiastical Rome on more than one count. Both diaries include itineraries unusually detailed for their periods and in this regard are unique for the countries of origin and valuable in regard to the history of the regions traversed. More than this, and of particular moment for the historian of the medieval Church, both diaries devote considerable attention to sights seen in the Eternal City. Here these little works offer a welcome, in a sense intimate, view of Rome of the periods in question; for they tell us one very important thing that the medieval Baedekers do not, namely, just what two individuals elected to see or were shown or, equally significant, what two men chose to note down or especially remembered in the course of their tour of the city. The English diary with its systematic list of Roman churches — the titles often in a dubious Latin (see the individual items, especially pp. 275–276 below) — furnishes us, furthermore, with a little catalogue that, coming between the list of Leo III (806) and the list that the papal chamberlain Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III) compiled in 1192, fills an obvious gap. The Icelandic diary, though less important in this regard, gains in interest by including a number of secular monuments and considerable detail about the churches, wanting in the English work. Both texts are worthy of more study than has been devoted to them.

From the time of Origen and of Rufinus and St. Jerome the question of the apparent change of the apostle's name from Saul to Paul has interested students of the New Testament. The problem is due to the fact that the author of the Acts in briefly giving an account of Paul's meeting with the Roman governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paullus, and with the false prophet Elymas, simply states: “Then Saul (who also is called Paul) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, etc.” Before this verse in Acts the apostle's name is invariably given as Saul, and after this verse he is always called Paul, except in two passages where there is reference to the very beginning of his career, his conversion. In his letters the name Paul, and never Saul, is used.

The Bay Psalm Book, which was printed here in Cambridge three hundred years ago this summer, is something much more significant than a bibliographical rarity or a literary curiosity. Its early editions are, of course, choice items of Americana for collectors, and its verse, which at first sight seems so uncouth, has provoked the derision or sarcasm of unsympathetic critics who have done no more than glance at it. Unfortunately most people know little more about the book than these widely publicized facts. But the Bay Psalm Book deserves respectful consideration on other and better grounds, for it is the earliest literary monument of the English-speaking colonists on this continent; it is a key to an understanding of their religious life; and it was the fountain-head of that great stream of later American hymnody of which it is the direct spiritual ancestor.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a brief description of Existenz-philosophie as it appears in the work of three men—Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers—and to make a few critical comments. One special obstacle should be noted at the start. A summary always misses the particular shades of meaning which an author brings out as he develops his theme in his own words, and in this philosophy it is the special nuances which are particularly important. Existenz is in fact as much like poetry as it is like philosophy, and a large part of its flavor is lost when it is translated into plodding prose. It makes less, that is to say, of the appeal to objective, verifiable truth than of subjective experience in its individual aspect. So far as it makes use of universal, communicable forms these are aesthetic rather than intellectual, and resemble more nearly the imaginative projections of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche than the logical essences of, say, a Plato. This appears to be true even in Heidegger's case in spite of the fact that he inherited from his master, Husserl, an interest in the bracketed, “reduced” logical essence which is reminiscent of the Platonic form. In Heidegger's hands Phänomenologie by becoming Existenz has turned from the logical to the more imaginative and emotional side of experience. Existenz is thus a poetic and philosophical attempt to describe the subjective experiences of religion, and as such it depends for much of its appeal on its own medium of expression.

In an examination of the influence of the Book of Enoch on certain motifs in Milton's Paradise Lost, Mr. Grant McColley challenges the commonly accepted belief that Bruce was the first to restore to Western Civilization the knowledge of the existence of I Enoch, which had passed out of circulation during the early centuries of Christianity. Mr. McColley's belief that at least the existence of I Enoch was known to certain persons in the mid-seventeenth century and before rests on quotations from three popular travel books of the time: Sandys' Relation of a Journey (1615), Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), and Peter Heylyn's Cosmography (1652). These authors all agree that the Ethiopians, or Abyssinians, had books containing the ‘oracles’ or ‘writings’ of the patriarch Enoch.

Various views have been held in the past concerning the purpose of the sixfold chronology in Luke. “The breaking of this oppressive silence [since the time of Malachi] by the voice of the Baptist caused a thrill through the whole Jewish population throughout the world. Lk. shows his appreciation of the magnitude of the crisis by the sixfold attempt to give it an exact date.” From this we may pass to a somewhat calmer later view. “The evangelist is using here a form which he has taken over from an alien sphere. … It is derived from secular historiography, which has the habit of making prominent important events, especially those with which the principal narrative begins, by means of circumstantial datings and synchronisms.”

The exploration of the Greek settlements in South Russia has produced a fair number of epitaphs in verse, which for the most part repeat poetic commonplaces: but a find of 1931 from around Kertch, the ancient Panticapaeum, has distinct interest. It is a stele, broken off at the top and bottom: traces suggest that the top was decorated with a relief representing a man and his young attendant; his name and patronymic may have accompanied this relief. The epitaph, preserved entire, in lettering assigned by the editor to the end of the first century B.C. or the beginning of the first century A.D. and by Dr. Sterling Dow to ca. 40–ca. 100 A.D., runs as follows:

οὐ λόγον ἀλλὰ βίον σοφίης ἐτυπώσαο δόξαν,

αὐτοδαὴς ἱερῶν γινόμενος κριμάτων.

εὕδων οὖν, ‘Εκαταῖε, μεσόχρονος ἴσθ’ ὅτι θᾶσσον

κύκλον ἀνιηρῶν ἐξέφυγες καμάτων.

It is now some fifty-two years since the first modern edition appeared of any part of Hephaistion of Thebes' compendium of astrology. The editor very properly collected in his introduction the scanty facts relative to the author and the unknown friend to whom he dedicates his work. But, apparently a little annoyed by the too positive assertion of Salmasius that all astrologers of that date were pagans, he put forth the hasty theory that this astrologer was a Christian. He had indeed no difficulty in proving that a somewhat unorthodox or lax Christian might have been a devotee of astrology at the time, about A.D. 381, when it is likely that Hephaistion wrote; but he went too far in the further statement that “das Werk des Hephaestion selbst bietet sicherlich keinen positiven Anhaltspunkt, dass der Verfasser desselben Nicht-Christ gewesen sei.” This has been echoed by later writers, as A. Bouché-Leclercq, who says “Il est possible qu'Hephestion de Thebes … fût chrétien,” and Fr. Boll, writing shortly before 1912, when a good deal more of our author had been printed in the C(orpus) C(odicum) A(strologicorum) G(raecorum). He sums up Engelbrecht's arguments, that the work begins σὺν θεῷ and is dedicated to one Athanasios, who is called ὁσιώτατος (and by other complimentary superlatives) and so may have been a Christian priest, concluding that the theory of the writer's Christianity is arrived at “wohl mit Recht.” As it seems to me remarkable that three learned men, of whom one had edited the astrologer and the others had certainly read him, should have overlooked the cogent evidence that he was a pagan, I think it worth while to set forth the proofs, positive and negative.