Nearly a century ago, Paul Volz, who is known primarily for his research on early Jewish eschatology, wrote a provocative analysis of the divine spirit in Jewish antiquity; one quarter of this study is devoted to “the spirit hypostasis” (Geisthypostase), that is, spirit (πνεῦμα) interpreted as an independent being rather than a natural element, such as wind, or the spiritual element of humankind, such as the soul.1 In the context of this intriguing discussion, Volz observed that “Philo unequivocally describes the spirit as an hypostasis,” for it mediates God's own power (Mittelwesen), accomplishes concrete actions, such as visiting and leading to truth, and possesses particular characteristics, such as invisibility and complete wisdom. According to Volz, however, Philo understood this spirit hypostasis less as a personal being than a cosmic principle:

The personal character of the Philonic pneuma normally retreats into the background, despite its hypostatic character. The reason for this lies probably in Stoic influence, from which Philo took over the panpsychic pneuma, and moreover in the Philonic conception of the Logos, alongside which the pneuma could never fully be developed.

Unlike Christianity, which regards the word “Pharisee” as synonymous with “hypocrite,” “legalist,” and “petty-bourgeois,” Jews have always understood Pharisaism as the correct and trustworthy side of Judaism. Since the eighteenth century, all disputants who participated in the great controversies and schisms within Judaism have claimed to represent the true heirs of the Pharisees. For example, adherents of the strong anti-Hasidic movement initiated by R. Eliyahu of Vilna in the second half of the eighteenth century, who are usually referred to in literature by the negative appellation “opposers” (םירננחמ), referred to themselves by the positive title “Pharisees” (םישורפ). When the Reform movement was founded in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the goal of reforming the Jewish religion to make it more “modern” and acceptable to its neighbors, the reformers perceived themselves as the true heirs of the Pharisees. In his important study of the Pharisees and Sadducees, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders, of Wissenschaft des Judentums and an important spokesman for the radical wing of the Reform movement, formulated the view of the flexible open-minded Pharisees, who reformed Judaism to the point of contradicting the laws set out in the Pentateuch, in order to accommodate them to their changing needs. Geiger's opponents easily produced evidence that negated his findings and proved beyond doubt that they, in their conservative strain, were the real heirs of Pharisaism. To his opponents, Geiger was a representative of the detestable Sadducees or their later counterparts, the Karaites.

The use of archaeological materials for interpreting New Testament texts poses many problems. While many archaeologists have interpreted the Hebrew Bible, this early interface of archaeology and the study of the Hebrew scriptures is due in part to the fact that the relation-ship between biblical texts and the realia from Palestine seemed more direct. Since archaeological materials tend to deal with mainstream culture and since the texts from Israel and Judah were connected to institutions that were part of that area's dominant culture, the study of archaeology has contributed much to an understanding of the Hebrew scriptures.

Burton Y. Berry gave a unique silver tetradrachm to the American Numismatic Society in 1959. The obverse of the coin bears the diademed and draped bust of a Ptolemaic king wearing sideburns, and, in the left field behind the king's portrait, a six-pointed star or comet (*). The reverse bears an eagle facing left on a thunderbolt, an inscription ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ (“of Ptolemy the king”), a six-pointed star or comet in the right field, and a monogram (ΠΑ) in the left field in front of the eagle. Dawson Kiang first published the tetradrachm in 1962. Dating it to the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–145 BCE), Kiang supposed that the portrait was an effigy of that monarch. In this article, I shall identify the portrait with Ptolemy V Epiphanes and submit a new hypothesis about the origin of his surname in 199/8 BCE.

The noted Provencal antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), perhaps the most dedicated of an international circle of acquaintances studying and collecting classical antiquities in the early seventeenth century, took an especially keen interest in ancient gems. With his friend, the painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), he planned an extensive publication on the subject that unfortunately never saw completion. Although Peiresc focused most of his attention on collecting Roman gems portraying classical iconography, he was also intrigued by the enigmatic series of magical gems—as were many others in the Renaissance, who considered the gems to be the products of early Gnostic heretics. A correspondence between Peiresc and Rubens in 1623, frequently cited in the modern literature, discusses the putative meaning of an amulet in Rubens's collection depicting a bell-shaped object thought to represent the “divine womb.” The gem is a Renaissance forgery based on genuine ancient examples; the concurrent—and correct—identification of this puzzling type as a uterus, however, contrasts markedly with the fanciful interpretations later fashionable in the nineteenth century.

This paper discusses the issue of “Christian” identity customarily defined by its distinctiveness. I wish to start with a biographical observation: The classics school that I entered in April 1939 in Frankfurt am Main was under the same roof as the Jewish high school. This struck me as very peculiar given the propaganda and political activity of the late thirties in Nazi Germany. The Jewish high school was named after Samson Rafael Hirsch, the famous Jewish scholar and rabbi of nineteenth-century Frankfurt. On our side of the building there was nobody who would answer my questions about the school, and before long the object of my boyish inquisitiveness ceased to exist. As part of the German war machine, a military censorship complex took over the Jewish part of the building and closed the Jewish high school. The Jewish students and their teachers disappeared. We, the students of the non-Jewish part of the building, wondered during study breaks where they and the many Jews in the neighborhood of our school had gone. As the yellow star on the clothes of Jewish fellow citizens appeared, it became very obvious to us youngsters that there were fewer and fewer Jewish people around. As the Nazis established a store “for Jews only” at the trolley stop near our school, the pain and hunger of the people with the Star of David showed more and more on their faces. Their number visibly dwindled.

In Romans 4 Paul appealed to the precedent of the patriarch Abraham to argue three points on the basis of the Jewish scriptures. First, righteousness was reckoned to Abraham because of his faith and not because of his observance of the law (Rom 4:1–8); second, righteousness was reckoned to Abraham before Abraham's circumcision (4:9–12); and third, God's promise to Abraham and his “seed” came through faith, not through the Mosaic Law (4:13–17a). All three points are based on Paul's interpretation of Gen 15:6 and closely related texts. Paul appealed to Abraham in order to show that Abraham was meant to be the father not only of the circumcised but also of the uncircumcised (Rom 4:11–12,16–17). Paul also insisted that what was written about Abraham was meant not only for Abraham but also for those who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead (4:23–25).

One of the strangest texts to be included in recent collections of biblical pseudepigrapha is that known as the Ladder of Jacob. Known only from the Slavonic Tolkovaya Paleya, this text elaborates on the story of Jacob's dream at Bethel in Gen 28:11–22, adding details to the vision described there and containing a prayer and angelic revelation nowhere present in the biblical narrative. It is clear that the Slavonic text is a translation from Greek; it appears likely to me that the Greek is itself a translation from an original Aramaic or Hebrew text dating from, roughly speaking, the Second Temple period.

George Bernard Shaw once described the Book of Revelation as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,” but then modern literati have had a penchant for unkindness when it comes to the language of the Apocalypse. D. H. Lawrence found what he called its “splendiferous imagery” to be “distasteful,” and hailed it “perhaps the most detestable of all these books of the Bible.” Lawrence hated the book so much that he wrote a commentary on it. In his own monumental commentary on the Apocalypse, writing just a decade earlier than Lawrence, fellow Englishman R. H. Charles understood the book to be a product of linguistic incompetence and redactional ineptitude, egregious travesties that remained until modernity, when Charles corrected them with his own heavy-handed redaction and conjectured emendations.

The story of the four who entered pardes, or the orchard, is the crux interpretum of the study of ancient Jewish mysticism. The answer to the question of how much mysticism existed in rabbinic Judaism depends on the interpretation of this story. In the history of scholarship of the past several decades, two major approaches have been taken. One approach, spearheaded by Gershom Scholem, although by no means initiated by him, sees in this story a record or some testimony of a mystical experience. The various terms employed, and in particular the term pardes, are seen as expressive of a heavenly ascent into paradise, and thus as a testimony of a mystical experience. The other approach, which consciously seeks to tone down the mystical and ecstatic element of the pardes story, sees in this story a parable. If it is a parable, then we do not have a record or testimony of an event of a mystical nature. Of course, even if the story is parabolic, the question of the subject of the parable remains open. Ephraim E. Urbach, who first took this line of interpretation, suggested that the story is a parable, and not a mystical record. The story refers, however, to the study of maʿaseh merkabah (“the work or story of the divine chariot,” referred to in the first chapter of Ezekiel), and thus retains esoteric significance.

The theory of religious language advocated by the twelfth-century philosopher-jurist Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) contains an apparent paradox. Maimonides’ radical stance regarding the absolute unknowability of God leads him to an austere theology of negation, which appears to be incongruous with his representation of God as a moral agent or intellect. Through analysis of the functions of meaning and reference in Maimonides’ theory of language, as well as his explicit or implicit distinctions between literal, metaphoric, and symbolic uses of language in theological discourse, I argue that the purpose of the Maimonidean theology of negation is to establish the reference of the name “God,” thereby making possible a rationally disciplined constructivist theology. This article shows how Maimonides sought to include a certain type of religious anthropomorphism in a theology that upholds the wholly other nature of God.

The argument that the Gospel of Thomas is or is not independent of the canon has often turned on the issue of whether or not there are visible in the text of Thomas words or phrases that arose in the redactional efforts of the individual evangelists. If specific Lukan or Matthean redactional traits of a saying, for example, are present in the text of Thomas, then, the argument runs, the Gospel of Thomas must have post-dated and been derived from that author and work and not from some independent tradition. The argument has not yet been made, so far as I am aware, for influence in the other direction, that sayings of the community that produced the Gospel of Thomas have influenced the text of the Synoptic Gospels. The method used in this study is the same: where Thomas redaction is found in the text of Luke, then the text of Luke must post-date and be dependent on sayings formed in Thomas Christianity.

Studies of Benedict Spinoza's biblical interpretation rarely pay more than cursory attention to the contemporary context of that work. Analyses tend to focus on authors whom Spinoza singled out for attack in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, such as Moses Maimonides (died 1204) and a rabbi who later attacked him, Judah ibn Alfakhar (died 1235). After his excommunication in 1656, however, most of Spinoza's intellectual and social circle—those with whom he shared his philosophical ideas and surely his ideas about the Bible—were Christian, or of Christian background, and not Jews. Spinoza's Treatise was not conceived in a vacuum or in a segregated Jewish context, nor was it aimed primarily at Jewish readers. Among Christians, the work engaged a national debate, involving church, state, and the universities, about the authority and interpretation of the Bible. Great political as well as intellectual issues were at stake.

Of a total of twelve parables or similitudes appearing in Q, fully half are paralleled in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. The two writings share approximately forty separate sayings. The similarity between these collections extends beyond considerable shared content, however, to embrace a common genre, a common predilection for aphoristic and proverbial forms, a common concern with both practical and speculative wisdom, and a surprising lack of interest in the death and resurrection of Jesus. As the similarities between Q and the Gospel of Thomas are necessarily of a literary variety, attempts to explain them have naturally tended to favor documentary hypotheses. This is certainly true of the conservative claim that the Gospel of Thomas is dependent for its traditions on the synoptic gospels. The trend toward denying any such dependence, however, has hardly diminished the tendency to explain the two writings' common content, formal features, and theological motifs in terms of essentially literary connections. Helmut Koester, who is largely responsible for the status the Gospel of Thomas now enjoys as an early and valuable document, has argued that, if the Gospel of Thomas is not actually dependent on an earlier recension of Q, which it very well may be, it at least shares common sources with it.

The question of how human language functions in relation to God constitutes one of the most difficult problems in Christian theology. I contend that Christian notions of language about God should be constructed in light of christology, since both are concerned with the relationship between the human and the divine. Northrop Frye, drawing on the poetry and thought of William Blake, speaks of the importance of “the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present” in understanding how religious language works. This fundamental quality of double vision or tension characterizes the relationship between the human and the divine both in language about God and in christology. In this article I shall examine several aspects of the relationship between the human and the divine: first, the basic problem of theological language as discussed by George Lindbeck; second, the notion of theological language as metaphorical, as discussed by Sallie McFague; and third, christology as found in the Chalcedonian definition of Christian faith. I shall conclude that it is appropriate to construct notions of language about God in light of Chalcedonian christology.

Recently in this journal Allen D. Callahan argued for a bold, distinctive interpretation of Paul's Epistle to Philemon. Contrary to the conventional interpretation, Onesimus was not a (runaway) slave, but was Philemon's own estranged blood brother. Rather than an appeal for forgiveness for a fugitivus, or a request to retain a slave for further service, the Epistle to Philemon is the apostle's attempt to bring about reconciliation between two brothers. Callahan's thesis constitutes a powerful reminder of how the interpretation of each of Paul's letters, perhaps especially this shortest and most subtle letter, depends acutely upon the interplay between historical reconstruction of the original context and the text itself. Callahan calls for a reconsideration of the most basic, universal presupposition of the interpretation of the letter—that Onesimus was Philemon's slave.

I thank Margaret M. Mitchell for her thoughtful criticisms of my article on the interpretation of Paul's Epistle to Philemon. She has pointed out certain limitations of my arguments, both on the culpability of John Chrysostom as the earliest disseminator of the familiar interpretation that Onesimus is a slave and runaway, against which I have inveighed, and also in other areas where, in her parlance, my constructive arguments seem vulnerable. I am gratified that my admittedly unconventional reading has been engaged seriously and thoughtfully by a colleague well versed in both the Pauline corpus and patristic exegesis.

The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein counts among the most significant philosophical influences on Gordon Kaufman's recent theology. Yet important convergences between Kaufman's theological worldview and Wittgenstein's philosophical teaching remain unexplored. In this essay I shall examine a number of such convergences connected with the concept of the human. The thought of Stanley Cavell will play a central role in the discussion. Kaufman shares with the skeptical Wittgenstein revealed in Cavell's writings an abiding concern with the ordinary in human life—for example, everyday language, the human body—but both are interested in this ordinariness as the locus of ineradicable mystery. A richly textured treatment of the ordinary (and mysterious) situation of face-to-face human encounter emerges when relevant passages of Wittgenstein's, Cavell's, and Kaufman's writings are compared. This article will develop some of the implications of this comparison that hold particular promise for theological anthropology. The orientation and concerns of the paper are thus primarily constructive.

Although not usually viewed as a manifestation of modern spirituality, hasidism strikingly resembles a product of the spiritual and ideological reorientation of Western religion in the post-Copernican world. Largely unaware of the philosophical and theological changes in European intellectual culture, many of the hasidic masters exhibited a sensitivity to the existential plight of humankind in the modern world.

Throughout the history of Christian thought the theological role of scripture as source of transcendent meaning has exercised considerable influence on the art and manner of biblical interpretation. In the early church the problems revolved mostly around the canon, specifically although not exclusively the New Testament, as defining the confines of scripture. The question arose, therefore, which biblical writings were divinely inspired and which were of doubtful origin. The latter were unacceptable for the Christian communities that had broken away from their ancestral Judaic religion. Even before the canon was fixed, however, the problems shifted from the divinely inspired composition of the Bible to its intrinsic signification; interpreters saw scriptural language itself as infused with theological content. As exegetical positions led to the development of credal statements that solidified into theological dogma, the early church established a link between biblical interpretation and sound doctrine. By enforcing sanctioned interpretations through effective excommunication, an ever more powerful church sealed the dominance of orthodoxy over heresy with the nearly divine force of ecclesiastical authority. In the church-dominated culture of the Middle Ages, the adequacy of scriptural interpretation—its method, its content, the credentials of its practitioners—often depended on its conformity with an expanding theological tradition.