Commentators have long noted that God's commandment to Noah to bring all animals onto the ark exists in two intertwined versions in the biblical text. In the first version, Noah is told to bring two of every species: “And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female” (Gen 6:19 nrsv). In the second version, however, the animal kingdom is divided into pure and impure species: “Take with you seven pairs of all pure animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not pure, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth” (Gen 7:2–3). Noah then sacrifices some of the pure animals and birds after the flood (Gen 8:20).

According to the least charitable view of Cyril's part in the “Nestorian controversy,” it was for him nothing more than that—a political scheme to eject a man whose scrutiny he had come to fear from a see whose power he had always envied. This account suggests that his apparent tergiversations tell us nothing of his theology: as a Christian he believed what the rest of Christendom believed, but as a prince of the church he turned his coat whenever this would serve to disguise his malice or change the wind. The more generous account reproaches Cyril not with bad faith but with bad logic: throughout his work, he oscillates between conflicting paradigms, in one of which the true subject of Christology is the Word who assumes the flesh, while in the other Christ has only the “compositional” unity that results from the coming together of two natures. The first prefigures the Chalcedonian shibboleth “one person in two natures”; the second Cyril himself encapsulated in the formula “from two natures,” which can be taken to entail that after the union there were no longer two natures but one. That Cyril himself drew this conclusion, contradicting the Chalcedonian Definition before he had heard it, is put beyond doubt for many by his defiant reiteration of a formula that he derived without knowing it from Apollinarius: “one nature [phusis] of the Word enfleshed.”

The Hellenization of Christianity is a long-standing and notoriously contentious historiographical construct in early Christian studies. While it has been deployed in surprisingly fluid ways, most scholars associate the thesis with Adolf von Harnack, for whom it acquired a decidedly critical valence. The “Hellenic spirit”—a concept Harnack usually left undefined—constituted a threat to the undogmatic gospel of Jesus. Whenever this adversarial Hellenic spirit triumphed, as it inevitably did, it corroded an authentic living Christianity into an institutionalized, dogmatic religion. For many others, both before and after Harnack, the Hellenization of Christianity has signaled a similar narrative of decline. The teachings and way of life that marked an authentic Christianity often stood in a disjunctive relationship with Greco-Roman culture, especially its philosophies. The influence of the latter precipitated a debasement of Christianity, the ossification of its teachings, or more seriously, the infiltration of heresy.

Given the multiplicity of legal interpretations and opinions, the question of the place of legal debate within early rabbinic literature of late antiquity—both as textual practice and as hermeneutical and legal theory—has occupied a particularly busy space within recent scholarship. This question centers on several issues of broad significance for the history of rabbinic Judaism and its literature: Does this phenomenon (if we can speak of it in the singular) represent a defining characteristic of rabbinic culture overall, or rather an aspect better attributed to specific times, places, and rabbinic “schools”? Did it emerge and develop internally within rabbinic Judaism, or is it, on the one hand, the continuation of antecedents in the pre-rabbinic, late Second Temple period, or, on the other hand, the result of external influences or pressures (e.g., Greco-Roman or early Christian) of a later time? Does such legal multivocality reflect the actual nature of either/both rabbinic jurisprudence or/and pedagogy, or the editorial choices of the later anonymous redactors of the composite and anthological texts that have come down to us (or, as I shall demonstrate, both)? Finally, what are its hermeneutical and theological underpinnings (as well as sociopolitical ramifications)? While these four questions will frame what follows, it is the latter two that will particularly demand our attention. They will be addressed, whether explicitly or implicitly, in several comparative textual analyses that will constitute the body of this article.

A trustworthy guide to all students of Christian antiquity, Peter Brown is Princeton University's Rollins Professor Emeritus of History. Born in Dublin in 1935, Brown was influenced early on by the L’École des Annales, a group who took its name from their work in the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale. These forward-thinking scholars sought to break from traditional historiography in order to pay attention to all levels of society, taking into account not so much a seemingly monolithic doctrine, which emerges only retrospectively, but the collective concerns of a larger and more complex society. L’École des Annales formed Brown in such a way that he has helped generations of academics pay attention to more than just major players and canonical doctrines. Rather, they read the traditional narratives in the contexts of wider cultural, economic, demographic, religious and familial concerns, mundane matters unavoidably shaping how any group of persons thinks of historical issues. He accordingly opens this gargantuan work by admitting his debt to modern French historiography—singling out the sociologist and philologue, Louis Gernet (d. 1962)—who stressed how the memorable and well-cataloged aspects of a people actually invent nothing. Rather, Gernet asserted, the elite portion of any given people reflects and thus captures what the many below hold dear. Given this lifelong influence, it is no surprise that Brown would eventually turn his erudition into a study on a common universal that instantaneously unites as well as divides, one that characterizes both elite and plebe alike—money.

In Ezek 37:15–28 the prophet Ezekiel is instructed to inscribe two “sticks” (Hebrew ), one for Judah and one for Joseph, and to unite them in a visual display meant to signify God's intention to reunite the former kingdoms of Judah and Israel. This intended meaning is made clear in the accompanying oracle (vv. 21–28), which explicitly proclaims this interpretation of the act. This form of prophetic announcement, in which a conspicuous action is followed by an oracle that is, in part or in whole, an interpretation of it, is often referred to as a symbolic action, or “sign act.” Whereas other sign acts in the Hebrew Bible strive for a simple and clear relationship between the act and the prophecy that they introduce, this one is more complex, both in its form and in the hermeneutical relationship between the act and its interpretation.

Writing a biography challenges us in fundamental ways as scholars of religion, as historians, and as human beings. We are forced to reckon with the implicit and explicit theological commitments of religious persons, the ways they inhabited the world, the sometimes “strange country” that is the past, and the varied ways in which our subjects took for granted things by which we find ourselves and our age so troubled. While we may eschew “taking sides” in our attempts to be good scholars and under the noble goal of not wanting simplistically and reflexively to impose our contemporary moral judgments upon figures from the past, we cannot avoid discussing the moral choices historical actors made, assessing their prominence in their time, their influence on their broader surroundings, and their legacy beyond their times. All of these factors have great bearing on how we narrate the lives of historical figures and how we represent them in the present. James Baldwin's impassioned claim that it is with “great pain and terror [that] one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view” might sound a bit overly deterministic, but it is worth remembering when thinking self-consciously about how we critically assess and evaluate those about whom we write. Grant Wacker's new biography of Billy Graham, America's Pastor, invites the reader along to grasp more fully what this looks like as Wacker, a self-described “partisan of the same evangelical tradition Graham represented,” masterfully evokes and unfolds Graham as a shaper of public consciousness and a spokesperson for millions of “ordinary Americans.” This work possesses the virtues of the careful and considered reflections of a seasoned historian's analysis of the life of a famous religious leader who is deeply admired by many Americans. It is about the closest we will get to a full appreciation of Graham the man and Graham the icon.

It was Franz Overbeck who, in his attack on Harnack, referred to Eusebius's work as “[that] of a hairdresser for the emperor's theological periwig,” and the eminent historian Jacob Burckhardt who declared Eusebius to be “the most objectionable of all eulogists” and “first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity.” The summary judgment of such luminaries has aided the tendency to write off the bishop of Caesarea as a hopeless ideologue. In recent decades, a shift has been underway to recalibrate the picture we have of Eusebius, with robust scholarship arguing in support of his work as an historian and biblical scholar. The aim has been in part to distance Eusebius from Constantine, a proximity that is the source of much of the modern consternation with the bishop, given modernity's own genealogical unease with the relation between religion and politics. Whatever Eusebius's actual relations with the emperor, however, his rhetoric of apparently unequivocal exaltation of Constantine endures. Yet this, too, requires reassessment.

This dissertation examines the explicit and implicit currency of indigenous religious thought on political, moral, and social formations from precolonial through colonial to postcolonial Ghana. It advances new answers to debates in Ghana about the role, if any, indigenous religion has to play in a modern Christian-dominated public sphere that simultaneously defines itself as secular by situating these debates in the history of the suppression and appropriation of so-called “undesirable customs” and their agents by both British and Ghanaian government officials. Based on archival research (colonial reports, government records, legal documents, newspapers, diaries, etc.) and a dozen oral interviews (with former and current politicians, indigenous religious priests, chiefs, and elders), (Un)Desirable Customs argues that despite its “unpopularity” and decline, indigenous religion critically shaped the construction of the colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian state. I highlight the inherent paradox in how the state morally and culturally stigmatized indigenous religious beliefs and practices, in an attempt to perform certain conceptions of secular modernity and Christian morality, yet, at the same time, appropriated indigenous religious rituals and symbols. These contradictory measures, I argue, are better understood as strategies of purifications that the state has enacted and continues to perform on itself in its attempt to define itself as “modern.” My study fundamentally shifts the attention from Christianity and Islam in relation to politico-moral formations to a focus on indigenous religion.

The Soul of the World is based on the Stanton Lectures delivered by Roger Scruton at the University of Cambridge. Much of the book draws upon and elaborates themes developed previously by the author, but in a tone that is “more conversational than scholarly” (vii). This revisiting of familiar themes, however, does not result in a series of rehashed essays carelessly strung together, nor does its tone convey a lack of intellectual rigor. This is not a philosophy-lite text but a carefully crafted and elegant meditation on the prospect of religious belief in the frequently hostile milieu of late modernity.