Dura-Europos on the Euphrates has given us many surprises, and not the least of them was that from this outpost we should acquire a Feriale, or list of days with prescribed offerings, and that these holy days should be exclusively Roman, Imperial, or military. After preliminary publications by Rostovtzeff, under whose guidance the whole work has proceeded, the text was edited by Robert O. Fink, Allan S. Hoey and Walter F. Snyder with a commentary indispensable to students of Roman religion and Imperial history.

The fragment which is the subject of the present article contains Romans 4:23 ([ἐγ]ράϕη) — 5:3 (θλίψις) on the recto side and 5:8 ([ἡ)]μῶν) — 13 (ἁμαρ[τία]2) on the verso side of the leaf. It is the property of Dr. Leland C. Wyman of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, who bought it in Cairo on July 3, 1950. The dealer from whom it was purchased said that the fragment was brought to him by some Arabs; and that it was found at Fusṭâṭ, which lay a little to the northeast of the modern Old Cairo (Maṣr el-Qadîmeh).

John Colet (1466–1519) resolved the bewildering tensions in the relation of man and God by attributing as much as possible to God and as little as possible to man. Spontaneously he destroys nature in order to exalt grace, feeling, as did St. Bonaventura, that pious souls, careful of the divine majesty, ascribe all things to God. He castigates the arrogance of those who imagine that they can know the true or will the good without the aid of grace. No reiteration of the radical insufficiency of man and nature is excessive. The core of his piety is a religious rejection of the world in which “all that belongs absolutely and essentially to man (who is nothing if not weak, foolish, evil, vain, lost and nought; whose power is weakness, his wisdom folly, his will malicious, his acting an undoing, his accomplishment destruction) all, I say, that goes to make up man is condemned with one voice and one judgement of the Spirit throughout the entire Holy Scriptures of God.”

The history of Persia from its very beginning until today, from Cyrus the Great to Riza Khan Pehlevi — a history covering twenty-five centuries equally divided by the Arab conquest of the year 642 into a pre-Islamic and an Islamic period — has seen an uninterrupted and continuous association between Iran and Israel. Jews have been living on Iran's soil from the dawn of the first Persian empire on, as an inseparable part of Iran's national destiny and development. Jews were the eye-witnesses of all the historical events in Persia under every dynasty — the Achaemenids, Parthians and Sassanids, the Omayyads and the Abbasids, the Seljuks, Mongols, Safavids, and Kajars, under every ruler, Caliph, Sultan, Il-Khan, Emir or Shah. Jews were the contemporaries of all the manifold religious movements and sects that were born on Persian soil, such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Shiʻa, Sufism, Bahaism; they were companions of the great classical poets, of a Firdūsī, Ḥāfiz, Saʻadī, Jāmī, and of all the other great Persian masters of art, literature and philosophy who made their everlasting contributions to world culture.

I recently became aware that I had for a long time entertained certain preconceptions about the way in which Presocratic thinkers saw the world, without ever having seriously considered the evidence on which my belief was based. This I have now tried to do, with the results which are set forth in this paper. Since in any case it will deal, in a fairly general way, with problems concerning the interaction of philosophical and religious thought in early Greece, I hope it will have a certain interest, whether or not its readers agree with the thesis put forward. The perennial fascination of that topic has been enhanced in recent years by the discussion provoked by Werner Jaeger's book on The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, from which I take this sentence as a kind of text for my own reflections: “Though philosophy means death to the old gods, it is itself religion.”

Dr. George H. Williams' recent study on The Norman Anonymous of 1100 A.D., published as an extra number of this Review, may be taken as an excuse for delving once more into the highly suggestive pamphlets of this anti-Gregorian royalist. In a paragraph headed Christus per naturam, Christus per gratiam Dr. Williams, able and stimulating, discusses the Christology — perhaps we should say: political Christology — of that courageous mediaeval publicist, thereby commendably calling attention to a hitherto somewhat neglected topic: the bearing of Christology on the relationship between Church and State. It is, however, not the christological aspect of the natura-gratia problem which will be dealt with in the following pages, but the historical and doxographic sides of it. Dr. Williams, it is true, has indicated the immediate, or possibly immediate, sources of his author's political theories, but it would have exceeded by far the proper tasks of his analysis to trace every theorem back to its origins. Although the building up of an unbroken catena philologica is not intended here either, it may yet prove not quite useless to spread out in the present paper some material, casually collected and perforce incomplete, which might elucidate the adaptation to Christian thought of an axiom of Hellenistic political theory.

Among the 734 inscriptions included in the first volume of Frey's Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum there are twenty-one (CII 535–551e) which are listed as from the Jewish community of Porto, the ancient Portus Traiani. There have been so many misstatements and differences of opinion among scholars with reference to the Jews of Porto that a fresh study of the data is appropriate.

Eusebius of Caesarea occupies a unique position in ancient Christian thought. His central problem is to explain and justify a Christian society which is to transform the Roman Empire and which will become the new world civilization supplanting Hellenism and Judaism. Earlier thinkers do not face this problem. The Roman Empire is for them one of the powers ordained of God, but it is pagan and they expect it to remain so. Consequently the question of human government is only peripheral to their thought. Nor do later thinkers see the problem quite as Eusebius does. In the East, for example in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, the question of human government again becomes peripheral to Christian thought, and Eusebius has no successor as a “political theologian.” In the West, Augustine gives a general answer to the problem of a Christian society in a Christianized Empire, but his solution contradicts that of Eusebius. To Augustine, the structure of the Christian Roman Empire is still that of Babylon, and human society is still a mixture of two opposed cities, the earthly city and the city of God.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is the earliest and, for us, the single most important literary record of the Eleusinian Mysteries. These Mysteries were for a thousand years one of the crowning glories of Athens, the pride of her statesmen, poets, and orators, a focal point of piety which though intimately civic was at the same time panhellenic. The constant references to the cult in both prose and poetry attest its popularity and singular importance. Yet it remains a curious fact that in all Athenian literature, at least until Hellenistic times, there is no direct mention of the Homeric Hymn and scarcely anything which can reasonably be identified even as a reminiscence or echo of it. Apparently the Hymn was allowed to fall into almost total oblivion. Why this should have happened is a question that seems to merit some consideration. By the very nature of the problem the evidence is inadequate to assure definite conclusions, but it is hoped that the solution proposed, though necessarily tentative, may add somewhat to our understanding of an obscure but interesting period in the religious history of Athens.

In a recent article Professor Norman H. Baynes discussed the evidence for opposition to religious art prior to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy. In the course of his illuminating article, he called attention to an important fragment of patristic literature which was first published in recent years and which but for Professor Baynes might have remained unnoticed. It is an excerpt taken from the Miscellaneous Enquiries (Συμμικτὰ Zητήματα) by Hypatius of Ephesus, who was archbishop of this most important see from 531 to about 538 and in addition one of Justinian's most trusted theological advisers. Professor Baynes used the text to illustrate the fact that prior to the Iconoclastic Controversy “any general cult of the icons in such extreme forms as later appears in the apologies of the iconodules would seem dangerous and a wrongful use of a practice which was tolerated only in the interest of the weaker members of the church.” (p. 95). The text, however, is also important from other points of view. Since it is difficult Greek and since the trend of Hypatius' thought, though entirely logical, may not be clear at first sight, it is advisable to submit here a translation of the document, accompanied by explanatory notes. The writer gratefully acknowledges that he owes much to Diekamp and Baynes for an understanding of the document.

Ούκ ᾒδειτε ὃτι έν τοῖς τοῦ Πατρός μου δεῖ εἶναί με;

Several recent translators of the New Testament prefer the rendering, in my Father's house, to the alternative, in the things of my Father, about my Father's business. They have very early precedent for this, in Tatian's Diatessaron and the Syriac versions.

On two previous occasions I tried to show how neither Plato nor Aristotle held that God was unknowable, ineffable, and unnameable, how the tentative objections against the unknowability of the ideas raised in the Parmenides and Sophist are answered by Aristotle, how in the extant literature of Greek philosophy prior to Philo there is no conception of a God who is unknowable and unnameable and ineffable, how Philo arrived at the conception of an unknowable, ineffable, and unnameable God, how he may have meant it to be either an interpretation of Plato or something in opposition to him, and how the description of God as ineffable found in Albinus and Plotinus may have been due to the influence of Philo. We may add here that, though Plotinus attributes his conception of a hierarchy of three hypostases to Parmenides as reported by Plato and though it is also to that Parmenides that he may refer by the pronoun “he” in his statement, “he says that it (the One) cannot be spoken (ῥητòν) or described (γραπτóν),” neither the views which he attributes to Plato nor the language which he quotes from him are those of Plato. They are rather those of older interpreters of Plato, and among them Philo is to be included.

Diocletian, as we all know, included religion in his schemes for the regeneration of the Roman State and put forward a new formulation of paganism, by which he placed himself under the special protection of Jupiter, while his fellow Augustus, Maximian, stood under the protection of Hercules, and the Caesars, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, appointed in A.D. 293, owned as patrons Mars and Sol respectively. Several aspects of the new religious policy have already been sufficiently emphasized. It was definitely conservative, in that Diocletian did not, like AureKan, claim for the Eastern Sun-God the ‘dominatus imperii Romani,’ but went back to the traditional chief god of Rome — Jupiter, ‘the Best and Greatest.’ It was in accordance with the spirit of an age, which was learning more and more to conceive of the divine powers as companions and preservers (‘conservatores’ and ‘comites’) of the rulers. It took account of the new configuration of the Empire under the Tetrarchy of Diocletian and his colleagues. The divine sphere was to be rounded off, to represent the earthly. And we may add, in all probability, that account was taken of the very Roman conception of the Genius, the spirit of life in the individual, and that Diocletian and Maximian, when they took the titles of Jovius and Herculius, meant to suggest that, though they were not actually identified with Jupiter and Hercules, they bore in themselves the spirit of the two gods. It is tempting to suppose that the ‘Iovi Augg.’ of the coins was intended to suggest just this. The idea would be helped out by the fact that the spirit of the individual woman was actually called ‘Juno.’ I want, in this little paper, to suggest yet another consideration, not quite so obvious and not quite so well observed, that may have entered into the calculations of Diocletian.

Mt. 543, which reads, ‘Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy,’ has long puzzled historians of Judaism. Strack-Billerbeck (ad loc.) profess themselves unable to find a written source for the second half of the maxim quoted, and think it is to be explained as a popular saying based on II Sam. 19.7 (so the Hebrew; English, 6) where Joab rebukes David for loving those who hate him and hating those who love him. This is not quite satisfactory, however, for all the five other maxims quoted in the chapter (and introduced by the same or almost the same formula) are either verbal quotations or close verbal reminiscences of verses of the Mosaic Law. (Mt. 5. 33, parallel to Num. 30.3, is, of the five, the one most remote from its presumptive original.) Therefore it has been suggested, e.g., that the second half of the maxim in 43 was not intended to be a part of the quotation, but was a bit of exegesis, added by Jesus or by some Christian editor, to indicate the popular understanding of ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor’ (Lev. 19.18).