The problems of Christian origins are many and varied. Even an incomplete bibliography of works devoted to the beginnings of Christianity, as M. Goguel remarked, would fill a volume of over five hundred pages. But the central and crucial problem, and certainly one of the liveliest issues in theology in our time, is the question of the relation of the historical Jesus to the Christ of the Church's faith. The twentieth century has been marked by a great shift away from the historical Jesus as the centre of theological interest to the Kerygma, the Church's proclamation, the Christ of faith, to Gemeindetheologie and existentialistische Exegese.

‘What sort of meaning does Christian discourse have?’ The question seems misleading, for within Christian discourse there are many different kinds of meaning—moral, historical, symbolic, exclamatory, etc. Modern philosophers recognise this, but they are mainly interested in the sort of meaning which is characteristic or distinctive of a realm of discourse, comparing and contrasting this with other uses of language. In this essay, we shall consider the varied analyses given by three contemporary philosophers. Each philosopher, in his analysis of Christian discourse, suggests a different nonreligious use of language as the illuminating logical model. Naturally, there is more in each book than the outline and application of the logical model, but I shall concentrate on this.

The Samaritan doctrine of Moses is the second tenet of the Samaritan Creed. Before realising the centrality of this tenet, it is necessary to relate it to the others. Then it will become clear that the second tenet is the one which, as it were, binds all the tenets of the Creed together.

The Creed is a statement of fundamental belief, consisting of five tenets with the addition of a sixth which may be regarded as later or merely supplementary. The first is belief in the Oneness of God; this belief the Samaritans hold no less strictly than Jews, Christians or Muslims, but the emphasis is on the Oneness, not the Unity of God. The unpartnered, unassisted, un-seconded God is sole Creator, ruler of men's spirits in a royal sense, king of rulers in an historical sense, and, as the Muslims too put it, ‘Lord of this world and the next’. The One God chose to express His relationship to His creatures preeminently through Moses, and it is solely in terms of Moses that God's will and purposes for mankind are to be interpreted.

From 1857, when Dr Robert Lee introduced his ‘innovations’ in public worship at Greyfriars' Church, Edinburgh, until the reunion of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church of Scotland in 1929, there was a relationship, sometimes direct and conscious, sometimes indirect and unconscious, between the revival of public worship in the Church of Scotland and the problems of Christian reunion.

In his lecture on ‘Eschatology in the New Testament’, delivered to the Society for the Study of Theology, at its inaugural meeting in Cambridge, in July 1952, the late Professor William Manson put forward an ingenious theory. He claimed that there is a specific Old Testament eschatology, which arose in the life of Israel from a primarily religious interest which viewed all human affairs in the light of an ‘ultimate transcendent Event, an End, towards which under the judgment and mercy of God, the world is hastening’. This conception which links history with eschatology, can be traced as far back as the events which gave rise to the traditions, embodied in the Yahwist narrative, about the revelations given to Moses.