The comparative study of Paul and the rabbis, an interest of students of the New Testament ever since Christian Hebraism, radically changed in the second half of the twentieth century. If “the study of relations between Judaism and early Christianity, perhaps more than any other area of modern scholarship, has felt the impact of World War II and its aftermath,” then, within this, Pauline scholarship has felt this impact the most. Various post-Holocaust studies read Paul not only in connection to early Judaism but specifically to rabbinic Judaism, which they saw as the epitome of both halakhic and Midrashic discourses. Turning to Tannaitic and Amoraic literatures expressed an urgent need to recontextualize Paul as part of traditional Judaism.

Origen's understanding of the epinoiai (aspects or concepts) of Christ is certainly one of the most fascinating and unique facets of his theology. By no means a marginal element in his Logos-Christology, a treatment, mention, or application of the epinoiai can be found in most of Origen's surviving texts. Scholarship on this topic has justifiably focused upon the two primary sources of the epinoiai in Origen's writings: Book I of his Commentary on John and Book I, Chapter 2 of On First Principles. While referencing these texts because of their systematic and definitional character, I intend to focus this article upon the substantial and multifaceted role of the epinoiai Christou in Origen's Commentary on Romans, the oldest extant commentary on this Pauline epistle. In doing so, my thesis is two-fold: first, I will argue that the epinoiai Christou play a considerable role in Origen's exegesis of Paul's epistle. If correct, this conclusion will be crucial for anyone seeking to gain a comprehensive account of Origen's concept of the epinoiai. Such is especially the case insofar as I will propose that the Commentary on Romans accentuates specifically the virtues as epinoiai, thereby offering a noteworthy glimpse into this particular aspect of Origen's epinoiai teaching. Second, I will argue that the results of Origen's application of the epinoiai concept to his exegesis constitute a compelling reading of the Pauline text that is worthy of contemporary engagement.

Some time in the late-fifth or early-sixth century CE, a ritual practitioner—operating in the environs of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt—created a protective amulet that reads, “Hôr, Hôr, Phôr, Elôei, Adônai, Iaô, Sabaôth, Michaêl, Jesus Christ. Help us and this house. Amen” (Ὡρ, Ὡρ, Φωρ, Ἐλωεί, Ἀδωναί, Ἰάω, Σαβαώθ, Μιχαήλ, Ἰεσοῦ Χριστέ· Βοήθι ἡμῖν καὶ τούτῳ οἴκῳ. ἀμήν). Each of the names used in the first part of this amulet, known as P.Oxy. VIII 1152 (=PGM P6a), is familiar from other ritual objects from late antiquity (approx. fourth to seventh centuries CE). But the juxtaposition of these divine names on a single amulet presents us with a puzzle: did the ritual expert who created this artifact or his client perceive there to be a difference, tension, or even contradiction between Jesus Christ and the other names listed? Or, alternatively, would they have conceptualized all of these names as belonging equally within what they would have thought of as the “Christian tradition” or some other tradition?

Christ's brides were hell bound by the end of the Middle Ages, when women—in the figure of the witch—were increasingly seen as Satan's spouses. Such is the narrative arc of Dyan Elliott's significant recent study of sponsa Christi (bride of Christ), The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. Elliott points toward the incarnational logic of Christianity in general and the type of physically immanent bridal mysticism that flourished among late medieval women in particular to locate some of the dynamic forces that helped make possible the theological ideas about witches that flourished from the fifteenth century onward. Elliott has done much to enrich our understanding of the development of an embodied version of the bride of Christ. Medieval and early modern Christianity held out an option, for women at least, to marry Jesus—to become a sponsa Christi—in a literal sense, a form of marriage sustained by such things as legal mechanisms, theological visions, particular emotions, religious rituals, and spiritual practices. But Elliott's argument, stopping as it does right before the tumultuous sixteenth century, lends itself to a reading that the literalized sponsa Christi was bound henceforth to the early modern witch craze. Desiderius Erasmus's 1529 treatise De vidua christiana provides us evidence that the literalized sponsa Christi developed in alternative ways in the early modern period, including the creation of a distinctive vision of the Christian widow who is, at times, bigamous. De vidua, then, can serve as the basis for expanding upon an alternative historical trajectory for the bride of Christ that Elliott mentions in passing in her study.

In his masterful translation and commentary on the Second Book of Maccabees, Daniel Schwartz devotes a short appendix to the historicity of the information provided in chapter 6, verse 7:

Is it possible to believe that the implications of the Christian Gospel are of such a kind that it cannot be communicated directly, and that the implications of the Christian Gospel are of such a kind that it ought to be preached on the street? Whether such a view is indeed “possible” did not bother the great paradoxical thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, who appeared to hold it. Indeed, one of the most enduring elements of Kierkegaard's theological legacy is his rigorously dialectical approach to Christian communication. For the reader of Kierkegaard, comprehending his (in)direct communication is typically both a frustrating and inspirational affair. On the one hand, Kierkegaard believed that the Gospel—precisely because of its unique existential consequences—cannot be preached directly; and on the other hand, he believed in the impassioned proclamation of this very same Gospel for the very same reasons. Traveling through his enigmatic authorship, one finds both of these aspects side by side, back to front, or sometimes one on top of the other. It is well noted that although Kierkegaard displays different stages of emphasis, he never totally relinquishes the importance of either method. It is the question of this article to re-engage this dialectical quandary, and to see how the paradoxical juxtaposition might prove both directly and indirectly instructive to a theology of Christian proclamation.

When religious tolerance appears in the literature on ecumenicism, religious pluralism, and other modes of peaceful coexistence, it is frequently juxtaposed with the words “beyond,” “more than,” and “is not enough.” To be sure, it is generally conceded in these contexts, tolerance is an improvement on intolerance, and, relatively speaking, then, a fine thing, as far it goes. For many, however, it does not go very far. “Religious tolerance,” we are told, “however virtuous, does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another.” It is thought to lack strenuousness, and hence, to be unsuited for modern moral conflicts, which tend increasingly toward the polarity characteristic of war: “Tolerance, especially of the knee-jerk variety. . . works as long as people can slink off by themselves, avoiding contact, and never facing up to what they truly believe.” No one says, “I am fighting for [fill in the blank] with all the toleration I can muster.”