This article examines a long-standing association of Martin Luther's christology with that of Cyril of Alexandria. However, for all its heuristic promise, the designation ‘Cyrillian’, must in Luther's case be understood either as an overly generalised statement of a well-established grammar of christology – in which case it simply is Luther's foundation and, as such, explains nothing specific about Luther's christology and, moreover, fails to do justice to the reformer's crucial argumentative moves. Alternatively, when taken for a set of material similarities, the designation is simply inaccurate, for Luther is decidedly not a Cyrillian, despite some fundamental convergences with the thought of the Alexandrian patriarch. Luther's context, as we demonstrate, leads him not only to go beyond Cyril, but also to argue in a manner contrary to Cyril, in order to secure what for both theologians is a realist eucharistic backdrop of their commitment to the Word's incarnation.

I am deeply grateful to my colleagues for their careful attention to my work, and for the invitation to respond to their comments in the pages of the Scottish Journal of Theology. It is a privilege to participate in such a conversation among friends and fellow scholars.

Professor Beeley has contributed a new chapter to the history of the doctrine of communicatio idiomatum. He has written a provocative book, whose argument is both revisionist and orthodox. Beeley proposes to revise the accepted christological narrative by questioning the significance and theological genius of Athanasius of Alexandria. In Beeley's judgement, Athanasius' contribution pales in comparison with such giants as Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Confessor. Beeley finds especially in Nazianzen's Christology the most profound and consistent rendering of the unity of Christ, a golden standard for expressing communicatio idiomatum. According to Beeley, Gregory's achievement was only partially matched by the Christologies of Cyril of Alexandria and Leo of Rome. Gregory's Christology is the apex of the Origenist tradition, its most complete and compelling expression. A permanent contribution of Beeley's work is the restoration of Gregory the Theologian to the diptychs of contemporary Western patristic scholarship, in which Nazianzen has been overshadowed by another Cappadocian, Gregory of Nyssa.

It is always exciting to read the retelling of a familiar narrative, whether it is of the early life of Shakespeare, the political careers of Washington and Jefferson, or the story of the development of the classic Christian understanding of the person of Jesus Christ during the first seven or eight centuries of Christianity. In this last case, the reader feels liberated from the weight of inherited pieties, invited to look again at the existing documentation with fresh eyes, urged to reconceive what he imagines to be the implied agenda of the main actors, and their significance for the later history of Christian faith. Christopher Beeley's new book from Yale certainly has this effect on those trained by earlier tellings of the story of early Christology, from Newman to Harnack and Loofs, to Sellers and Grillmeier and Kelly. The heroes and villains, characteristic phrases and defining moments of heresy and orthodoxy, all take on a slightly new form in Christopher's reconstruction – a form centred on the question of how the personal and ontological unity of the Saviour is conceived and emphasised by key Christian authors and principal church synods from the third to the eighth centuries.