Here in this particular world—of our Divinity School, the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Committee on the Study of Religions and all who are associated with us — we devote ourselves to the understanding of the spiritual and social laws which govern what authors of old called the sense of divinity and the religion that is born from it, making us beings who seek what is of surpassing worth, seek that which is and does not come into being or pass away, seek that which can bestow on us fullness of life and arouse us to adoration and imitation. The identification and the interpretation of these laws is the guiding purpose both of the study of religion and of theology, which also criticizes them. The appropriation of these laws, the incarnating of them into our spiritual reason, is the serious purpose of religion or of the communal and personal faith, into a full measure of which we aspire to grow. But what we call the serious work of appropriation—the task of realizing and becoming the faithful, religious beings we are in potentiality—also involves an element of play. That, at least, is the observation of the historian Johan Huizinga; and it is an observation that many of us have come to accept. The word “play,” however, here signifies something other than the simple copying of exemplars or obeying of rules of action; “play” means participating in the actualization of the ideal realities'that summon us. Hence, our spiritual propensity to retreat into ourselves and to venture out beyond ourselves in order to discover and to celebrate such being as constrains our whole-hearted respect and love, subordinating all our other inclinations and tendencies: that propensity is our spiritual play by which we help to actualize the supreme worth we seek. And in nothing characterizing our human nature does this native propensity show itself more plainly than in the imagination's play with symbols. It is about this play of symbols that I propose to speak— as a tragic play.

During a tour of Europe in 1860–61, Lev Tolstoy had the opportunity to meet the internationally famous French socialist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who was then living in exile in Brussels. Since by that time Proudhon's reputation in Russia was already well established, and since the young Russian author was thoroughly familiar with his Qu' est-ce que la propriété?, Tolstoy looked forward to the meeting with great anticipation. By all accounts he was not disappointed. The two men hit it off remarkably well, and even toward the end of his life Tolstoy remembered Proudhon with affection and admiration. This is not to say that their views on politics, society, religion, and international law were in complete accord. Tolstoy was, after all, quite skeptical about Proudhon's socialism both before and after their encounter. But in the main he respected him for his impassioned commitment to moral truth and social justice.

In a previous study ‘How Many Cock-Crowings? The Problem of Harmonistic Text-Variants’ I raised the question of ‘harmonistic’ readings in synoptic texts. When dealing with the triple tradition we have been trained at points in a gospel where there are two possible readings, one of which agrees with the other two gospels and one of which does not, to favour the odd man out. In that instance I argued that the byzantine text of Mark with its two crowings had got out of step with Matthew and Luke because of an accidental interpolation into its text, and that the ‘harmonistic’ reading was in fact original. More often, however, the byzantine text of one gospel is suspected of getting into step with the other two through harmonistic changes. But it is unwise to assume this too readily, as may be illustrated from the most notorious example: the case of the rich young man in Matthew 19. 16, 17. This example raises sharply two questions: What is the relation between textual criticism and the synoptic problem? And what place should be given to supposed harmonization in assessing readings?

If the book of Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon) was written in Alexandria in the Late Ptolemaic or early Imperial period, as seems most probable, it is a priori likely that its author and intended audience were familiar with the Egyptian goddess Isis, at least in her hellenized form. This is all the more likely since, as many critics have acknowledged, the author of Wisdom was cognizant of other aspects of Hellenism and was able to adopt some of these in his presentation of Jewish theology. Thus, for example, there are reminiscences of Homer and Hesiod, allusions to Egyptian religious practices, and Greek philosophical vocabulary. That the author was aware of Isis and her mythology need not mean, of course, that this influenced his representation of Sophia to any significant degree. But given the popularity of the goddess, this possibility can scarcely be excluded. It will be the purpose of this article to examine the evidence for the influence of Isis upon Sophia and to inquire into the function of the reshaping of Jewish wisdom speculation as it is encountered in the Wisdom of Solomon.

The use of Ioudaioi in the Fourth Gospel (hereafter, FG) has attracted much scholarly attention. It is a consistent conclusion of such investigation that the term Ioudaioi in the gospel has a variety of meanings. It is also noted and generally agreed upon that one of the ways in which the term is used is unique to John among New Testament authors and indeed among ancient authors in general; it is this unique usage of Ioudaioi which has been the focus of the investigation. However if we look only at this peculiarly Johannine use of Ioudaioi we find that scholars have disagreed both about which texts within the gospel constitute this usage and also about the identity of the persons referred to by the term. Some authors have seen this usage as referring to the entire Jewish nation composed of both the common people and the narrower circle of religious authorities. Other scholars have considered the term to refer exclusively to religious authorities.

The question, What did Paul know about Jesus of Nazareth?, has long been debated by students of the New Testament. The debate has not issued in any consensus. Indeed, critical appraisals of Paul's relation to the Jesus of history and to traditions about him have been unusually disparate. Thus, on the one side, W. D. Davies has argued that ‘Paul is steeped in the mind and words of his Lord.’ On the other side, R. Bultmann could claim that ‘the teaching of the historical Jesus plays no role, or practically none, in Paul’. The contrast between these two assertions is puzzling, and all the more so as neither can be regarded as idiosyncratic: Davies is not alone in avowing that sayings of and traditions about Jesus were of momentous significance for Paul, and it is not difficult to find critics at one with Bultmann. Moreover, as our two quotations do not simply represent two circles of opinion but also mark poles between which appears a variety of viewpoints, matters are even further complicated.

Les mss. grecs, dont nous allons examiner les variantes pour Jacques, sont tous médiévaux, donc tardifs. Plusieurs d'entre eux ont des états de texte apparentés: il s'agit d'un groupe de minuscules apparu lors d'un classement antérieur, fait à partir d'une collation de 498 états de texte sur 25 lieux variants de Jacques, et complété par des témoins absents de la collation ou sans parenté évidente avec le groupe. Au départ, l'intérêt de ce groupe est d'occuper une place originale par rapport aux deux types de texte admis, le lsquo;syro-byzantin’ et l'‘alexandrin’. Nous avons disposé, pour collationner 239 lieux variants, de l'apparat de Von Soden et des collations de Scrivener et de K. Clark. Dans la mesure o< ces sources sont fiables – et nous le supposerons pour cette étude –, nous tâcherons de répondre à deux questions: ce groupe est-il homogéne? Quelle est l'ancienneté possible de ses leçons les plus caractéristiques? Accessoirement, nous reviendrons sur le classement de Von Soden, pour juger de son bien-fondé en ce qui concerne notre Epître.

Interpreters of Paul have expressed no doubt until the present era that Paul's viewpoint on sexual intercourse is articulated in 1 Cor. 7.lb: καλòνανθρωπωγυναικòς μń âπт*σθαι This association of the most outstanding Christian theologian with sexual asceticism has caused significant repercussions in Western culture. But now there is much uncertainty as to whether the apostle was: (a) asserting his position in his own words; (b) quoting a slogan of some Corinthians that he accepted; or (c) quoting a Corinthian slogan that he rejected. In this essay a sampling will be given of these major interpretive positions and an argument in favour of the third will be presented.

In spite of the amount of writing about grammatical questions on NT Greek, it is not superfluous to develop and to document some of these subjects whose extension exceeds the limits of handbooks of Morphology and Syntax. The present work has been suggested by Prof. G. D. Kilpatrick and it tries, by its exhaustiveness, to determine what hitherto could only be the fruit of an intuition based on partial or sample studies.

While the discovery of the Manichaean, and then the Gnostic, MS collections in Coptic has provoked a number of studies on the broad cultural context of these two religious movements, the specific Egyptian environment in which the MSS were transmitted remains largely unknown. Lack of documentation generally accounts for this ignorance. Especially in the case of the Coptic Gnostic library, all sorts of ideas and religious sects have been called forth to comment upon the corpus and to explain, it seems, everything except what was common in the Nile valley in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

Das Anliegen dieses methodologischen Aufsatzes ist bescheiden, zugleich aber anspruchsvoll und schwierig, bescheiden, weil die viel verhandelte Materie der neutestamentlichen Gleichnisse und die unterschiedlichen Auslegungsmodelle in aller Kürze im methodischen Ansatz referiert und kritisch gewürdigt werden sollen, anspruchsvoll (und in gebotener Kürze angemessen kaum durchführbar) ist dieser Versuch, weil exemplarisch gezeigt werden soll, was linguistisch orientierte Exegese leisten könnte und wie sie historisch-kritische Methoden integrierend zu reflektierteren und stärker kontrollierbaren Ergebnissen kommt, vielleicht auch neue Einsichten vermittelt. Schwierig ist dieses Unterfangen vor allem, weil es die linguistisch Methode (und Terminologie) nicht gibt, sie sich nach B. van Iersel als ‘ein unfaßbares und vielköpfiges Ungeheuer’ gebärdet, sie ‘mehr von einem Lebewesen als von einem Bauwerk an sich zu haben (scheint)’, das ‘unablässig in Entwicklung und Bewegung’ ist. Doch Sicherheit durch Flucht oder Enthaltsamkeit ist nach van Iersel abzulehnen, es bieibt nur der ‘Versuch, den Drachen zu zähmen’, ‘die Linguistik als Hilfswissenschaft’ der ‘exegetischen Arbeit dienstbar zu machen’.

Discussion of the meaning of σκєυ>ος in 1 Thess. 4. 4 has traditionally centred on two possible connotations, ‘body’ and ‘wife’ (cf. respectively, B. Rigaux, Les Epitres aux Thessaloniciens, 1956, pp. 503–7; E. Best, The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, 1972, pp. 160–5).

The major purpose of this article is to study the dynamics of biblical poetry, especially in terms of its dominant device, parallelism. The goal of poetic analysis is to understand the ways in which a poet strengthens his message through effects engendered by formal devices. The process of analysis needs a principled and reasoned method of study which can be applied to poetic materials. In poetry, as in music, a disciplined approach will deepen not only one's understanding but also one's appreciation of the poetic system as a whole and of individual poems.