Four of those tractates from Nag Hammadi for which as a group the convenient but nebulous label ‘Sethian’ has been adopted use a strange and previously unknown designation for the primal Man that has so far defied satisfactory decipherment. The scholar last to venture a solution to the riddle prefaces his attempt, and a bibliographical litany of earlier attempts (including one of his own), with the discomforting admission that ‘eine voll befriedigende Deutung dieser Bezeichnung steht m. E. noch aus. Jede der bisher vorgeschlagenen Deutungen hat ihre offenkundigen Schwächen’.1 In this paper I propose to review and evaluate the interpretations that have so far been suggested and, at the risk of adding only another discordant note to the chorus, to offer what I believe is the correct solution, together with some suggestions as to the setting in which the name was formed, and why. It is of some significance for the history of early speculation about the prototypical Adam.

Nur dem unbefangenen Leser kann unser Thema als Tautologie erscheinen; die historisch-kritisch arbeitende Exegese weiß seit Johann Salomo Semier (1725–1791), daß der Autor der Johannesapokalypse nicht mit demjenigen des Johannesevangeliums identisch sein kann. Zwei Jahrhunderte lang haben protestantische Ausleger die sprachlichen und theologischen Unterschiede zwischen Evangelium und Briefen des Johannes einerseits und der Offenbarung des Johannes andererseits zusammengestelit und ausgewertet; die scharfsinnigen Beobachtungen wichtiger Gemeinsamkeiten und Berührungspunkte durch katholische Kommentatoren schienen entwertet durch das apologetische Bemöhen, den Apostel und Zebedaiden Johannes als den Autor des Evangeliums, der Briefe und der Apokalypse des Johannes zu erweisen.

It seemed appropriate that a lecture given to honour a scholar whose concerns have been centred on the Old Testament, by someone whose field is the New Testament, should link together these two topics. I have therefore chosen to consider one aspect of the problem of the way in which the Old Testament is interpreted by New Testament authors: more specifically, the authority ascribed by one of them – St Paul – to the Old Testament in relation to the revelation of God in Christ.

The Thirty-fifth General Meeting of the Society was held at the University of Toronto, Canada, from 25–29 August 1980, under the Presidency of Professor X. Léon-Dufour. About two hundred and forty members, spouses and guests were present.

Reginald Pecock, D.D., thirty-second bishop of Chichester (1450–1458/59), had a meteoric career as a historic personage. He made a bright, unexpected appearance out of an obscure background. He shone brightly, first as a curiosity in his world and then as a seeming threat to it. Colliding with the power realities of his time, his career was shattered and his reputation permanently blackened by the Paul's Cross bonfire that reduced some fourteen of his books to powdery ash. This once proud figure (the obvious pun on his name was apt and widely used by his enemies) was now quite pathetic. He was required to suffer the humiliation of standing before 20,000 people to confess his errors and to assist in piling upon the fire the material expressions of his lifetime of thinking and of defending the Church. When those flames subsided, Reginald Pecock returned to the obscurity from which he had emerged, and there he died. Thus, for this the most famous lord spiritual of the Lancastrian regime; author of the most ambitious theological program of the fifteenth century in England; the first bishop of the English Church to be formally convicted of heresy–for this man we have no certain knowledge of the date of his birth or the date of his death, the place of his origin or the site of his burial.

The question whether John used one or more of the Synoptic Gospels continues to be hotly debated. It is obvious that John is indebted to other sources for much of his information. But where his material overlaps the Synoptic Gospels, it is more difficult to decide whether he is using independent traditions or not. In one case, however, it can be shown that he had a saying of Jesus which he received in a Greek form transmitted independently of the forms in Mark and Q. All go back to a common Aramaic original. The saying in question is Jn. 3. 3, 5.

In the development of Christology in the primitive church, the emergence of the worship of Jesus is a significant phenomenon. In the exclusive monotheism of the Jewish religious tradition, as distinct from some other kinds of monotheism, it was worship which was the real test of monotheistic faith in religious practice. In the world-views of the early centuries A.D. the gap between God and man might be peopled by all kinds of intermediary beings – angels, divine men, hypostatized divine attributes, the Logos – and the early church's attempt to understand the mediatorial role of Jesus naturally made use of these possibilities. In the last resort, however, Jewish monotheism could not tolerate a mere spectrum between God and man; somewhere a firm line had to be drawn between God and creatures, and in religious practice it was worship which signalled the distinction between God and every creature, however exalted. God must be worshipped; no creature may be worshipped. For Jewish monotheism, this insistence on the one God's exclusive right to religious worship was far more important than metaphysical notions of the unity of the divine nature. Since the early church remained – or at least professed to remain – faithful to Jewish monotheism, the acknowledgement of Jesus as worthy of worship is a remarkable development. Either it should have been rejected as idolatry – and a halt called to the upward trend of christological development – or else its acceptance may be seen with hindsight to have set the church already on the road to Nicene theology.

The Apocalypse is not a random jumble of ‘prophecies’: it shows clear evidence of ordering. The problem, however, is to know on what principles the ordering has been done, and which principle has been dominant or primary, and which less influential. For example, the Seven Letters, Seals, Trumpets and Bowls seem at first sight to dominate the book; but then every commentator has some embarrassment in explaining the intrusions of chs 7 and 10–11, let alone the second half of the book. Even then, we need an explanation of the symbolism of the seals, trumpets and bowls, which is in no obvious sense given: so, on their own, the four Sevens are only a partial answer to the question.

The “judicious” Richard Hooker (1554–1600) gave classic expression to the via media position of Elizabethan Anglicanism. He attempted to steer a middle course, appropriating what he considered to be the truths and avoiding what he considered to be the errors and excesses, between Roman Catholicism and the Magisterial Reformation (Lutheranism and especially Calvinism). It has often been pointed out by scholars that Hooker sometimes inclines more in one direction than the other on certain key doctrines. For example, it has been said many times that his view of the relation of God and the world, of grace and nature, of faith and reason, is characterized by continuity rather than discontinuity, and that in this he was true to the medieval Catholic thought of Thomas Aquinas. But his view of justification has been said to be nearer to that of the Magisterial Reformation than to that of Rome.

In assessing the importance of William Ellery Channing to his generation, Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced him “our Bishop” and put in sharp focus what was for him an intellectual problem, and what has remained for us a historical one. It is not the word “bishop” that is problematic, for almost no one disputed the leadership of Channing in the first decades of the nineteenth century, that crucially formative period for our culture. His first biographer, nephew William Henry Channing, noted that he “was everywhere recognized as the most eloquent and effective preacher in Boston,” and after his death Emerson remarked that he “left no successor in the pulpit” (JMN, 1. 470). New Englanders generally recognized him as the key spokesman for the liberal or Unitarian theology, and social reformers of all stripes looked to him with hope to support their endeavors. On the basis of a handful of literary essays and religious polemics, he became, in Sydney Ahlstrom's phrase, “the most influential American religious thinker being heard abroad,” and Robert Spiller noted that in the critical world, he was “among the first American writers to win British critical consideration.”

One of the dilemmas of the Fourth Gospel is that of the form and background of the first 18 verses designated as the Prologue. There has been much discussion with respect to the original form and literary unity of the underlying hymn which is thought to be the foundation of the Prologue.1 Of no less importance has been the debate concerning the Hintergrund of this hymn. Indeed, over the years there has been a variety of suggestions made as to its religious background.2