Moses Mendelssohn famously penned his Jerusalem; or, On Religious Power and Judaism in response to a public challenge. Mendelssohn had declared “ecclesiastical power” to be a contradiction in terms, and had thus come out strongly against the use of coercion in religious life, and against the ban of excommunication by rabbinic authorities, in particular. In the anonymously published The Search for Light and Right, August Cranz defies Mendelssohn to explain how he could reconcile this liberal view of religion with his continued commitment to—and his insistence that Jews were still obligated to observe—Jewish law. “As reasonable as all you say [about religious power] may be, to just that degree it contradicts the faith of your fathers . . . and the principles of its church . . . expressly set down in the books of Moses,” Cranz argues. “The theocratic ruling staff drove the whole people . . . with force and punishment.” True, Cranz concedes, exile reduced the capacity of Jewish authorities to enforce Jewish law, “but these ecclesiastical laws are there even if their exercise is no longer a must.” Cranz challenges Mendelssohn to explain his apparently irreconcilable commitments: “How can you persist in the faith of your fathers and shake the whole structure by clearing away its cornerstones, dear Mr. Mendelssohn, when you contest the ecclesiastical law given as divine revelation through Moses?”

Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) was a prominent Russian émigré historian, philosopher, Orthodox theologian, and ecumenist. He was also the first Orthodox theologian to teach at Harvard Divinity School (1957–1964). In the 1920s, Florovsky wrote and defended his dissertation on the leading nineteenth-century Russian public intellectual, Alexander Herzen (1812–1870). Until now, the full text of Florovsky's work had been considered lost. I recently found five documents containing a substantial portion of the dissertation in the Georges Florovsky Papers archive of the St Vladimir's Seminary Library (GFP SVS). This newly discovered material amounts to about one-half of the dissertation and contains some important clues for reconstructing the remaining half of the work. My article discusses: 1) the plan of the dissertation and the history of its composition; 2) Florovsky's defense of the dissertation in Prague in 1923, as summarized in Alexander Izgoev's report, preserved in the Georges Florovsky Papers at the Princeton University Library (GFP PUL); 3) Florovsky's preparation of the dissertation for publication; 4) the description of the newly discovered archival material; and 5) the reconstruction of the dissertation, as preserved in the redactions of 1928–1930. The dissertation is the only monographic study that Florovsky ever finished, his other book-length studies being surveys rather than monographs. The dissertation is also important for understanding the methodological presuppositions of Florovsky's magnum opus, The Ways of Russian Theology (1937).

Ben Sira, a Jewish sage who lived and worked in Jerusalem in the early second century b.c.e., takes up the topic of pride in a discussion of politics in order to indict those who behave proudly as betraying the created nature of humans. Within his reflections on anthropology he links pride and sin in Sir 10:13 and then proceeds to assure his students that God will surely punish the proud through humiliation and calamity. Yet, from its rather unassuming role in Ben Sira's discussion of power, the link between pride and sin in Sir 10:13 became a locus of scribal activity and interpretation in subsequent centuries. As the text was transmitted and translated in Second Temple Judaism and late antiquity the versions of this verse in the Greek, Syriac, and Latin texts show vividly the interdependence between textual transmission and theological tradition. When placed within their historical context, the transformations of Sir 10:13 found in the forms of the verse evidence a dialogical interaction with current discussions regarding virtues and vices in moral theology in early Judaism and Christianity. A significant historical turning point occurred when Augustine made the Vulgate version of Sir 10:13a, “pride is the beginning of every sin,” a key prooftext in his discussions of sin. Thereafter this verse came to play a central role in Western Christian hamartiology, especially as it was connected to the placement of pride at the head of the capital vices or “Seven Deadly Sins.” This article will begin with a discussion of the role of pride in Ben Sira and then trace the textual transmission of Sir 10:13 and the theological influences that shaped its transmission and translation. Additionally, the story of how Sir 10:13a became a central text in Western discussions of the nature of sin will be shown to have significant theological implications for an understanding of the relationship between canonical text and the development of theological traditions.

It is well known that the demonstration of God's existence is a crucial problem in early modern theology and philosophy. In contrast to the medieval period, in the seventeenth century atheism became not only an individual standpoint, but a true philosophical and epistemological position. Accordingly, any attempt to prove the existence of God had to address both atheist and libertine attacks against the classical proofs of his existence. In this sense, it is not possible to understand fully Descartes's metaphysical project, including his proposal of new proofs for the existence of God, without reading it as a reaction to this intellectual context. In spite of the charge of atheism brought against him in the Admiranda methodus novæ philosophiæ Renati Des Cartes (Utrecht, 1643) by the Utrecht Theologian Gijsbert Voetius (1589–1676) and his follower Maarten Schoock (1614–1669) (who accused Descartes of replacing the traditional arguments for God's existence with new proofs intentionally made susceptible to the criticism of atheists), Descartes consistently claimed that the demonstrations proposed in the Meditationes de prima philosophia (Paris, 1641) aimed to establish the existence of God against the atheists.

Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen have shown that anthropomorphism, one of the most popular and equally biblical tenets of ancient Christianity, was spread out not only among the simpliciores (the simple) of the early ecclesia but also among its eruditi (its educated members), particularly such docti (learned) in Stoicism like Tertullian. Following previous researchers, Griffin and Paulsen have also argued that Christian Platonizing authors, starting with Origen in the East and Marius Victorinus in the West, developed a sturdy campaign of promoting the doctrine of an incorporeal God. At a time when the clergy itself was largely conceiving God as a corporeal entity, the Christian Platonists were heavily employing the rhetoric of erudition in order to uphold an anti-anthropomorphist agenda. Other scholars have noticed that Origen of Alexandria was the first (or among the first) to relate the anthropomorphist position to the uneducated members of the Christian community, the simpliciores. Later on, Cassian, Socrates, Sozomen, and Palladius will communicate the events of the Origenist debate by means of the same distinction between simpliciores and eruditi. As Elizabeth A. Clark observes:

According to the least charitable view of Cyril's part in the “Nestorian controversy,” it was for him nothing more than that—a political scheme to eject a man whose scrutiny he had come to fear from a see whose power he had always envied. This account suggests that his apparent tergiversations tell us nothing of his theology: as a Christian he believed what the rest of Christendom believed, but as a prince of the church he turned his coat whenever this would serve to disguise his malice or change the wind. The more generous account reproaches Cyril not with bad faith but with bad logic: throughout his work, he oscillates between conflicting paradigms, in one of which the true subject of Christology is the Word who assumes the flesh, while in the other Christ has only the “compositional” unity that results from the coming together of two natures. The first prefigures the Chalcedonian shibboleth “one person in two natures”; the second Cyril himself encapsulated in the formula “from two natures,” which can be taken to entail that after the union there were no longer two natures but one. That Cyril himself drew this conclusion, contradicting the Chalcedonian Definition before he had heard it, is put beyond doubt for many by his defiant reiteration of a formula that he derived without knowing it from Apollinarius: “one nature [phusis] of the Word enfleshed.”

In Ezek 37:15–28 the prophet Ezekiel is instructed to inscribe two “sticks” (Hebrew ), one for Judah and one for Joseph, and to unite them in a visual display meant to signify God's intention to reunite the former kingdoms of Judah and Israel. This intended meaning is made clear in the accompanying oracle (vv. 21–28), which explicitly proclaims this interpretation of the act. This form of prophetic announcement, in which a conspicuous action is followed by an oracle that is, in part or in whole, an interpretation of it, is often referred to as a symbolic action, or “sign act.” Whereas other sign acts in the Hebrew Bible strive for a simple and clear relationship between the act and the prophecy that they introduce, this one is more complex, both in its form and in the hermeneutical relationship between the act and its interpretation.