The Immortality of Man was one of the fundamental creeds of the philosophical religion of Platonism that was in part adopted by the Christian church and that thus became one of the foundations of the Christian civilization of the Eastern and Western world. Ever since Paul in the 15th chapter of I Corinthians made resurrection the cornerstone of the Christian faith the Church has had a profound interest in the ancient philosophers who taught that man's soul is immortal and does not perish along with its mortal companion the body. Although this belief in the immortality of the soul, the ψυχή, is not the same as the Christian idea of man's resurrection in the flesh or in a transfigured body, both religious ideas have a natural affinity with each other; and it is therefore easy to understand that the Platonic belief in immortality was regarded as an anticipation of the Christian resurrection and helpful to the faithful who might wish to check their emotional expectations of a future life after death by rational reflection. Thus we find attempts to compare both things or to look for natural phenomena that could be interpreted as analogies of resurrection in nature.

The problem of the two Messiahs in Apocryphal literature, especially in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and in the Damascus Covenant, occupied scholars at the beginning of the present century and has revealed new facets with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Especially pertinent to this problem are some of the texts from Qumran Cave 1, and some fragments from Qumran Cave 4, recently published. We shall here endeavor to make clear the distinctive features of these Messiahs, their status and their tasks at the end of days, and to elucidate the historical setting from which the doctrine of the two Messiahs sprang.

The use of the term άλεεῖς άνθρώπων, “fishers of men” at Mark 1:17 (on which depends Matthew 4:19 but only indirectly Luke 5:10) has often been treated as a self-evident metaphor. “The words of Jesus summon Simon and Andrew to become disciples and heralds of the Kingdom of God,” Vincent Taylor says. Other figures might have sufficed for this dual purpose and the peculiar nature of the metaphor is not explored when the terms “disciples” and “heralds” are used. What is the relationship of disciples to Jesus and how heralds were related to the Kingdom is not made clear although the Markan term may have been intended to do something of this kind. It is insufficient to observe that, since the four men are depicted as fishermen, the summons is appropriately phrased.The metaphor has a Biblical background which provides some clue to the nature of their new calling or, since they are already fishermen, to a new type of fishing and a new catch. Riesenfeld underlines the importance of the phrasing of the call but does not enquire into its meaning.

Johannes Gaertner recently published an article on Latin verse-translations of Psalms in which he described at length the history of a “buried and forgotten literary genre” that reached the height of its popularity during the sixteenth century. Psalms, however, was not the only book of the Bible to find itself arrayed in this curious dress, and one may accordingly add a bibliographical footnote to Professor Gaertner's article by noting some of the most important Latin verse-translations of individual books and also of large portions of the Bible, almost invariably written by Germans or Dutchmen: the practice seems to have been largely a phenomenon of the northern Protestant reformation.