In his third prescribed lecture out of four, for each of a Harvard student's year in College, Judge Paul Dudley, in parlous times for New England, with the Catholic French and their Indian allies a constant threat, asked that his Lecturer be mindful that the Seer of Revelation, carried away in the Spirit into a wilderness (17:3), saw a woman “and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: Babylon the great, mother of harlots” (17:5). He expressly identified “the Romish Church with that mystical Babylon.” The first Hollis Professor of Divinity, Edward Wigglesworth (1693–1765), gave the initial anti-Popery lecture in 1757, and he more than adequately fulfilled the Donor's intentions.

In a very interesting and perceptive article, John J. Collins has reexamined Theodotus' epic Περι ᾽Iουδαίων. As opposed to the opinion that was prevalent until recently, i.e., that Theodotus was a Samaritan, Collins attempts to show that he was not only not a Samaritan, but that, on the contrary, his poem was directed against the latter group. He characterizes Theodotus as “a militant and exclusivist Jew” (p. 102) who nevertheless “composed one of only two surviving Jewish epics in the Greek language” (p. 102); this confirms, according to Collins, Tcherikover's view that the Hasmoneans were opposed to the Greeks for political reasons but did not reject Greek culture. Theodotus defends his Jewish nationalism through the medium of Greek epic poetry.

When we deal with religious phenomena, we are not always fortunate enough to find explanatory texts. That is particularly true of the mystery religions and thus should be expected when we look at the materials concerning Isis, Sarapis and Demeter at Antioch of Syria. But in this instance we are faced with special problems. First, the texts are so meager that we are forced to turn to the artifacts in order to grasp at all the influence of these religions within the third largest city of the ancient world. Second, and more important, the effort to collate all the artifacts is at present impossible. The reports of the excavations in Antioch from 1932–39 were only published in a shortened preliminary form. For that we must be thankful, but it does mean that exact locations and dates of certain finds are quite difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the collections of materials primarily are divided between the McCormick Art Museum at Princeton University, the Louvre in Paris, and the local museum in Antakya, Turkey. Separate pieces, however, are scattered over the world. The materials at Princeton and Paris are accessible, but those at Antakya are limited in most instances to the ones on display. The major difficulty in retrieving the excavated materials comes not from bureaucratic obstinacy in Turkey. I received significant assistance from both Selhattin Asim, cultural director of the Hatay region, and Nizamettin Bati, director of the museum, during two visits to Antakya in 1976 and 1977. The major problem lies in the fact that the serial numbers recorded in Antakya bear no resemblance to those published in the preliminary reports. Literally hundreds of artifacts are housed in the Antakya museum which have not been studied in any thorough way. If this serial number conundrum could be broken, much more light could be shed on conditions in Antioch. For now, only preliminary studies of available pieces can be offered. Within such studies, arguments from silence are quite questionable. The task in this article is to discuss the texts and artifacts known to me in order to correct some inaccuracies of interpretation and to add color to the picture of Hellenistic religion in Antioch of Syria.

Whether the phrase ‘Son of God’ should be included in the first verse of Mark is one of the thorniest New Testament textual cruxes. Nineteenth-century scholars, overawed by its omission in the newly discovered codex Sinaiticus (ℵ = 01) and wary of theological features that did not appear to be primitive, tended to view the phrase with suspicion. Thus Tischendorf, Westcott-Hort, and Nestle banished it from their Greek testament texts, while von Soden placed it in brackets. Although all modern English translations include the phrase (as do the Greek editions of Lachmann, Tregelles, Souter, Merk, and NEB Greek), it is placed in brackets by the widely used United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament and is omitted by the British and Foreign Bible Society's Greek, Aland's Greek Synopsis, Nestle's 25th edition, and some current European vernaculars (including the French version by Jean Grosjean in La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [Paris, 1971], and the Dutch version of the Netherlands Bible Society, 1951). Three recent discussions of the text reflect the same variety of opinion. Cranfield adduces five “very strong reasons for regarding [the longer text] as original.”

The question of whether there existed “Forerunners of the Reformation” is of considerable interest both to historians and theologians. The significance of the historical aspect of the question will be evident to any student of the history of ideas. It is clearly important to establish whether precursors of the distinctive teachings associated with the Reformation of the sixteenth century exist, and if they can be thus identified, to establish what influence, if any, they had upon the Reformers. However, it was the theological aspect of the question which was considered more relevant at the time of the Reformation itself, and which still has considerable significance today. The central theological question concerning the existence or otherwise of the Forerunners is this: Can the distinctive teachings of the churches of the Reformation be considered to be truly catholic? It can be shown without difficulty that it was the desire to demonstrate the catholicity of the Lutheran Reformation which led to the search for such Forerunners in the first instance.

Let me explain the jagged, cacophonous title of this talk, which must jar on ears expectant of a disquisition on immortality, the leitmotiv of the Ingersoll lecture series. By “anti-temporality” I denote that which is opposite in kind to being temporal, that is, pertaining to, concerned with, or limited by time. By “time” I provisionally accept the first definition offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: “A limited stretch or space of continued existence, as the interval between two successive events or acts or the period through which an action, condition or state continues: a finite portion of ‘time’.” Here, however, I would detect a certain ambiguity in the phrase, “interval between two successive events or acts,” for such intervals may, in many societies, be culturally detached from natural or logical sequentiality and formed into a domain governed by anti-temporality. Here the very definition of time implies its opposite.