Burton Y. Berry gave a unique silver tetradrachm to the American Numismatic Society in 1959. The obverse of the coin bears the diademed and draped bust of a Ptolemaic king wearing sideburns, and, in the left field behind the king's portrait, a six-pointed star or comet (*). The reverse bears an eagle facing left on a thunderbolt, an inscription ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ (“of Ptolemy the king”), a six-pointed star or comet in the right field, and a monogram (ΠΑ) in the left field in front of the eagle. Dawson Kiang first published the tetradrachm in 1962. Dating it to the reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–145 BCE), Kiang supposed that the portrait was an effigy of that monarch. In this article, I shall identify the portrait with Ptolemy V Epiphanes and submit a new hypothesis about the origin of his surname in 199/8 BCE.

In Romans 4 Paul appealed to the precedent of the patriarch Abraham to argue three points on the basis of the Jewish scriptures. First, righteousness was reckoned to Abraham because of his faith and not because of his observance of the law (Rom 4:1–8); second, righteousness was reckoned to Abraham before Abraham's circumcision (4:9–12); and third, God's promise to Abraham and his “seed” came through faith, not through the Mosaic Law (4:13–17a). All three points are based on Paul's interpretation of Gen 15:6 and closely related texts. Paul appealed to Abraham in order to show that Abraham was meant to be the father not only of the circumcised but also of the uncircumcised (Rom 4:11–12,16–17). Paul also insisted that what was written about Abraham was meant not only for Abraham but also for those who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead (4:23–25).

George Bernard Shaw once described the Book of Revelation as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,” but then modern literati have had a penchant for unkindness when it comes to the language of the Apocalypse. D. H. Lawrence found what he called its “splendiferous imagery” to be “distasteful,” and hailed it “perhaps the most detestable of all these books of the Bible.” Lawrence hated the book so much that he wrote a commentary on it. In his own monumental commentary on the Apocalypse, writing just a decade earlier than Lawrence, fellow Englishman R. H. Charles understood the book to be a product of linguistic incompetence and redactional ineptitude, egregious travesties that remained until modernity, when Charles corrected them with his own heavy-handed redaction and conjectured emendations.

Of a total of twelve parables or similitudes appearing in Q, fully half are paralleled in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. The two writings share approximately forty separate sayings. The similarity between these collections extends beyond considerable shared content, however, to embrace a common genre, a common predilection for aphoristic and proverbial forms, a common concern with both practical and speculative wisdom, and a surprising lack of interest in the death and resurrection of Jesus. As the similarities between Q and the Gospel of Thomas are necessarily of a literary variety, attempts to explain them have naturally tended to favor documentary hypotheses. This is certainly true of the conservative claim that the Gospel of Thomas is dependent for its traditions on the synoptic gospels. The trend toward denying any such dependence, however, has hardly diminished the tendency to explain the two writings' common content, formal features, and theological motifs in terms of essentially literary connections. Helmut Koester, who is largely responsible for the status the Gospel of Thomas now enjoys as an early and valuable document, has argued that, if the Gospel of Thomas is not actually dependent on an earlier recension of Q, which it very well may be, it at least shares common sources with it.

Although not usually viewed as a manifestation of modern spirituality, hasidism strikingly resembles a product of the spiritual and ideological reorientation of Western religion in the post-Copernican world. Largely unaware of the philosophical and theological changes in European intellectual culture, many of the hasidic masters exhibited a sensitivity to the existential plight of humankind in the modern world.