The view that God is incorporeal, without body or parts, has been the hallmark of Christian orthodoxy, but in the beginning it was not so. In this article I show that ordinary Christians for at least the first three centuries of the current era commonly (and perhaps generally) believed God to be corporeal. The belief was abandoned (and then only gradually) as Neoplatonism became more and more entrenched as the dominant world view of Christian thinkers.

Augustine's assimilation of Christ to wisdom in the philosophical tradition established a paradigm for method in theology. If in the beginning was the Word, and that primordial Word was analogous to intellectual concept rather than oral discourse, then in ideal imitation the theologian was a dialectician rather than a rhetorician. Yet if Christ is wisdom and the language of wisdom is dialectic, why did he speak rhetorically? Why the simile rather than the syllogism? Augustine proposed that scripture is divine baby talk. The academic business of theology became its education into human mature language by translating its images into ideas. Yet a hermeneutical and exegetical revolution since the late nineteenth century has, through historical and literary criticisms, restored scripture as rhetoric to its legitimate religious status. The conventional apologetics of pabulum is now intolerable. This alteration in norm is influencing, in the history of theology, an evaluation of the tradition as rhetoric. The research, although belated, may prove as revisionist as in scriptural studies. As the master rhetorician of anti-rhetoric was Augustine, a critical examination of the rationale for his methodological displacement of the scriptural norm with the contemplative ideal is cogent.

In manuscript no. 1142B (Jl 142) in the Library of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, on fol. 267r, there is a previously unpublished Canon List. The manuscript is a Miscellany, in the notrgir script, and although undated it cannot be very old. It contains various theological and homiletical works, and the list is followed, on fol. 268V, by a work given in the Catalogue as “Ezekiel." The text of the list was copied from the manuscript. The chief abbreviations have been resolved.

The study of medieval Judaism was revolutionized by the late S. D. Goitein with A Mediterranean Society, his multilayered study of the medieval Jewish communities in Egypt based on the documents from the Cairo Genizah. For while previously the Genizah had been mined for important rabbinic documents and for the history of the philosophers and Geonim, Goitein's research sought to provide an account of the religion and life of all classes of society.

John Calvin urged Peter Martyr Vermigli to leave Zurich to serve as pastor of the Italian church in Geneva. If Martyr were to join him, Calvin wrote in his February 1557 letter, he would share the task of giving biblical lectures and might even “resign the whole task to you, so far as your convenience will permit.” In a September letter to the Zurich Senate, Calvin again invited Martyr to Geneva where his mission would be “to the incredible profit of both the men of his own nation and ourselves.”