Does a principle of Gentile ritual impurity motivate Israelite and late antique Jewish prohibitions of intermarriage? The answer to this question turns upon the answer to an even more basic question: is a principle of Gentile ritual impurity found in ancient Israelite and Jewish texts? Some suppose ritual impurity of Gentiles to be an ancient halakah dating perhaps to early biblical times (Schürer, Alon) and serving as the rationale for laws regulating or reducing Jewish and Gentile interactions of various kinds. Others suppose ritual impurity of Gentiles to be a legal reality only in the Second Temple or Tannaitic period (Büchler, Klawans). On such a view, Gentile ritual impurity did not serve as the rationale for older laws regulating or reducing various forms of Jewish-Gentile interaction, including intermarriage.

One way in which ancient rulers proclaimed their power over war captives and slaves was to inscribe their bodies with a distinctive mark of ownership. For instance, according to Herodotus, the Persian king Xerxes ordered “royal marks” inscribed on Theban soldiers who had deserted to his side. To cite an example closer to the world of Judaism, 3 Macc 2.29 reports that the Hellenistic ruler Ptolemy Philopator ordered an ivy-leaf shaped “mark of Dionysus” branded onto Jews. Generally speaking, the mark of circumcision served a very different social role in antiquity, serving in many (though not all) contexts as a sign distinguishing Jews from others. There is reason to believe, however, that circumcision too could serve as a “rite of domination” marking Jewish power over Gentile bodies. Several sources refer briefly to incidents during the second and first centuries BCE when Jewish rulers forcibly circumcised Gentile peoples after subduing them in battle.

A scribal error has turned up in Q! This has wide-ranging implications and consequences, to which the present paper is designed to point. If there is a scribal error in Q, then Q was indeed a written Greek text, behind which stood an older written Greek text as Vorlage. This, of course, finally puts to rest already outdated theories of Q being only an Aramaic text, or only a layer of oral tradition rather than a written text. It also has important implications for the current view of Q and points into the future of pre-Q research as well. The history of the synoptic tradition is no longer dependent only on the forms of oral transmission, but now has a series of written texts bridging much of the gulf back from the canonical gospels to Jesus.

In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin extensively quotes the Jewish scriptures and includes several citations of logia of Jesus. Furthermore, while explicit citations from Paul are peculiarly absent from the text, Justin, writing from Rome, certainly knows Paul's writings in detail and uses them. Indeed, it seems that the Dialogue provides a perfect occasion for him to employ Paul because in it he addresses the relationship between Judaism and the church, a central topic in both Romans and Galatians. Besides the appearance of Pauline quotations, several of Justin's arguments directly rely on Paul's thinking. For example, Justin probably has Galatians 3 before him as he composes Dialogue 95–96. Oskar Skarsaune's analysis of Justin's writing also indicates that Romans is one of Justin's preferred sources for quotations of the Jewish scriptures; that is, he sometimes quotes the Jewish scriptures as they appear in Paul rather the LXX. He draws especially from the Jewish scriptures quoted in Romans 2–4 and 9–11 because the chapters examine the problem of Torah and the Jews' rejection of the gospel, also two important issues in the Dialogue.

Modern German thought owed much to classical Greece. Yet in philosophy and theology, beginning with Hegel and his contemporaries, the debt to Platonic idealism was radically modified by insistence on the reality of history. Construed dialectically, history became a key to overcoming difficulties with both Platonic and Cartesian dualism left unresolved by Kant. In theology, after World War I dialectical theologians, including Barth and Tillich, embraced in varying degrees the existentialists' critique of Hegelian essentialism and belief in progress. This affected how they understood incarnation in christology, sacramental presence in ecclesiology, and Christian responses to what they saw as the demonic threat of German National Socialism. Anglo-American critics, especially of Tillich, often miss the dialectical nuances of his admittedly abstract theology and his religious socialist response to Marxism.