The Roman garrison town of Talmis, now called Kalabsha, lies in Nubia a little South of the Lesser Cataracts of the Nile and was the seat of a god called Merul or Melul, a name hellenized as Mandulis. He was worshipped elsewhere in this region, as for instance in a temple of his own at Ajuala and in the temple of Petêsi and Pihor at Dendûr, and again further North at Philae, where a figure of him was in A.D. 394 sculptured on the North wall of the ‘Hadrian passage,’ but he is at Dendûr described as ‘great god, lord of Talmis,’ and Talmis was certainly the center of his cult. The first religious edifice known there was built by Amenophis IV, but Professor Griffith informs me that there is no likelihood that Mandulis was worshipped in it, his name being unknown in Pharaonic Egypt and apparently non-Egyptian.

As everyone knows, Canon Muratori is a list of New Testament books that was found by Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and is contained in a codex dating from the eighth or possibly the seventh century, which belonged originally to Columban's Monastery at Bobbio. The list of New Testament books is part of this codex, which also contains a collection of tracts and creeds that appeared between the second and fifth centuries and that seem to have been collected and transcribed in the eighth (or seventh) century. The fragment on the canon is just that, since the beginning is lost, and the text ends abruptly, showing that it was copied from a mutilated and presumably ancient exemplar. There are also some bits of the Muratorian canon that were found in four eleventh- or twelfth century Latin manuscripts of St. Paul's epistles at Monte Cassino. And it has been shown that the compiler of the prologue in which these occur cannot have used the Milan manuscript. The fact that he was working from an independent source indicates that the poor Latin of the Milan text was not that of the original author. A Greek original was suggested by Muratori when he first published the list in 1740; his suggestion has received wide support, though some have argued for a Latin original. Muratori assigned the list to Caius, a presbyter in Rome, but others have suggested Papias, Hegesippus of Rome, Rhodon, Melito of Sardis, and others.

Historical studies of the American social gospel have concentrated on the social and economic viewpoint of the movement. Such a focus is understandable since the fundamental premise of the social gospel was the belief that social change should be controlled and directed through the rational application of religious ideals. Scholarly interest in the movement has thus naturally gravitated towards questions of practical import: how the social gospel galvanized the churches to social action; how it challenged dominant political assumptions; how it contributed to the success of the progressive movement; how it helped to promote cooperative social ideals and a limited type of Christian socialism; and how it struggled with the problem of finding a realistic political philosophy.

The rabbinic influence on Origen's exegesis of the Song of Songs has been the focus of three major studies.

In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the future struggle of African Americans after their successful Montgomery bus boycott. Among the “forces of good,” King saw the indispensable assistance of the federal government, cautioning critics and sympathizers that though government action was “not the whole answer,” it was an “important partial answer.”1 King was addressing one of the most common criticisms of black activism for civil rights. White conservative Protestants, in the South and North, insisted that race relations would worsen because agitation would only stoke the fears and hatreds of whites and that government action on behalf of blacks was only a form of coercion. King rejected this reasoning by noting that “morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.” He argued that it was true, for example, that laws could never make employers love their black employees, but they could prevent them from refusing to hire blacks because of their skin color. King conceded that society ultimately must depend on “religion and education to alter the errors of the heart and mind,” but he emphatically argued that “it is an immoral act to compel a man to accept injustice until another man's heart is straight.”2 He added that the law was a form of education in that it instructed citizens about what society regarded as right and appropriate. King asserted that in any case the “habits if not the hearts of people have been and are being altered every day by federal action” and that it would be wrong to undervalue the efficacy and force of law in altering human behavior and social patterns.

The Greek terms Ἰουδαῖος/Ἰουδαία and their Latin equivalents Iudaeus/Iudaea have rarely posed serious translation problems for scholars. Whether in masculine or feminine form, singular or plural, regardless of declension, these terms have usually been taken as straightforward indicators of Jews, at least when applied to individual persons. Only recently A. T. Kraabel has suggested that these terms, uniformly translated “Jew” or “Jews,” might have other significance, in particular as indicators of geographic origin, that is, “Judaean(s).”

In view of the enormous expansion of biblical studies in the last century it is highly exceptional when a book published more than a hundred years ago remains today the basic work on its subject. Such is Jakob Freudenthal's study of the Hellenistic Jewish writers preserved by Alexander Polyhistor. Like any classic which remains influential for a long time, Freudenthal's work has not only laid the foundations for further study but has also perpetuated a number of misconceptions. One case where Freudenthal's opinion has distorted subsequent research is the epic poem of Theodotus, preserved in Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica 9.22.1–11. Freudenthal classified Theodotus with the so-called Ps. Eupolemus, Cleodemus Malchas, and Thallus, all of whom he regarded as Samaritans and all of whom have strongly syncretistic features. This view of Theodotus has persisted in much of the literature, from Schürer down to the recent reviews by Denis, Hengel, and Wacholder. We will argue, on the contrary, that the surviving fragments present a rigidly exclusive view of Judaism and reflect the anti-Samaritan propaganda of the Hasmoneans. The combination of a distinctively Hellenistic form with a militant and exclusive Judaism provides an interesting example of the blending of Judaism and Hellenism in the period following the Maccabean revolt.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is a book of puzzles. Worried lest his radically intellectualist teachings harm the unschooled reader incapable of replacing naive faith with reasoned conviction, Maimonides took extraordinary precautions to conceal them from him. He cut up his arguments as with a jig saw, placed the pieces in careful disarray, and tossed in a goodly number of extra pieces which seemingly fit but do not. His presupposition, of course, was that any reader keen enough to piece together his puzzles would be intellectually prepared to cope with his teachings. No one will gainsay that Maimonides did a superb job of concealment. After almost eight centuries, students of the Guide are still trying to figure out how to solve its puzzles.

The problem addressed in this paper is implied in the title. The terms “apocryphal” and “canonical” reflect a traditional usage which implies deep-seated prejudices and has had far-reaching consequences. Any standard dictionary, like Merriam-Webster, will explain the term “apocryphal” as “not canonical; unauthentic; spurious.” The synonyms are listed under “fictitious,” i.e., “invented or imagined rather than true and genuine,” and the term “apocryphal” is explained here as follows: “implies a mysterious or extremely dubious source of origin.”

Origen, far from being a precursor of “Arianism,” as he was depicted during the Origenist controversy and is often still misrepresented today, was the main inspirer of the Nicene-Cappadocian line.1 The Trinitarian formulation of this line, which was represented above all by Gregory of Nyssa, is that God is one and the same nature or essence in three individual substances and that the Son is to the Father. Indeed, the three members of the Trinity share in the same 2 This formulation was followed by Basil in his last phase; Didymus, Gregory of Nazianzus from 362 onwards; Evagrius; and numerous later authors.3 Origen himself had already maintained both things: that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have the same but are three different and Gregory of Nyssa closely followed him.4 As I set out to argue, Origen’s thought represented a novel and fundamental theorization with respect to the communality of and the individuality of conceived as individual substances, in the Trinity. He influenced not only subsequent Trinitarian theology, but perhaps even “pagan” Neoplatonism. (Likewise, on the christological side, Annewies van den Hoek5 has insightfully demonstrated the importance of Origen in asking—and endeavoring to answer—the question of the unification of humanity and divinity in Christ, and Origen’s influence on later formulations.)

The modern discussion of Patriarchal religion may be said to begin with the brilliant essay of Albrecht Alt, Der Gott der Väter, published in 1929. Alt proposed to use new means to penetrate into the pre-history of Israel's traditions of the old time. He repudiated the methods of such earlier scholars as Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen, who attempted to reconstruct the pre-Yahwistic stage of the tribal forebears of Israel by sifting Israel's early but fully Yahwistic sources for primitive features, primitive in terms of an apriori typology of religious ideas derived largely from nineteenth century idealism. Such procedures, Alt recognized, yielded merely the superstitious dregs of Israelite religion at any of its stages. As early as 1929, it was obvious to him that the archaeological data bearing on the second millennium gave a very different picture from that painted by the older historians. At least it was clear that the religion of Israel's neighbors was on a very much more sophisticated level than that being predicated for the pre-Mosaic tribes.

The demon of acedia holds an important place in early monastic demonology and psychology. Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345–399), for example, characterizes it as “the most troublesome of all” of the eight genera of demonic thoughts (). He goes so far as to characterize it as the commander of the demonic host arrayed against the monastic, which distracts the monastic with persistent thoughts. From the monastic demonology of Evagrius, especially as transmitted through his Latin-speaking protégé John Cassian, acedia—equated by Evagrius with the “noonday demon” () of Ps 90:6 In the medieval Latin tradition of the seven deadly sins, acedia has generally been understood as the sin of sloth. Moral theologians, intellectual historians, and cultural critics have variously construed acedia—or “accidie,” among other English spellings—as the ancient depiction of a variety of psychological states, behaviors, or existential conditions: primarily laziness, ennui, or boredom. Still others have attempted to place acedia within the context of Evagrius's highly idiosyncratic anthropology, or they have tried to situate it in the controversies over monastic itinerancy. More recently, acedia has been considered analogous to the modern clinical condition of depression. Andrew Solomon, notably, draws explicitly on the Evagrian monastic tradition for the title of his recent study, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Religion is deeply implicated in contemporary U.S. public life, as demonstrated in the increasing analysis of faith in any given presidential, congressional, or judicial candidate's political viewpoints; in ongoing presidential executive orders that approve government support and funding for faith-based initiatives; and in the continued lobbying by religious groups about a variety of moral and social justice issues such as euthanasia and immigration, to name a sample of recent flashpoint issues. What role do religious claims play in U.S. public life? How does Christian theology help clarify that role? What is the particular contribution of Christian feminist theology to understanding and rethinking that role?

In any discussion of the origins of Christian ”anti-Semitism,” among a number of New Testament passages that can be adduced, i Thessalonians 2:14-16 will inevitably be brought to the fore. The purpose of this article is not per se to contribute to the current Jewish-Christian ”dialog,” but to discuss historically and exegetically this important passage in Thessalonians. (Such a study, of course, will not be completely irrelevant to the contemporary theological scene.)

The thesis of this paper is simple: we as critical readers of the New Testament often use John Rylands Greek Papyrus 3.457, also known as P52, ininappropriate ways, and we should stop doing so. A recent example will illustrate the problem. In what is on the whole a superb commentary on John's gospel, D. Moody Smith writes the following about the date of John:

For a time, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, the possibility that John was not written, or at least not published, until [the] mid-second century was a viable one. At that time Justin Martyr espoused a logos Christology, without citing the Fourth Gospel explicitly. Such an omission by Justin would seem strange if the Gospel of John had already been written and was in circulation. Then the discovery and publication in the1930s of two papyrus fragments made such a late dating difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. The first and most important is the fragment of John chapter 18 … [P52], dated by paleographers to the second quarter of the second century (125–150); the other is a fragment of a hithertounknown gospel called Egerton Papyrus 2 from the same period, which obviously reflects knowledge of the Gospel of John…. For the Gospel of Johnto have been written and circulated in Egypt, where these fragments were found, a date nolater than the first decade of the second century must be presumed.

As is well known, the beginnings of biblical exegesis are to be found within the Hebrew Bible itself: later books or passages often comment on earlier ones, clarifying perceived ambiguities, at times harmonizing apparent contradictions, or seeking to bring an ancient text up to date, even rewriting history or trying to bring out some would-be esoteric meaning. Indeed, evidence of these interpretive concerns is to be found not only within the later parts of the Jewish canon, but among the biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, in the Qumran documents, Hellenistic Jewish writings, the New Testament, rabbinic literature, and so forth. Sometimes we can do more than simply catalogue how a given verse or passage was interpreted in various sources—we can actually try to glimpse something of the history and evolution of its interpretation.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus declares himself to be the way to the Father; in the First Apocalypse of James, Jesus explains exactly what this way entails. This article analyzes how 1 Apoc. Jas. uses the Johannine christological themes of identity, death and ascension and makes them applicable for human salvation. The identity of Jesus as a son of the Father, as opposed to the inhabitants of the world/cosmos, his autonomous death that conquers cosmic evils, and his immediate ascension and fleshly return are all Johannine motifs that are reformulated in 1 Apoc. Jas. Jesus reveals to James that he too is a son of the Father, and James must declare this identity during his postmortem journey through the celestial toll-collectors. He must not fear his impending stoning as, like other martyrdom literature, the martyr is immune to earthly concerns, and the real challenge lies in the cosmic sphere.

A considerable number of detailed studies have been devoted to the Messiah of Ephraim (or of Joseph). Among the problems which were raised by scholars are the following: What need was there for the creation of another messianic figure? Why was this second Messiah ascribed to the Joseph tribes in particular? Why and when did the strange motif of the forerunner of the Davidic Messiah, who was doomed to fall in battle, come into being? Does this figure have any connection with the “suffering servant” of Isaiah or, perhaps, with the Christian Messiah, destined to suffer and die?

I propose to discuss what might be called the “mechanics of conversion” in the countryside of the sixth-century later Roman Empire. This process consisted fundamentally in implanting monasteries in districts where few villages had been Christianized, or where the population was nominally Christian but so badly instructed that earlier pagan cult practices persisted. There is considerable evidence for rural conditions in the hagiographic lives of monks and in the ecclesiastical histories of this period. One of the principal difficulties in this sort of study is the geographic distribution of the sources. Hagiographic texts are, in effect, local histories, largely confined to the environs of the monastery. Thus, we are reasonably well informed about western Asia Minor and Galatia in the sixth century, for which sources like this exist, but hardly know anything about paganism in Greece until the tenth century, when monasteries finally began to appear in rural districts.