Although the importance of anthropomorphic conceptions in rabbinic thought is widely recognized, their original nature and significance are still in need of clarification. A major difficulty in this task stems from the scarcity and the obscurity of some of the most important texts, which, moreover, cannot be dated with any precision.

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?

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.

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.

The site of ancient Thessalonica has been continuously inhabited as an important city ever since its foundation by the forceful Macedonian king, Cassander, in the last years of the fourth century before Christ. Yet few ancient cities of equal importance have been the subject of so little investigation in modern times. Up to now, the inscriptions found in Salonica have all been chance discoveries, almost invariably due to such causes as the demolition of the old city walls during the last decades of the nineteenth and the early years of this century, the remodelling or removal of older buildings and other construction inevitable in the life of a large port and center of population. For these reasons it must be emphasized that the several hundred pagan Greek inscriptions of Thessalonica whose texts are now known (many of the stones once seen have been lost or destroyed) are in fact a quite fortuitous body of evidence. The following pages, therefore, cannot pretend to be a balanced and complete study of the religious cults of pagan Thessalonica. That is a task for the future when circumstances will, we must hope, permit a continuous and accurate study of the existing ancient remains, as well as of those new discoveries which may confidently be anticipated. Here I have only attempted to put together what can now be said about the cults of the Roman city.

In the ongoing scholarly search for the roots of Islamic theology, students of Kalām are entrenched in two main camps: those who see early Islamic theology as a product of the encounter with Christian theology, and those who, without denying certain influences, emphasize the independence of Muslim thought and regard Kalām as a genuine, original reflection of the inner development of Islam. Until now, the arguments of one group of scholars have done little to convince the other. Indeed the scarcity of sources from the formative period of Kalām renders any evidence inconclusive. Yet it is not only the paucity of material, but the very nature of the question, which makes a definite answer practically impossible. For it can always be argued that interest in questions such as God's unity, theodicy, and anthropomorphism might appear within any monotheistic system. Thus, although Islamic theology can often be shown to be strikingly similar to Christian theology of an earlier period, it is often easier to speak about parallels than about sources.

In the late 1960s, African American children in Boston were asked to draw maps of their neighborhood, near the old Mission Hill housing project. The housing project, largely white at the time, took up a large part of their hand-drawn maps, but was figured in various ways as a big blank: a no-man's land, a topography absent of marks or monuments. The streets around it, as well as schools, restaurants, and stores, were often carefully and clearly articulated, but the housing project itself was an open, unmarked rectangle. Recent critical geographers have been interested in the way “people's spatial behaviour is shaped by the hills and valleys of the invisible information and environmental stress surfaces over them.” Landscape and the built environment of the city are not neutral, but have their own rhetoric, exerting influence on the bodies of those who move through them. And humans map and interpret space, understanding and defining the limits of their known world through the movements of their bodies.

Evidence for the existence of ancestor worship among the uncivilized peoples of Africa is varied and abundant. Outside the limited range of Mohammedan and Christian influence, there are few tribes whose religion has been reported with any care that do not appear to practice ancestor worship in some form. Without any attempt to provide a complete volume of testimony, and with the purpose only to indicate the wide range and diversity of these practices, we shall review geographically a portion of the facts available, passing across the map somewhat irregularly from northwest to southeast.

During the last two decades there has been a considerable revival of interest in the Chronicler's history. A number of articles, as well as the appearance of several commentaries on the books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, bear impressive testimony to this fact. In the light of these concerted efforts, one might be tempted to think that we are well on our way to a consensus of opinion in regard to the basic problems of this segment of O. T. literature. Unfortunately, this is not the case at all. There still exists a wide divergence of opinion on such basic questions as date, authorship, and intent. This lack of agreement is graphically illustrated by two recent German commentaries which appeared within a year of each other, namely those of Wilhelm Rudolph and Kurt Galling. Whereas the latter considers the Chronicler's history to be the work of two successive editions, one dating from ca. 300 B.C., the other from ca. 190 B.C., Rudolph views it as essentially the work of one man writing during the early decades of the 4th century B.C. More recently, D. N. Freedman has argued for an even earlier date, placing it around 515 B.C., i.e., during the time of Haggai and Zechariah. It goes without saying that such differences in authorship and date would, of course, also lead to considerable differences in one's views regarding the purpose and theology of the Chronicler's history.

It is still an accepted opinion of biblical scholarship that the regulation governing the offering of half a shekel in Exodus 30:11–16 belongs to one of the late trends of the Priestly Code. This text in Exodus, which enjoins upon the people of Israel the offering of half a shekel for the service of the tent of meeting in the desert, is thought also to reflect the conditions of the early Second Commonwealth, when an annual tax of half a shekel was collected for the maintenance of the sanctuary.

For the diction of this Treatise has not been chosen at haphazard, but with great exactness and exceeding precision (Maimonides, Introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, p. 15).

In 2.32 of The Guide of the Perplexed, at the very outset of his section on prophecy, Maimonides states: “The opinions of people concerning prophecy are like their opinions concerning the eternity of the world or its creation in time” (p. 360).

“We shall at length be really and fully united to Thee [Almighty God] through Christ our Lord.”

The following lectures were delivered in March, 1926, at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Only the opening sentences have been slightly altered. I had originally intended to give a general survey of the numerous tendencies and movements in present-day German theology, but the situation is so complicated that such a survey would necessarily have been superficial. I therefore preferred to follow a single trend of thought and direct attention to a movement which seems most characteristic of the present situation, and which is likely to command the interest if not the assent of American theologians. I must say at the outset that this movement is entirely opposed to what we older men have been taught and have ourselves been teaching. Yet it is only fair to acknowledge that the leaders of the movement have something to tell us, and that they know how to impress the younger generation. At this moment we are actually speaking of a “Theology of Crisis.” That is the subject which I have attempted to elucidate in these lectures. And since the subject has not hitherto been treated in English, I have thought fit to append a complete bibliography. In that bibliography works or papers mentioned in the course of the lectures are marked with an asterisk.

Few eras are more interesting and profitable to study than those in which the basic ideas of mankind change under the impact of new discoveries and ideas. Our own appears to be such a period; of previous ages perhaps only the ebullient Renaissance can equal it. At its English beginnings in the sixteenth century men reached avidly for new experiences; in the course of time they tried to codify them into theories which would do justice to the observed facts and at the same time harmonize as far as possible with the dicta transmitted from the past. These early efforts resulted in the foundation of the modern methods of science, not to mention permanent and still unchallenged achievements like Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or Boyle's theory of gases. Such is the seventeenth century: the first great age of scientific generalization in English history.

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

During the latter part of the second century Irenaeus of Lyons, at the beginning of his treatise “Against All Heresies,” did not hesitate to state with great emphasis that Christianity had fully succeeded in keeping intact the original Christian faith, in safeguarding the unbroken continuity of the apostolic tradition, and in maintaining the unity of belief and of sacramental practice throughout all the churches scattered in the Roman Empire. One might easily remark that the very treatise which Irenaeus had set himself to write offered clear evidence that the Christian unity so emphatically affirmed by him did not really exist. Far from being united, Christianity was rent by serious doctrinal and disciplinary conflicts. Evidently Irenaeus was speaking of the oneness of the Christian faith without taking into account the divergent beliefs and practices of those groups which had been cut off from the communion of the Great Church. So understood his assumption was true: by the end of the second century the καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία did possess unity of essential belief and even a certain degree of uniformity in its organization and practice. How such a unity had been achieved is one of the most important problems in the history of early Christianity.

Sometime in the late 130s, Valentinus came to Rome. From information given by Irenaeus, it can be calculated that the founder of “Valentinianism” stayed in the imperial capital for more than fifteen years, maybe for as long as twenty-five or thirty years. At that time Justin Martyr also lived in Rome, and indeed Justin mentions “the Valentinians” once, in his Dialogue with Trypho (35.6), composed around 155–160. Justin's testimony suggests that during his years in Rome, Valentinus was active as a Christian leader.

The ever-increasing respect for Luther among Roman Catholic theologians and historians of Christian thought is not only a sign of but also a significant contributing factor to contemporary ecumenical openness — especially so in Germany. Yet at the same time we should realize that this more positive evaluation of Luther is based on the conviction that the reformer was born under the star of heresy. While it is granted that he articulated the biblical message of sin, grace and forgiveness in Christ within the context of the late medieval nominalism in which he was reared, it is exactly this context which is regarded as essentially a-catholic or even as anti-catholic to the extent that it obstructed Luther's grasp of the full and true catholic tradition in the Middle Ages. Therefore, from the very beginning, access to the specifically Catholic tradition had been denied to Luther.

There were indeed many respects in which Christianity was objectionable to Celsus. But perhaps no doctrine was so peculiarly nauseating to him as the Jewish-Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. At the beginning of the fifth book of the contra Celsum Origen is dealing with Celsus' attacks on the pride shown by the Jews in supposing that they were the chosen people of God. Celsus is contending that the Jewish belief in angels is merely a manifestation of this (5.6). They believe they have a particularly privileged position in God's sight on the ground of the angelic messengers sent to them by God (cf. 5.41), and this fantastic conceit is equally manifested in their selfcentered conception of the resurrection which is nothing more than the outcome of their delusion that they are the center of the universe and that the world was made entirely for their benefit (4.74–99). It is in this context that he continues:

It is foolish also of them to suppose that, when God applies the fire (like a cook!), all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly burnt up, and that they alone will survive, not merely those who are alive at the time, but also those long dead who will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as before. This is simply the hope of worms.

The Christian interpretation of the Old Testament was early set upon finding in it a figure corresponding to the Son, or the Word (Logos), in the New Testament, a divine being, intermediary between God the Father and the world in creation, revelation, and redemption. For Christian theology, with its philosophical presumptions, a God who visibly and audibly manifested himself to men in human form and action was necessarily such a being; the Supreme God, in his supramundane exaltation or his metaphysical transcendence, could not be imagined thus immediately to intervene in mundane affairs. In this assumption and to a considerable extent in their particular interpretations the Fathers had a precursor in the Jewish theologian Philo.