The interpretation of Adam and Eve's sexual life was a matter of some concern for early Jewish and Christian exegetes. As Louis Ginzberg observed, several Jewish pseudepigraphical works as well as the writings of many of the early Church Fathers “presuppose that not only the birth of the children of Adam and Eve took place after the explusion from paradise (Gen 4:1ff), but that the first ‘human pair’ lived in paradise without sexual intercourse.” The reasons for such an exegesis are not difficult to discern. The Garden of Eden was not simply a story about the primeval world; it could also function as a metaphor for the world-to-come. Hence the Garden was a paradigm for the ideal world of the eschaton, a world one should attempt to actualize or bring into existence now. Because Christians believed that the next world was devoid of marriage (Luke 20:27–40), it followed that the Garden was as well. In addition to this reason, Christians were also exhorted to abstain from marriage as a concession to the apocalyptic ferment of the present world (1 Corinthians 7).

One of the most significant developments in medieval Islamic thought was the emergence in the ninth and tenth centuries of a theological reaction against some of the rationalistic and deterministic elements of Greek philosophy that had begun to influence Islamic life and thought. Alongside the assimilation of Greek ideas and the development of Arabic philosophy by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, a counter-movement arose, among the Mutakallimun (speculative theologians), that rejected any attempt to view nature as a closed, eternal, and necessary system or to view God as limited by human conceptions of justice or by human free will.

The thought of Augustine on the two ethical categories of sin and grace is of great importance in the history of Christian theology. His system of grace and predestination prevailed for many centuries, although not without strong opposition, and underwent, through scholastic elaboration, substantial changes in order to save the freedom of the will; and finally it reappeared in the conception of the spiritual life shaped by Luther and the other teachers of the Reformation. It is on account of his doctrine about grace and predestination that Protestant theologians like to call Augustine “der Paulus nach Paulus und der Luther vor Luther.” Whatever may be the exactness of this genealogy, it shows at least the value and efficacy of the Augustinian conception of the natural and supernatural life on the development of the European spirit. In the Catholic tradition this thought of Augustine is at the very basis of the ethical, ecclesiological, and sacramental systems; in the Christian but non-Catholic movements this doctrine, interpreted in a rather paradoxical way, gave a starting-point to the Reformation.

Tannaite rabbis were accustomed to summarize succinctly the 611 or 613 commandments of the Law in from one to eleven general precepts; but these summaries were merely private halakoth. Until the second century A.D. there were read in the synagogue service the Ten Words which God himself spoke directly to his people, without the mediation of Moses. A Hebrew papyrus from about 200 B.C. includes the Decalogue with the Shema. And Philo goes so far as to declare that “the Ten Words are summaries of the special laws which are recorded in the sacred books.”

Since the earlyliterature on the1980s we have witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of historical Jesus. It is not entirely clear why Jesus scholarship has again become so important following the collapse of the first quest and the relatively meager results of the New Quest; the differences between this most recent quest and its two predecessors, however, are immediately evident. Key among the differences is the role played by scholarship on the Sayings Gospel Q. This essay offers some reflections on the ways in which Q has figured (or not figured) in reconstructions of the historical Jesus and offers some cautions in light of the achievements of a quarter century of composition-criticism on Q.

A holy book arouses the greatest respect even among those (indeed, most of all among those) who do not read it… and the most sophistical reasoning avails nothing in the face of the decisive assertion, which beats down every objection: Thus it is written. It is for this reason that the passages in it which are to lay down an article of faith are called simply texts. The appointed expositors of such a scripture are themselves, by virtue of their occupation, like unto consecrated persons; and history proves that it has never been possible to destroy a faith grounded in scripture.

The exact nature of Ham's crime against the drunken Noah has long fascinated exegetes, who have been left dissatisfied by the simple voyeurism described in the biblical text. One particularly interesting explanation, namely, that Ham actually castrated his father, first emerges in a Talmudic account of a debate about Gen 9:24 between Rav and Samuel, two renowned third-century Babylonian rabbis

In spite of all the volumes written about the Synod of Dort, one looks in vain for a comparison between the condemned Remonstrants and Calvin, either in doctrine or in those other distinguishing features of the Calvinism that flowed from Calvin and Geneva, and formed the working program among Huguenots, Dutch, Scotch, English, and the descendants of all four in the American colonies.

In a collection of essays dedicated to the memory of Paul Lapp it is fitting that one of them should deal with the lmlk or royal jar stamps to the study of which he made such an important contribution. It is our purpose here not to emulate his example nor to present a full review of the many problems associated with the interpretation of these stamps but to deal with the question of their date and to make some suggestions about the historical implications of the pattern of their geographical distribution.

Probably no two traditions of philosophy differ more widely than those of classical Greece and India. It is only when we force our way through the logical surface to the seemingly illogical practices andgoals of an earlier age that we can see similarities between the two cultures. These similarities, however, are sometimes so striking that the Indian evidence may help our understanding of Greece and the Greek our understanding of India. One gains such a reciprocal understanding, I think, from examining what I shall call the cults, meaning by this the sum of practices and goals as opposed to the philosophy, of the Greek Cynics and the Indian Pāśupatas.

The town of Northampton was settled in 1654, by pioneers coming up the valley from Connecticut. The physical tasks of the first years kept them from forming a church, but in 1659 they called Eleazar Mather to be their parson, who came with his bride Esther, daughter of the Reverend John Warham of Windsor. Mathers were either long or very short lived; Eleazar died on July 24, 1669, leaving Esther a widow of twenty-five, with three children and an estate of £524, of which £60 were in books, and Northampton went in search of a new pastor. In the forthright New England of the seventeenth century there was a method in such situations so frequently observed that it might almost be called a custom. When a minister died, after a town had invested in him to the extent of land and a house, and the widow was of marriageable age, they summoned a young bachelor to the pulpit. A few months after Eleazar's death, Solomon Stoddard, eight years out of Harvard, came by invitation to exhibit a sample of his preaching; on March 18, 1670, he married Esther Mather. She bore him twelve children and in her old age, though very “lame of the Sciatica,” she still was spinning “at the Linen-wheel”; she outlived her husband by seven years and died in 1736 at the age of ninety-two.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is among the most influential works ever written in religious philosophy. It occupies a unique place in Jewish religious thought. While the majority of subsequent Jewish thinkers have criticized what they understood of Maimonides' text, they have often felt obligated to struggle with his contentions. This obligation constitutes the highest expression of respect in Jewish philosophy.

Muslim medieval authors were fascinated with religious issues, as the corpus of Arabic literature clearly shows. They were extremely curious about other religions and made intense efforts to describe and understand them. A special brand of Arabic literature—the Milal wa-Niḥal (“Religions and Sects”) heresiographies—dealt extensively with different sects and theological groups within Islam as well as with other religions and denominations: pagan, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and others. Of course, most of the heresiographies were written in a polemical tone (sometimes a harsh one, like that of the eleventh-century Spaniard Ibn Ḥazm's: Al-Faṣl fi-l-Milal wa-l-Ahwā wa-l-Niḥal [“Discerning between Religions, Ideologies, and Sects”]), but some come close to being objective, scholarly descriptions of other religions (for example, Al-Shahrastānī's Milal wa-Niḥal book from the twelfth century).

Maurice Friedman, the leading scholar of Martin Buber's work, notes that “the question must even arise whether the philosophy of dialogue, the I-Thou relation between man and man, cannot stand by itself as an autonomous ethic, grounded in Buber's anthropology, but not necessarily tied with the relation between man and God.” Friedman then suggests that Buber's philosophy of religion and interpretation of the Bible do provide an important source of his ethics. An examination of Buber's thought reveals, however, that the tie between his philosophy of dialogue as an ethics and his view of the relation between man and God is indeed not necessary in some ways and perhaps not even possible.

Between 456 and 466, we are told by Cyril of Scythopolis (Vita S. Sabae, 9), S. Saba, sent on a mission from Palestine to Alexandria, was surprised to meet his father John, from whom he had been parted at the age of five in 444. In that year John had been conscripted and drafted into the numerus Isaurorum at Alexandria; now, under the name of Conon, he had risen to command of the unit. He was overjoyed at being reunited to his son, and suggested that he στρατεύεσθαι καὶ πρεσβύτερον τοῦ νουμέρου γενέσθαι.

In India the term “minorities” refers to religious communities present in much smaller numbers than Hindus—Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and Parsis/Zoroastrians. According to a 1991 census of India, out of the total Indian population of 846 million, there are 687.6 million Hindus of various sects, 101.6 million Muslims, 19.6 million Christians, 6.3 million Buddhists, 3.3 million Jains and 3.1 million adherents of other traditions. Christians are thus less than 3 percent of the total population whereas Hindus number about 83 percent. “Minorities” may also allude to those communities that have traditionally been kept outside the Hindu-based caste system—Dalits and Adivasis (or Tribals). Dalits number between 180 and 200 million and Adivasis number between 85 and 90 million in a population that has now crossed the one billion mark. While they are now included into the general category of Hinduism, these groups have been treated with overt hostility and repression, and have been the target of concerted and calculated attacks from the majority community. Christianity is also targeted violently and systematically in contemporary India, especially Christians who have been identified as Dalits and Adivasis. An analysis of the ideology and agenda of Hindu nationalism in an historical perspective will reveal the way in which the Dalits and Adivasis are perceived to present a threat to the fulfilment of this nationalist agenda. The Hinduization of India manifests itself with a propensity to eradicate all forms of variant plurality.

In recent decades, the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite (pseudo-Dionysius) has recaptured the attention of a number of scholars. These scholars address Dionysius's importance for the history of philosophy, for Christian aesthetics and liturgical and biblical symbols, and for postmodern theology. Much of this attention focuses on the brief and historically influential The Mystical Theology, written ca. 500 CE. For scholars, however, this text, like the God of which it speaks, seems to embody contradictions. I s there a consistent logic in the text, or is it deliberately inconsistent? In this essay, I shall analyze passages throughout the Dionysian corpus in order to interpret the sometimes dense expressions of Mystical Theology and uncover the logical structure of Dionysius's negative theology. I shall suggest that Dionysius's primary task is to deny that God is a particular being. By identifying the patterns of language used to speak of beings, Dionysius can identify both affirmative and negative language that avoids such patterns and hence is appropriate for speech about God. This interpretation demands close attention to the distinction between particular assertions or denials and the assertion or denial of all beings. By focusing on this distinction and on the higher status of negative over affirmative theology, I shall show, against the dominant trend in Dionysian scholarship, that this negative theology logically coheres; it is neither self-negating nor logically contradictory.

Juvenal in his First Satire (vv. 115, 116) remarks on the curious fact that Pecunia, though so devoutly worshipped, yet has no temple of her own

ut colitur Pax atque Fides, Victoria, Virtus, quaeque salutato crepitat Concordia nido.

She is not actually like them an object of cult. The modern reader, while relishing the bitterness of the gibe, is left vaguely wondering how the Romans could seriously worship such ‘personifications’ as Pax or Fides, and his wonder will only increase, if he follows up the subject and traces the cult of the ‘Virtues’ in literature, in inscriptions and, above all, in the imperial coinage. When we talk of ‘personifications,’ we feel ourselves at once in the realm of poetic or artistic imagery and fancy; the ancient Roman, when he spoke of similar figures, felt himself in the realm of religious fact.

There is a persistent tradition in the Eastern Christian Churches, often referred to by Oriental Christians even at the present day, to the effect that early in the VIIIth century there was an exchange of letters on the question of the respective merits of Christianity and Islam, between the Umayyad Caliph ʻUmar II (717–720) and the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the Isaurian (717–741), in which the Emperor gloriously refuted the claims of Islam. If this is so, it will represent one of the earliest documents in the Muslim-Christian Controversy known to us. Carl Güterbock rightly states that the beginnings of literary discussions concerning Islam among the Greeks can be traced back to the middle of the VIIIth century, when Leo III was succeeded by his son Constantine V (741–775), but he begins his account of the Byzantine polemists with John of Damascus (†754) and his pupil Theodore Abū Qurra (c. 825). A polemical epistle of Leo III to ʻUmar must have been written before 720, and would thus be earlier than any known Byzantine tractate on this controversy.

In 1 Corinthians the apostle Paul is attempting to straighten out some people in his newly founded community who, by virtue of their possession of wisdom, were claiming a special spiritual status. Apparently they designated themselves as pneumatikoi in contrast with the psychikoi, or those of lesser religious achievement. By a careful reading of Paul's arguments in 1 Corinthians we can discern some of their key religious terminology and principles. On the basis of pertinent parallels to these terms and principles, especially in Hellenistic philosophical sources and Hellenistic Jewish texts, it is then possible to draw certain conclusions regarding the religious viewpoint of these Corinthians.