Arthur Darby Nock was born in Portsmouth, England on February 21, 1902, the son of Cornelius and Alice Mary Ann Page Nock. In his family's quiet and somewhat austere home, he and his elder sister were always urged to excel in their school work and had little opportunity for easy contact with friends. In later years Nock felt that early loss. Meanwhile, however, he flourished in the atmosphere of forced learning, and distinguished himself both at the Portsmouth Grammar School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he had won a Scholarship.

A fairly long, though incomplete, list of sacrifices for the festival of the Eleusinia from the Athenian State Calendar of the end of the fifth century B.C. is preserved in the inscription published in Hesperia 4 (1935), 21, column three, lines 60–86. The arrangement of items can best be illustrated by the beginning of the column in question:

Throughout the State Calendar the scheme of entries is regularly the same:

A few successive lines will illustrate this further:

Among the votive inscriptions of magistrates in Greek cities there exist a number of dedications to the goddess Aphrodite. J. and L. Robert in Rev. ét. gr. 72 (1959), 229–230, draw attention to these singular pieces of evidence and explain them in reference to a characteristic of Aphrodite as a patroness of friendship and of harmony. The devotion of magistrates to the goddess of love, apart from all that we know about her in the life of antiquity, displays such an astonishing singularity that a further approach and investigation seem to be expedient.

Shortly before his death Professor Nock asked me to arrange publication of the following lecture on Gnosticism (which had been read at the Harvard Divinity School and elsewhere). Of several unfinished lectures and papers he wished it alone to be printed. Anyone who knows his work or who could have seen the mass of material which he had already collected to supplement and annotate this paper will understand the hesitations which such a perfectionist must have overcome in order to authorize its appearance in so incomplete a form. He was clearly preparing to transform it into a major article with full augmentation and reference to other work. Though it remains only a sketch, however, it presents his final evaluation of a subject to which he had devoted frequent attention in articles and reviews for almost forty years. A few months before his death he wrote an important summary of recent work and of his own views on early gentile Christianity as an introduction to the recent paperback reprint of Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background (Harper Torchbooks, 1964). There he said that Gnosticism “may fairly be called the crucial issue today in the study of early Christianity.” In his brief discussion the present lecture was evidently very much in his mind.

The publication in January, 1953, of fragments of an unknown recension of the Greek Bible gave the first unambiguous warnings of a revolution to come in the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Earlier the publication of the great Isaiah scroll of Qumrân, Cave I (IQ Isaa), and later of the second fragmentary roll of Isaiah (IQ Isab), created noise and excitement, but none of the major text-critical schools was forced to shift significant ground. Champions of the Hebraica veritas who had increasingly dominated the field, especially in Europe, noted the close affinities of the scrolls with the traditional text. The failure of IQ Isa to produce a significant number of superior readings despite its antiquity embarrassed lingering survivors of the great critical tradition of the nineteenth century, and delighted biblical exegetes and historians who wished to ply their trade without entering the miasmal precincts of text-critical labors. Despite some attention paid to its occasional affinities with the Old Greek, most scholars, whether prompted by traditionalist prejudgment or sheer inertia, were pleased to label the text vulgar or even sectarian, avoiding thereby a serious reexamination of their text-critical theories.

In view of the fatefulness of Ludwig Feuerbach for religion in the modern world, it is curious that recent theologians have written so little about him. For the most widely effective critiques of religion in our time, those by Marx and Freud, are both variations on a theme that received its classic expression not from them but from him. Yet Karl Barth is the one major theological figure of today who has explicitly concerned himself with Feuerbach over the years. Even if Barth had no other bearing on our situation than this, his reflections on Feuerbach would merit the attention I propose to give them by considering three questions: (1) Who is the Feuerbach with whom Barth has been concerned? (2) How has Barth responded to him? (3) Has he answered him?

To one who is familiar with the New Testament and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Tatian's Discourse to the Greeks comes as quite a surprise. Supposedly an apology for Christianity, there is within it not one mention of Christ or Christianity (at least, not in these terms). Other familiar words such as “Jesus,” “Lord,” “Church,” “Savior,” “salvation,” etc., are also absent. Except for a passing reference to “the God who suffered” (15, 5–6), and the unqualified statement that “God was born in the form of a man” (23, 6), one might overlook altogether the fact that Tatian was a Churchman.

In the argument preceding Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton chooses to emphasize at the outset one aspect of his conception of time. He summarizes Satan's report to the fallen angels, and adds “for that Angels were long before the visible Creation, was the opinion of many ancient Fathers.” Nowhere else in these prefatory “arguments” does he feel it necessary to make any explanatory statements about the cosmology of the poem. Here, however, he calls attention to a belief that was in conflict with the prevailing Christian view. But, as Milton realized, the reader must grasp this heterodox belief of his in order to understand the whole design of the poem.

It may seem futile to pose the question of the influence of Nominalism upon Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's Archbishop of Canterbury. Attempts to view the Reformation as a reaction to late medieval Nominalism, or as essentially Nominalist itself, have not been too well received. One student of Cranmer's theology, G. W. Bromiley, declares that any Nominalism in Cranmer was unconscious. Cranmer himself, of course, denied that he founded his doctrine upon anything but Scripture and the Fathers.

Few criticisms of Christianity are so emotionally charged or so inexorable in their logic as the argument against the almightiness and goodness of God based on the fact of human suffering. “Either God cannot abolish evil or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all-good.” Numerous solutions to this dilemma have been offered by theologians, philosophers and poets which have pointed to the educational value of suffering, the realization of such second-order goods as compassion from the existence of first-order suffering, the promised compensations for earthly suffering in another existence, and so forth. Even the best of these solutions leave great dark areas. Suffering, in fact, is not always ennobling. Must God have created so much and such devastating first-order evils to produce compassion? Can we possibly comprehend what could count as a “compensation” for the brutal, pointless agonies to which human beings are subject? We seem constantly faced with the necessity of saying in extremis that it is, after all, “a mystery.” I happen to agree that it is a mystery, but in Christianity “mystery” means not merely a problem that we cannot see through but something that is revealed. The problem is of such importance that we simply cannot be satisfied with a few rhetorically convincing forays signed off with the reminder that God's will is inscrutable. I agree with Fr. Daniélou, “The question is fraught with anguish for too many sorrowful hearts to be lightly put off: we must get to the bottom of it.”

As far as form is concerned, the gap between Lat. abyssus, “abyss,” and its nasalized Romance congeners of the type abism-is difficult to explain. The two prevalent interpretations are somewhat artificial and unsatisfactory. They are presented by Wartburg, who postulates analogy to the suffix -ismus (Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch [FEW], I, 11), and by Corominas, who posits a basis *abyssissimus reduced to *abissimus (Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana, I, 9).

Although Matthew Arnold, in his disquisitions on faith and belief, never used the word “myth” as literary criticism defines it today, yet his whole approach to the spiritual crisis of modern times derives from an implicit assumption that man cannot live without myths. In “On the Modern Element in Literature,” he voiced man's need of an adequate intelligence of his situation. To comprehend the collective life of humanity, past and present, in all its complex interrelatedness—such is, to Arnold, the essence of moral and intellectual deliverance, the necessity for an age of “multitudinous” facts.

A well-known statement of R. Abba in the Yerushalmi (Jerusalem Talmud) attributes the historical origins of ordination — or, to be more precise, of “appointment” — to R. Johanan b. Zakkai. In contrast, however, the Babli (Babylonian Talmud) bases ordination on the biblical verse: “And (Moses) laid his hands on him (Joshua)” (Num. 27:23), thus recognising Moses as the founder of the institution. Borenstein rejects the Babylonian tradition completely, as does Newman, although the latter suggests somewhat vaguely that some kind of ordination may have existed prior to R. Johanan b. Zakkai. Gulak also maintains that ordination did not go further back than R. Johanan b. Zakkai on the grounds that during the period of the Temple the appointment of urban judges was in the hands of the High Court.

Three eminent scholars, Professors Robert M. Grant, T. A. Burkill, and Cyril C. Richardson, in their reviews of my Religious Philosophy, have raised certain problems touching on topics in Patristic philosophy. The problems are of such importance as to call for further consideration.

“To help your conception,” Jonathan Edwards counselled his congregation, “imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, all of a glowing heat, or into the midst of a glowing brick-kiln, or of a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine also that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within and without as a bright coal of fire, all the while full of quick sense; what horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace!” “But your torment,” warned Edwards by way of conclusion, “your torment in hell will be immensely greater than this illustration represents.”

Since the discovery at Pompeii of specimens of the ROTAS-SATOR rebus scholarly investigation into the origin of the “magic square” has been bedevilled by a fundamental problem. Is it or is it not sheer chance that the letters of the square can be rearranged in two intersecting PATER NOSTER's with two A's and two O's remaining to be positioned at will?

The theological crisis in Judea occasioned by the destruction of the Temple in the year 587 B.C.E. left its indelible imprint upon the contemporary literature. The conflict between the popular belief in the inviolability of the House of God and the stark reality of the national catastrophe raised fundamental questions about the nature of God and divine justice. The books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Habakkuk, in particular, bear repeated testimony to the pervasive urgency of the problem. Once the inevitability of the fall became an ineradicable conviction in the prophetic consciousness, the need for an explanation became no less imperious than if the disaster were already an accomplished fact.

Professor Page's interpretation of Sappho, Fr. I, in Sappho and Alcaeus has been approved by numerous writers and reviewers, but it raises serious difficulties and my purpose in this paper is to examine them. In doing so I shall have occasion to refer to an article published many years ago in this journal which was concerned with the epiphany description in particular and which drew the conclusion that the poem was not to be taken quite so seriously as was the fashion at that time. Page is in agreement on this point, and I do not propose to discuss it further. In addition, however, a suggestion based on the form and style was made in regard to the sixth stanza, which is the key to what is novel in his interpretation. This suggestion has been tacitly rejected, and I now propose to reiterate it and, if possible, reinforce the argument which was then put forward.