Richard Rorty has suggested that religion is a conversation-stopper.1 Jeffrey Stout has questioned this claim, gently chiding Rorty for his animus toward increasing assertiveness on the part of religiously committed individuals in their address of public issues.2 Stout concludes that “conversation is the very thing that is not stopped when religious premises are introduced in a political argument.”3 He is convinced that Rorty is overly sensitive on this matter and believes, with Nicholas Wolterstorff and others, that religious people in a pluralistic democracy have not only the right but also the responsibility to share their convictions and the reasoning that leads to their opinions on vital moral and social issues. Stout quotes Wolterstorff as follows:

Hans Jonas began his 1961 Ingersoll Lecture by acknowledging the “undeniable fact” “that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality.”1 Jonas nonetheless concluded his lecture by affirming that “although the hereafter is not ours … we can have immortality … when in our brief span we serve our threatened mortal affairs and help the suffering immortal God.”2 While he may not have realized it, Jonas's words capture what I shall argue is the dominant view of immortality in modern Jewish thought. Underlying this view is an effort to refute materialist conceptions of human existence without committing to any particularly theological or traditionally metaphysical notion of immortality.

The passage in Numbers 9:1-14 presents new legislation on the Passover sacrifice. For one who contracted impurity immediately prior to the Passover or was too far away to participate in it, the amendment prescribes an alternate date, one month later:

Is Origen of Alexandria the inventor of the eschatological doctrine of apokatastasis— of the eventual return of all creatures to the Good, that is, God, and thus universal salvation? Certainly, he is one of its chief supporters in all of history, and he is, as far as we know, the first to have maintained it in a complete and coherent way, so that all of his philosophy of history, protology, and anthropology is oriented toward this telos.1 There are, however, significant antecedents to his mature and articulate theorization, at least some of which he surely knew very well, and there is even a possible parallel. For this conception did not appear ex nihilo, but in a cultural context rich in suggestions and premises, and in a philosophical framework of lively discussions concerning fate, free will, theodicy, and the eternal destiny of rational creatures.

The presents its chief protagonist in two discrepant ways: Job the patient and Job the rebel. Ancient Jewish interpretations of Job praise Job the patient and condemn, or at least do not praise, Job the rebel. Modern Jewish interpretations, by contrast, praise Job the rebel and scant the patient, pious Job of the frame story. Job the rebel becomes a model of sincerity or authenticity, a chief value of modernity. Job the patient and pious sufferer so celebrated by antiquity is at best an ambivalent figure.

In the nineteenth century the unrestricted application of the historical-critical method posed an unprecedented challenge to inherited Christian notions about the Bible. While this challenge was eventually to be felt most acutely in the study of the New Testament (nt) once the distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” had firmly established itself, traditional viewpoints on the Old Testament (ot) were actually the first to be called into question. As a consequence of historical investigation, it became increasingly difficult for theologians to claim that the gospel is already taught in the ot. Regarding this matter, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) made a bold proposal. He argued against the canonical standing of the ot on the grounds that it expresses Jewish, not Christian, religion. For him this conclusion was the unavoidable result of the advancing critical scholarship that was undermining the christological exegesis used to defend the church's claim to the ot against the synagogue's counter-claim to its sole rightful possession. Opposing such “christianizing” readings, Schleiermacher broke ranks from Christian theologians and championed the side of the Jews in this historic debate. His only predecessors in this regard were Marcion and the Socinians, although his proposal for relegating the ot to noncanonical status was later endorsed by Adolf von Harnack.

In recent years scholars from a broad spectrum, including classicists, patristic and biblical scholars, ancient historians, and specialists in ancient Judaism,1 have demonstrated an increasing interest in universalism. There has been very little written, however, on Porphyry's search for universal salvation, and whether Eusebius of Caesarea's understanding of universalism2 —here defined as the universality of a particular cult's soteriology (or even more briefly stated, the belief in universal salvation)—was influenced polemically by Porphyry. Eusebius's great apologetic works, Praeparatio evangelica and Demonstratio evangelica (henceforth P.E. and D.E.), written ca. 313–318 and ca. 318–324 c.e., respectively,3 provide many passages in which he artistically weaves universalist themes into his overall theological argument: P.E. contains 187 such passages, while D.E. has 417, more than twice that number.4 While some of the sub-themes of each work are either identical to one another or very similar in scope and content, the different audiences addressed—P.E. is primarily written to pagans against the charge that Christianity is new and thus lacks the authenticity of an ancient tradition, while D.E. responds to Jewish criticisms and gives pastoral guidance for the bishop's flock—can account for differences in both rhetorical method and theological emphases.

“I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of His wrath.” (Lam 3:1)

“Now there was a wall all around the outside of the temple area. The length of the measuring reed in the man's hand was six long cubits, each being a cubit and a handbreadth in length; so he measured the thickness of the wall.” (Ezek 40:5)

In the introduction to Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Maurice Bloch makes some forthright admissions about the methodological and theoretical pitfalls threatening a project of the scope he undertakes in this slim, provocative volume. He acknowledges, for instance, the temptation, when arguing for what he describes as a “quasi-universal” religious structure, to present “a tendentious selection of examples, and make this structure appear to be present everywhere.”1 In the face of this danger, independent readers, who “choose to continue the exercise by trying to see whether what is proposed here stands up to the test of the other cases they know” become the most important critical constraint.2 In what follows I test Bloch's theory of rebounding violence against the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian.

The first eight chapters of the Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish pseudepigraphon preserved solely in its Slavonic translation, deal with the early years of the hero of the faith in the house of his father Terah.1 The main plot of this section of the text revolves around the family business of manufacturing idols. Terah and his sons are portrayed as craftsmen carving religious figures out of wood, stone, gold, silver, brass, and iron. The zeal with which the family pursues its idolatrous craft suggests that the text does not view the household of Terah as just another family workshop producing religious artifacts for sale. Although the sacerdotal status of Abraham's family remains clouded in rather obscure imagery, the authors of the Slavonic apocalypse seem to envision the members of Terah's household as cultic servants whose “house” serves as a metaphor for the sanctuary polluted by idolatrous worship. From the very first lines of the apocalypse the reader learns that Abraham and Terah are involved in sacrificial rituals in temples.2 The aggadic section of the text, which narrates Terah's and Abraham's interactions with the “statues,” culminates in the destruction of the “house” along with its idols in a fire sent by God. It is possible that the Apocalypse of Abraham, which was written in the first centuries of the Common Era,3 when Jewish communities were facing a wide array of challenges including the loss of the Temple, is drawing here on familiar metaphors derived from the Book of Ezekiel, which construes idolatry as the main reason for the destruction of the terrestrial sanctuary. Like Ezekiel, the hero of the Slavonic apocalypse is allowed to behold the true place of worship, the heavenly shrine associated with the divine throne. Yet despite the fact that the Book of Ezekiel plays a significant role in shaping the Abrahamic pseudepigraphon,4 there is a curious difference between the two visionary accounts. While in Ezekiel the false idols of the perished temple are contrasted with the true form of the deity enthroned on the divine chariot, the Apocalypse of Abraham denies its hero a vision of the anthropomorphic Glory of God. When in the second part of the apocalypse Abraham travels to the upper heaven to behold the throne of God, evoking the classic Ezekielian description, he does not see any divine form on the chariot. Scholars have noted that while they preserve some features of Ezekiel's angelology, the authors of the Slavonic apocalypse appear to be carefully avoiding the anthropomorphic description of the divine Kavod, substituting references to the divine Voice.5 The common interpretation is that the Apocalypse of Abraham deliberately seeks “to exclude all reference to the human figure mentioned in Ezekiel 1.”6

The seminal thirteenth century Geronese kabbalist, Talmudist, and exegete Moses Nahmanides (Moses b. Naḥman, 1194–c.1270) perceived the physical world as a mirror for the internal workings of the divine world. For him the Bible “relates about the lower matters and alludes to the upper,”1 rendering its apparently mundane legal, historical, and ethical dimensions a record of the inner variegated life of God. At the very inception of the world, each and every day of creation transcends its strict temporality, referring “at the inner core of the matter” () to the “sefirot which emanate from above.”2 The world's genesis unfolds along the parallel planes of the material world and the complex intradeical mechanics, the sefirot—a staple of kabbalistic thought and terminology—that are constituent of God himself. However, Nahmanides' exegetical project does not invite the escapist flight from reality that mysticism so often requires. On the contrary, his thoroughgoing kabbalistic ontology divulges a keen appreciation for and preoccupation with empirical reality and temporal history rather than threatening to overwhelm the mundane. His biblical exegesis has been characterized as exceptional within its genre for being “entirely free of the frequent kabbalistic tendency to devalue peshat [the plain sense of the text].”3 As David Novak has argued, Nahmanides, despite his kabbalistic theology, “also finds in the Torah a commitment to the reality of nature and history, even if that level of truth is transcended by the Kabbalah. Kabbalah, the highest truth, does not displace all other truths but puts them in perspective.”4 The argument that ensues in this article will demonstrate, firstly, that a prominent example of this feature of Nahmanidean exegesis pertains to the domain of interhuman relations. Here I will focus particularly on those “truths” his exegesis discloses about the spousal relationship. Secondly, Nahmanides' view of the spousal relationship is offered as paradigmatic of his kabbalistic theology, which not only does not displace its concrete social, psychological, anthropological, and juristic realia, but actually complements them. Thirdly, the case will be made that Nahmanides' narrative exegesis, with its overarching quest for the plain sense of the text, is not intended simply to sate his readers' intellectual and literary curiosity but also practically shapes his normative positions. In this particular context I will explore how his exegetical construct of a primordial composite human being, its gendered bifurcation, the definitive ideal of spousal union, the subsequent relational tensions between man and woman, and their conflict and resolution into a gendered hierarchy, all dramatized by the Garden of Eden narrative, inform his normative framework for the conduct of conjugal duties.

In 1963, when the “linguistic turn” had evidently taken hold of New Testament studies, Albert Vanhoye, a linguistically trained Catholic priest, published a monograph entitled La structure littéraire de l'épître aux Hébreux.1 The manifold reactions to his refined literary-rhetorical approach and conclusions in favor of a concentric structure oscillated between euphoric approval and offensive disapproval. Along with its translation into German (1979/1980) and a decade later into English (1989), Vanhoye's study influenced and stimulated Hebrews scholarship like none other in the twentieth century.

In the early or mid-second century c.e., a Jewish proselyte named Aquila1 translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek.2 The translation survives today only in fragments, but both Jewish and Christian sources from Late Antiquity offer perspectives on and information about Aquila as well as citations of his translation. To fully understand the role his legacy played in Jewish and Christian communities requires careful analysis of each of the sources. I believe that prior scholarship, especially regarding ancient perspectives on Aquila and his translation, as well as the popularity of his translation in various communities, has drawn conclusions based on overall impressions of texts that may appear quite differently when examined closely and in context. My goal in the following pages is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Aquila's Bible translation in Late Antiquity.

The Aeneid of Vergil and the Psalter traditionally attributed to David so influenced Augustine's writing that one scholar has called the Confessions “a recapitulation of Vergilian epic in a Christian universe,” and another has described it as an “amplified Psalter.”1 Since both works permeate Augustine's narrative, classicists and theologians have long studied the place of the Aeneid and the Psalms in the Confessions, but never in relation to each other.2 Consequently, the dialogical quality of Augustine's text, which includes these radically divergent voices, has largely gone without comment. As paradigms of classical and biblical literature, however, the Aeneid and the Psalms contribute to the formation of the author's own voice and affections. Ancient readers, for instance, widely recognized Vergil's epic as the work of the summus poeta, a book with prophetic powers and the crown of Roman literature to be emulated by all Latin writers.3 Early Christians, in turn, regarded the Psalter as the fabric of constant prayer, a kind of compendium of all scripture pointing prophetically to Christ.4 Thus, the Confessions represent a struggle among powerful voices and emotions frequently operating at cross purposes.

In this essay I examine a rather quirky and possibly novel teaching of Faustus Socinus (1539—1604): what George H. Williams calls a “pre-Ascension ascension” (hereafter PAA) of Christ into heaven. Faustus claimed that this bodily ascent into heaven took place before Christ's final visible ascension to heaven some time between his baptism and the commencement of his earthly teaching ministry. The theory states in brief that Christ, “after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, … was in heaven, and abode there for some time.” Christ took this heavenly sojourn “that he might hear from God himself and … see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God's own name.”1 In another place Socinus states that Jesus, “after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the gospel, was raptured into heaven (in caelum raptus fuerit). There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race.”2

The mysticism of the seventeenth-century French cardinal, Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629), contains an extended treatment of the relationship of the human and the divine in mystical union. Bérulle explores the nature of mystical union in detail and gives attention to the combination of the apparently incompatible elements of the human and divine and the historical and eternal. He prefers not to begin with the opposition between these elements but instead, by exploring the relationship between them, to use relational language, which brings together unity and difference. For this task, he draws on the tools of late medieval mysticism, which entail especially the metaphors of interior poverty, nuptial mutuality, and neoplatonic emanation. At the same time, he applies the categories of Christology to the problem of mystical relationality and difference. Christology deepens the ways in which to assert and to combine unity and difference between the human and the divine in mystical union. For the reader today, this provides an intriguing perspective on the question of mystical relationality.1 I intend here to set out Bérulle's understanding of mystical relationality and to focus on his christological development of questions of unity and difference.

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king's son in Matthew 22:1—4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town's praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2

Calendars, liturgy, and especially festivals offer a convenient vantage point from which to analyze collective identities. They can provide access to group mentalities rather than to the ideas of individual intellectuals, which are often more or less confined to ivory towers.1 Ritual addresses the whole human being—the intellect, emotions, and body—and it does so by establishing and defining relations between the individual, his or her in-group, and the out-group.2 Every collective identity is formed and reformed in a continuous process encompassing exchange with, as well as distinction from, other possible collective identities.3 Sometimes, this construction of a “we” in distinction from “them” is explicit, while at other times it takes place in a more clandestine and encrypted fashion.

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.