The diversity among introductions to Paul is a tribute to the apostle's genius. There are two basic reasons for the diversity of opinion that exists today: First, internal incoherency—the difficulty of sorting Paul's thought into center and periphery (or event and context); and second, external incoherency—the gaps in our information about one of the most famous and interesting lives of all time. No consensus has emerged on the question of Paul's place in the world. We make this point not because this study will address the problem directly, but because we shall make inferences from one of the views in current circulation, namely that there is a basis to Paul's claim to Pharisaism (Phil 3:5). Attacking this view, some scholars have thought of him as a “would-be Pharisee” at best. We, nevertheless, think that the preponderance of evidence situates Paul in a universalist Jewish, probably Pharisaic, context. Paul believed that many of the law's prescriptions were still valid. As an illustration of Paul's belief in the continuing validity of the law, this essay attempts to show that 1 Cor 7:5–7 is best understood in the context of ritual purity concerns. These concerns include both the injunction for spouses to abstain from sexual activity for a time of prayer and Paul's defense of a celibate lifestyle within his own charismatic self-understanding.

In his 1989 article entitled “Apologetic Literature and Ambassadorial Activities,” William R. Schoedel considers “aspects of the form of apologetic literature in the early church and Judaism.” More specifically, he attempts to discover possible models for the literary character of the Christian apologies, and in particular the Embassy of Athenagoras, in the various kinds of addresses that ambassadors delivered before the emperor when presenting appeals and requests. Examples of such addresses include the ambassadorial speech discussed by the third-century rhetorician Menander Rhetor, the legal oration as exemplified by Philostratus in his treatment of the trial of Apollonius of Tyana, and the imperial libellus or petition. Schoedel draws two clear conclusions from this investigation. The first is that the literary form of Athenagoras's Embassy is an “apologetically grounded petition,” that is, a “mixed form that as such appears to have no real precedent in the Greco-Roman literary tradition.” The second is that “there is good reason to think that [it] was written to be presented to the emperor or delivered before him.” The present article will explore the ideas and arguments that led Schoedel to each of his conclusions and will offer an alternative interpretation of the evidence in each case.

Apanorama of female figures people the writings of Philo of Alexandria, ranging from the most sublime to the most debased. Amid this colorful array of characters are three female personifications of important conceptual constructs in Philo's worldview—Wisdom (ἡ σοφία), sense perception (ἡ αἴσθησις), and Nature (ἡ φύσις). Like the concepts they represent, these figures have little in common, and it is hard to reconcile their heterogeneity with what Philo says about the “female” as a category in itself. Here the data become particularly contradictory and confusing, for Philo's gender categories are among the most rigid and consistently applied principles of his thought. My purpose here is to try to unravel this rather glaring inconsistency between Philo's narrow perception of gender and the breadth of his female characterization as displayed by these three figures.

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.

Is it possible to work back from Matthew and Luke to the final redaction of Q, from there to the earliest composition of Q, and thus ultimately to the historical Jesus? John Kloppenborg's article skillfully presents the difficulties and perils of such a procedure. I shall comment only on the second part of his paper; there is little to dispute with respect to the first part, which is an illuminating review of the role of Q (and other sources) in the search for the historical Jesus during the last two centuries. At the end, I shall offer some suggestions that may help to solve the conundrum of the historical Jesus.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the mythic dimension of rabbinic thought. Much of this work emerged from debates between scholars of Jewish mysticism over the origins of kabbalistic myth. Should these origins be sought in external traditions that influenced medieval Judaism or within the rabbinic tradition? As is well known, Gershom Scholem claimed that the rabbis rejected myth in order to forge a Judaism based on rationality and law. Moshe Idel, on the other hand, argues that mythic conceptions and specifically the mythicization of Torah appear in rabbinic literature. While the medieval kabbalists elaborated and developed these ideas, they inherited a mythic worldview from the rabbis. Scholars are now increasingly likely to characterize many classical rabbinic sources as mythic. Medieval myth need not have been due to external influence, but should be seen as an internal development within Judaism. Despite the appearance of mythic thought in rabbinic literature, however, a tremendous gulf remains between rabbinic and kabbalistic myth. The full-blown theogonic and cosmogonic myths of the kabbalists, the complex divine structure of the Sefirot, and the detailed expressions of the theurgic effect of ritual (that is, the effect that specific rituals have upon God or the Sefirot) represent a mode of mythic thinking far more comprehensive than that of the rabbis. In rabbinic literature one finds mythic motifs—succinct, independent, and self–contained expressions—not fully developed myths. How exactly did rabbinic myth develop into medieval mystical myth?

In the centuries since Tertullian asked, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” the dichotomy between these two cities and their respective cultures has assumed almost mythical proportions. Scholars have expended a great deal of energy to show that this sentiment has a greater prescriptive value than a descriptive one. It now seems apparent that for nearly a thousand years, from the time of Alexander to the Muslim conquest, the Jews of Palestine lived in and successfully negotiated with Greco-Roman culture. The question that remains open is the depth and intensity of this interaction. It would plainly be both irresponsible and beyond my capabilities to attempt any type of comprehensive answer to this question.

What does it mean “to be a man”? Whereas in most societies at most times the determination of “maleness” is straightforward (does he have male genitalia? what is his chromosomal make-up?), locating the cultural constructions of “manhood” is far more difficult. Many anthropologists have noted that in contrast to models that postulate a common psychology for all men, everywhere, all the time, constructions of manhood are varied and culturally dependent. For example, the highly aggressive behavior necessary for retention of manhood for a male resident of Andalusian Spain can be contrasted to the sanctioned behavior of males of Tahiti. Unifying these diverse constructions of masculinity, however, is the common idea that manhood is an acquired state that males must fight both to attain and maintain. Because manhood is an achieved state, it can never be taken for granted: a male must be constantly proving that he is a man. “[T]he state of being a ‘real man’ or ‘true man’ [is] uncertain or precarious, a prize to be won or wrested through struggle.” Similar constructions of manhood are evident today throughout the circum-Mediterranean.

How do human beings receive answers to the most urgent questions they have of the powers of heaven? How do celestial beings provide guidance for perplexed humans? People living around the Mediterranean in the first few centuries CE devised many ways of seeking heavenly guidance; one of them was adjuration, in which they commanded gods, angels, or daemons to appear on earth and both reveal the mysteries of the universe to them and answer their questions about the problems of daily life. Similar techniques of adjuration occur in the Greco-Egyptian ritual texts usually referred to as the Greek magical papyri, the early Jewish mystical works known as the hekhalot literature, and Sefer ha-Razim, a collection of adjurations in Hebrew, heavily influenced by both Greco-Egyptian ritual texts and the hekhalot tradition of hymnology. These adjurations assume that human beings, through their knowledge of the correct invocations and divine names, possess the power to persuade or force the gods or angels to fulfill their desires.

In 1968 Amos Funkenstein published an article in Hebrew entitled “Changes in the Patterns of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the 12th Century.” In that article, Funkenstein argues that Christian attitudes toward Jews underwent a change in the twelfth century, a change discernable in the Christian polemical literature of the period. In contrast to the previous Christian strategy of polemicizing against Judaism through a battery of prooftexts, or testimonia, the innovative polemics introduced three important elements—the recourse to reason, the attack on the Talmud, and the use of the Talmud to prove the truth of Christianity. These innovations signaled the beginning of the end of the relative Christian tolerance of Jews and Judaism inspired by the writings of Augustine.

John Kloppenborg's article is a superb example of why studies of the gospel tradition, including the Sayings Gospel Q, should be important to students of religion as well as of early Christianity. Beginning with the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, whose last anonymous and posthumously published essay on “The Intention of Jesus and His Disciples” inaugurated both the modern quest of the historical Jesus and the origins of the synoptic problem, Kloppenborg traces in an exemplary way the twists and turns of a restless biblical scholarship that continues to struggle with the interpretative challenge laid down by Reimarus. From the pioneering studies of David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur, and the Tubingen school, through the detailed analyses of Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, Bernhard and Johannes Weiss, and Adolf von Harnack, to the modern research initiated by Heinz Eduard Tödt, James M. Robinson, Helmut Koester, and Dieter Lührmann, Kloppenborg presents an archaeology of the discipline. His mastery of both primary texts and secondary scholarship demonstrates what is required of anyone who wishes to earn the right to have an opinion.

Contact between cultures is a complex phenomenon that often involves accepting foreign ideas until these become new ways of self-expression. The case of the phoenix is of special interest, in this respect, because in antiquity it was associated with the sun temple at Heliopolis and miraculous forms of rebirth. The phoenix motif also appears in a variety of early Jewish and Christian writings, thus allowing for a comparative appreciation of its rabbinic reception. In light of these other intercultural encounters, it becomes clear that the rabbis were familiar with the details of the Hellenistic phoenix myths, and not only adapted the story to their own values but even enhanced its mythological dimension. In this way, the rabbis continued the Hellenistic practice of reactivating an ancient Egyptian myth. In contrast to the symbolic approach of early Christianity, the rabbis characteristically chose to accommodate the phoenix on a literal level, interpreting it mythopoeically, that is, by creating myth. Their interpretation of the phoenix moreover illuminates important, yet hitherto unnoticed aspects of rabbinic mythology.

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.

In a recent article entitled “Le monachisme égyptien et les villes,” Ewa Wipszycka cataloged for the later Byzantine period the abundant evidence of monastic habitation in or adjacent to the towns and villages of Egypt as well as in or on the margins of the cultivated land. Her analysis, which begins after the late third- to fourth-century formative period of Antony, Pachomius, and the Lower Egyptian semi-anchoritic centers in Nitria, Scetis, and Cellia, supplies convincing evidence of the rhetorical selectivity employed in the portrayal of Egyptian monasticism by the authors of the literary sources. In the literary texts, the dominance of monastic sites located in places of solitude generates a monastic geography of physical isolation. While acknowledging this dominance in the literature, Wipszycka draws together the infrequent literary references and the more numerous documentary examples of less physically isolated and more socially integrated monastic centers. The resulting picture of Egyptian monasticism is spatially and socially more complex than that derived from the literary sources alone.

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).

When I was completing my book on foundational theology, I presented a paper on the concept of broad reflective equilibrium and foundational theology to a group of colleagues at a conference sponsored by the Association of Theological Schools. This paper summarized the book's concluding section, which dealt with the relationship between contemporary criticisms of foundationalism and a foundational theology employing the method of broad reflective equilibrium. It advanced a systematic and historical argument. Systematically, the section argued that the method of broad reflective equilibrium offered a vision of foundational theology that avoided the pitfalls of foundationalism, overcoming the foundationalism of fundamental theology. It appealed to current discussions about methodology, specifically, the discussions on reflective equilibrium in the philosophy of science and in political ethics. The historical argument appealed to Schleiermacher by relating Schleiermacher's stance on the relationship between systematic and philosophical theology to the conception of a nonfoundationalist foundational theology, employing the method of broad reflective equilibrium.

A wife's right to divorce her husband does not exist in Jewish law, or so claims virtually every textbook on Jewish law. Over the years scholars have, of course, noted exceptions to this absolute assertion. In Jewish marriage contracts from Elephantine, for example, women have a right to divorce equal to that of men. Another example is the Gospel of Mark's logion on divorce, which apparently implies that either a woman or a man can initiate divorce procedures. Josephus, moreover, relates that Salome, King Herod's sister, sent her husband a bill of divorce. Mainstream scholarship has too often brushed aside these pieces of evidence as nonrepresentative actions or misunderstandings on the part of a transmitter. The Elephantine community was thus remote and had lost contact with the center of Jewish life many years earlier, living a pagan existence and following the legal practices of its neighbors. Mark was a non-Jewish author describing the actions of Palestinian Jews in light of more familiar Roman legal practices. Salome's actions contradicted Jewish law and succeeded only because of her Roman citizenship.

In his Vita sancti Patricii, written in the late seventh century, Muirch depicts St. Patrick, the national apostle of Ireland who lived in the fifth century, with a number of interesting characteristics. In this paper I shall demonstrate that the sources behind Muirch's account of Patrick included biographies of New Testament apostles. These biographies provide a background in religious literature for some of the events which, according to Muirch, befall Patrick on his missionary journey around the island of Ireland.

Ulfila the Goth (ca. 310–383) has gained fame as the Arian apostle to his people. More accurately, he was responsible for the conversion of semi-Arianism during the 340s. Yet two distinct traditions exist regarding Ulfila's own religious formation. One is an Arianized version of his life in the reports of Philostorgius and Auxentius, which claims Ulfila as an Arian from birth. The other, a Nicene version gleaned from the works of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, asserts that Ulfila “converted” from Nicene orthodoxy to Arianism sometime between 360 and 376. How compelling is either biography? If, moreover, Ulfila had remained loyal to Nicene doctrines until at least 360, to what had he converted the Goths in the 340s?

In an earlier essay I proposed the paradoxical theses that the main religio-philosophical alternative in the West to Judaism and Christianity has always been the perennial philosophy in its various forms, and that Christianity (and less so Judaism) has always been an amalgam or synthesis of the ideal types, biblical religion and the perennial philosophy. An example of the former is the concept delineated by the biblical theology movement of the 1940s and 1950s. By the latter I mean the religio-philosophical world view exemplified by Neoplatonism and Vedanta, and by the philosophical foundation of Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy, and propounded by such authors as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, S. H. Nasr, and Huston Smith.