Christianity was founded by an historical person who lived in comparatively recent times. Few of us have not seen one or other of our grandparents; some doubtless have looked upon the faces of their great-grandparents. Now Jesus of Nazareth lived, and people were first called Christians, no longer ago than about twenty-five such periods of time as separate a man from his great-grandfather. We speak sometimes of the ‘evolution of Christianity,’ as if Christianity were something coeval with the geologic periods. But the fact is that though there has been a great deal of activity in theological speculation under the name of Christianity, there has been very little evolution of Christianity itself since the days of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus. However that may be, we need to realize that Christianity appeared in the full light of comparatively recent historical times, and was founded by an historical person of whom we have fairly definite records and under conditions that we may pretend to understand. And if there are some things about the origin of Christianity that we do not know or understand, it is not because of the remoteness of the times, but because of the obscurity and the literary insignificance of its beginnings. The men who launched it were plain men, and we cannot know what they failed to observe and in after years omitted to set down. Yet they set down enough to enable us to study intelligently the circumstances and conditions under which Christianity arose and to which in so large part owed its rise.

The excavation of a site commonly gives us a neat and definite stratification of successive periods. Although the religious history of the Empire is less fortunate, nevertheless it has turning points and we can remark certain features as characteristic of particular periods. It is not that the phenomena in question are confined to these periods, but that they appear in them with special emphasis. The purpose of this paper is to consider a group of inscriptions which throw some light on the religious atmosphere of Rome in the middle of the third century of our era.

The problem of Jesus, which by its very nature must always remain of present concern, seems of late to have stirred a keener interest than for many years past. Never have the publications relating to Jesus and to the problem of the origins of Christianity been so abundant as to-day, and more than ever before do men crave an exact idea of the true story of Jesus and the conditions in which Christianity had its origin.

The student of present-day German religious thought cannot fail to be impressed by the diversity of the attitudes which it expresses. German religious belief runs the entire gamut of possibilities. Side by side one finds authoritarianism, rationalism, mysticism, a devotion to the past and a dominant interest in the future, a religion based on scholarly research and another grounded in romantic experience, a cloistered individualism and a pragmatic interest in human welfare. Students of Aquinas, of Kant, and of Schleiermacher, disciples of Keyserling and of Steiner, ecclesiastics, nature-lovers, and workers for a new social order, all are active today, and through their efforts a new series of general philosophical conceptions is rising from the ruins of the war.

It has often been suggested that the principal gnostic myths had their origin in genuine folklore, and the difficulty of discovering traces of this lore outside of gnostic sources has been explained by supposing that the myths were Oriental and were derived either from the oral traditions of localities in which no literature was produced or from literature which is no longer extant. Nothing favorable, however, to this view can be found from a comparison of gnostic myths with the native myths of Greece or with such Oriental mythology as is preserved unmixed with philosophic exegesis. In cases where known Greek, Jewish, or Christian sources are borrowed for the myths, the effort to extract gnostic theology is as painful as in the worst attempts of the Stoic exegetes, but where the myth is distinctively gnostic the philosophic meaning is easily traced in the story's plot. The reason for this is evidently not that Oriental myths are more philosophic than Greek but that gnostic myths are in their origin artificial and symbolic. Reminiscences of Oriental fancy may occasionally appear, but they do not control the main structure of the plots and can usually be detected by the difficulty with which a philosophic meaning is attached to them. An underlying structure of thought invariably conditions the imaginative forms of gnostic myths, so that theological differences between related sects are often apparent only in minor variations in the development of the story. These variations are difficult to interpret in systems of which we have only a fragmentary knowledge, and it is dangerous to patch up one system with pieces derived from another, however admirably they may seem to fit. Unlike the Stoics, who started from popular myths, the natural products of unsophisticated imagination, and explained these as symbols of philosophic truth, the gnostics invented their own myths to suit their philosophy. In course of time the best of these inventions served as the basis for further allegorizing, and some of the later gnostics, like the authors of Pistis Sophia, forgot, or neglected, the philosophy of their masters and elaborated only the mythological elements in their theology. Since they were men of feeble abilities, they only made bad myths into worse ones, and obscured the philosophic meaning which was really symbolized in the earlier forms of the stories, stiff and artificial though they were.

An Impressive thing is happening in these days. We are observing the Tercentenary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The common verdict has been for a long time rather against the Puritans. Their civil administration is declared to have been at times tyrannical, their ecclesiastical order prejudiced, even bigoted. Individuals among them appear to us fanatical. Such accusations have become almost traditional. At the present moment however the mind of our country and in some measure of the world has turned again to the contemplation of the Puritan history. We recall their deeds and suffering. It is realized how one-sided is the judgment alluded to. There is a disposition to recognize how great was their service to our country and to modern men. This is the mind of some who by no means share the solemn earnestness, the rigidity, the zealotry of the typical Puritan character. Perhaps no generation of our countrymen has ever been further removed than is our own from Puritan standards. Yet there is this widespread feeling that justice is not always done them. We may owe to them something of the larger liberty and more comfortable existence which, coming generations after them, we now enjoy and which apparently we might not have enjoyed had we lived among them.

Buddhist literature is not complete in any one language. The primary sources for the study of Buddhism consist of texts in Pali, in Sanskrit (with some fragments in Prakrit, and a few texts in a mixed dialect — as though composed by men who were trying to turn Prakrit into Sanskrit but who had a very imperfect knowledge of Sanskrit grammar), in Chinese, in Tibetan, and in several of the languages which were current in Chinese Turkestan. There are also texts in Mongolian, but these seem to be derivatives from Tibetan, and not of primary importance.

It is with five of the Christian fragments unearthed at Oxyrhynchus by Grenfell and Hunt, under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Fund, that I propose to deal here. It will be convenient to quote these fragments as OP (Oxyrhynchus Papyri), and the discoverers of them as GH (Grenfell and Hunt), using the enumeration adopted in their large volumes (not that of the popular reprint of April 1904). The fragments to be considered are Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1, 654, 655, 840, and 1224; the first two of these (No. 1 and No. 654) are the so-called ‘Sayings of Jesus’ and ‘New Sayings of Jesus’; No. 655 is the ‘Fragment of a Lost Gospel,’ containing a page of sayings; No. 840 the ‘Fragment of an Uncanonical Gospel,’ published in 1908; No. 1224 the fragments entitled ‘Uncanonical Gospel,’ published in 1914.

The resemblance of P. Got. 21 to the letter sent by Jesus to Abgar had already occurred to me when I saw Bell's review of Frisk's publication. Bell there expresses the opinion that “the text looks like a version of the ‘Letter to Abgar.’” It is in reality nothing else.

The Old Testament has always been something of an embarrassment to the Christian church. The book was Scripture and its heroes were to be taken as examples. Nevertheless there was much in their conduct which ran counter to the prevailing Christian ethics. A problem thus arose both in exegesis and in ethics. Were the patriarchs to be justified? Should they be imitated? Marcion evaded the difficulty by simply rejecting the Old Testament, pointing out the complete antithesis, for example, between the precept, “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,” and the conduct of Joshua, who kept the sun up till his wrath went down. In the main the fathers resolved such difficulties by allegory, but even this key did not suffice. There was no denying that Moses really slew the Egyptian, that the Israelites robbed them, that Abraham lied, that Jacob was polygamous, and that Samson committed suicide, not to mention the deeds which made it appropriate to attribute to David the penitential psalms. Origen, the prince of allegorists, admitted that the incest of Lot and the polygamy of Abraham and Jacob were “mysteries not understood by us.”

On a visit to Damacus in March 1929 I found in the Musée National a fragment of the gospels, written in Greek, which has escaped the notice of those who have compiled lists of the manuscripts of the New Testament. It is mentioned neither by Gregory nor by von Soden. Its discovery has been reported to Professor von Dobschütz of Halle, and he has designated it 0196.

The publication of Professor Dewey’s Gifford Lectures, under the title “The Quest for Certainty,” affords a new opportunity for a study of the main emphases in the work of our leading American philosopher, and also for the clarification of the relations of his thought to the fundamental postulates of religion. A large part of the book is given over to an analysis of the conditions under which knowledge is attained. This paper will attempt a statement and criticism of the more important parts of the argument.

He entered into the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes (Mk. 1, 21–22).

The accepted interpretation of Mark 1, 21 f. is well known. In the words of Herford, the passage means that Jesus taught “with the spiritual force of a tremendous personality,” and this was bound to shock his contemporaries who adhered to the idea of Torah. Such a view has the advantage of making the material self-explanatory, while it receives corroboration both from other data in the gospels regarding Jesus' personal traits and from facts derived from the Judaistic sources concerning the Pharisaic method of teaching.

In the Harvard Theological Review for July 1926 attention was called to a manuscript of the works of St. Athanasius (Athens, National Library 428) which is of interest as the oldest Greek witness to a recension of De Incarnatione recently discovered by Professor Lebon of Louvain. Further investigation of this manuscript, and especially an examination of its text of Contra Gentes, raises new problems in the textual history of Athanasius's works and adds to our knowledge of the recension of De Incarnatione discovered by Lebon.

Of what value is a pure conjecture, unverified, perhaps unverifiable? In the face of possible disparagement we answer, Much every way. A conjecture is the most concrete and tangible form of the working hypothesis. When directed at some important yet knotty point of criticism it coördinates and articulates the data, narrowing the question down to sharply definable points. It is the oxyacetylene blowpipe of historical inquiry. It may be misdirected, but if so is promptly quenched. If rightly applied it goes to the heart of the matter. Criticism in this form laughs at the epithet ‘destructive’. Discarding the defensive armor of negative propositions it comes boldly forth into the open, flinging down its challenge of pointed affirmation and defying disproof. As long as its challenge remains unanswered it serves to rouse debate from the lethargy of stagnation. Accepted or rejected, it stimulates to new energy the forces of liberalism and conservatism alike. In the end it works inevitably for the truth. Against the truth it can do nothing.

Ignatius, Magnes. 1: Γνοùς ὑμῶν τò πολυєύταĸτον τῆς ĸατὰ θεòν ἀγπης ἀγαλλιώμενος προειλόμην ἐν πίστει ᾽Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ προσλαλῆσαι ὑμῖν. So Ignatius begins his letter to the Magnesian Christians:

When I learned [from the deputation of your church] with what admirable discipline your godly love [i.e. your love as Christians determined by the standards of God, κατὰ θεóν as in Paul's Rom. 8, 27 and 2 Cor. 7, 9. 10] is ordered, I resolved in my joy to send you a letter [προσλαλεῖν as in Ign., Ephes. 3] upon faith in Jesus Christ.

Since John Lightfoot's contributions to the interpretation of the New Testament from Rabbinic sources a large literature has grown up on the subject, and in Strack and Billerbeck's recent commentary on the gospels an immense amount of erudition is stored up. Yet in spite of the invaluable labors of these scholars more light can still be thrown on the understanding of the New Testament from the study of the halakah underlying it.

In my Studies in Matthew (1930, pp. 452 ff.) the reader will find a brief statement of my conviction that the long debated Papias-testimony prefixed by a medieval prologue-writer to the Gospel of John was originally meant for the Revelation. Arguments and references there given need not be repeated here because the present note is concerned only with the final clause of the fragment; but since this is obscure it may be advisable to print it in full side by side with the conjectured original.