Does a principle of Gentile ritual impurity motivate Israelite and late antique Jewish prohibitions of intermarriage? The answer to this question turns upon the answer to an even more basic question: is a principle of Gentile ritual impurity found in ancient Israelite and Jewish texts? Some suppose ritual impurity of Gentiles to be an ancient halakah dating perhaps to early biblical times (Schürer, Alon) and serving as the rationale for laws regulating or reducing Jewish and Gentile interactions of various kinds. Others suppose ritual impurity of Gentiles to be a legal reality only in the Second Temple or Tannaitic period (Büchler, Klawans). On such a view, Gentile ritual impurity did not serve as the rationale for older laws regulating or reducing various forms of Jewish-Gentile interaction, including intermarriage.

Popular nature programs, such as the cable-television program Wild Discovery, are both appealing and frightening because they confront the audience with acts of pure violence that follow the natural law of the jungle and the harsh imperative of nature's food chain. Viewers are enthralled watching the leopard catch its prey: such is the power of violence.

One hundred and ninety-one years ago, in 1808, Johann Leonhard Hug's Introduction to the New Testament carried statements that, in part, may strike textual critics as being far ahead of their time. Hug laments the loss of all the original manuscripts of the New Testament writings “so important to the church” and wonders: “How shall we explain this singular fact?” Next, he observes that Paul and others employed secretaries, but Hug views the closing salutation, written in the author's own hand, as “sufficient to give them the value of originals.” Then, referring to the further role that scribes and correctors must have played after such a Christian writing had been dictated by its author, he says:

Let us now suppose, as it is very natural to do, that the same librarius [copyist] who was employed to make this copy, made copies likewise for opulent individuals and other churches—and there was no original at all, or there were perhaps ten or more [originals] of which none could claim superiority.

The little narrative of Paul's flight from Damascus in 2 Cor 11:32-33 holds a promise to the ear of the historian. In the first place, Aretas is the only figure of political history mentioned in an authentic letter of Paul. This fact alone indicates the importance of this text for the chronology of the apostle's life. Second, there is the remarkable parallel provided by the account in Acts 9:23–25. The extent of the agreement is impressive: it consists not only of the general course of events, but extends to the wording, which is partly identical and partly synonymous. The correspondence appears more extraordinary in light of the fact that Acts otherwise exhibits no verbal connections with the letters of Paul. Third, there is the vivid manner in which Paul relates the experience: the mention of a place and a particular person, the detailed description of the circumstances, and the concentrated account of the action, together create a living image of a dramatic event. The clarity and strength of representation suggest that the experience had a special significance. Perhaps, as Calvin postulated, haec persecutio fuit quasi primum tirocinium Pauli (“this persecution was, as it were, Paul's first military service”). The incident left a deep trace in the memory of the early church,9 one that time has not erased: the Damascenes still point to an opening in the wall as the window through which the apostle was let down.

First, a few remarks about the audience of the Gospel according to Mark. This study is based on the premise that Mark was read aloud in gatherings of Christians in the late first and early second centuries that were not necessarily liturgical in a narrow sense. Further, those who listened were not all equally committed to the Christian faith and probably assimilated and interpreted the instruction that they received in various ways. Some in the audience, even if they were familiar with the Pauline understanding of Jesus as the Son of God, may have preferred to de-fine Jesus' divine sonship in another, more traditionally Jewish way, to be discussed below. Finally, even if the Gospel was written primarily for insiders, it is likely that copies were available to interested or critical outsiders. Celsus's knowl-edge of the Gospels shows that this happened at least by the second half of the second century.

By the late fourth century, prominent Christian leaders no longer remained content to advocate religious separatism from their polytheistic social environment. Instead they started making more strenuous efforts in law and in the streets to prohibit Greek and other pagan religious practices in the Roman Empire. This change in policy and practice was the outcome of historical factors that need better explanation than that of the unavoidable destiny of Christianity. One important aspect of this change, I argue here, is a problematic innovation in the tradition of Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian polemic against polytheism. The innovation derives from Paul's letter to the Ro-mans and develops through patristic endorsements of Paul's argument. In Rom 1:18–32 Paul fully reworks the Hellenistic Jewish polemical tradition, even though his argument is not yet recognized today as the distinctive proclamation that it is. Nonetheless, the polemic he wages in Rom 1:18–32 is anomalous in the tradition before, during, and for a century after he lived.

The history of what constitutes a “cure” in a given society is a history of that society's values: for the rhythm of the cure shows what is acceptable as a plausible way of giving form, and so the hope of resolution to … the nebulous and intractable fact of suffering.

One way in which ancient rulers proclaimed their power over war captives and slaves was to inscribe their bodies with a distinctive mark of ownership. For instance, according to Herodotus, the Persian king Xerxes ordered “royal marks” inscribed on Theban soldiers who had deserted to his side. To cite an example closer to the world of Judaism, 3 Macc 2.29 reports that the Hellenistic ruler Ptolemy Philopator ordered an ivy-leaf shaped “mark of Dionysus” branded onto Jews. Generally speaking, the mark of circumcision served a very different social role in antiquity, serving in many (though not all) contexts as a sign distinguishing Jews from others. There is reason to believe, however, that circumcision too could serve as a “rite of domination” marking Jewish power over Gentile bodies. Several sources refer briefly to incidents during the second and first centuries BCE when Jewish rulers forcibly circumcised Gentile peoples after subduing them in battle.

A scribal error has turned up in Q! This has wide-ranging implications and consequences, to which the present paper is designed to point. If there is a scribal error in Q, then Q was indeed a written Greek text, behind which stood an older written Greek text as Vorlage. This, of course, finally puts to rest already outdated theories of Q being only an Aramaic text, or only a layer of oral tradition rather than a written text. It also has important implications for the current view of Q and points into the future of pre-Q research as well. The history of the synoptic tradition is no longer dependent only on the forms of oral transmission, but now has a series of written texts bridging much of the gulf back from the canonical gospels to Jesus.

On the face of it, the very title of this paper may appear puzzling. Responses to the problem of evil are by their nature theological or philosophical, whereas halakha, or Jewish law, is about behavior. In what sense, then, can there be a halakhic response to the problem of evil?

In 1997, the Harvard Theological Review published an article written by L. Michael White in which he “presents and analyzes evidence for the social location and organization of Jewish groups in the environs of Rome, specifically from the port city of Ostia” during the first centuries CE. White draws from two sources in his examination: archaeological remains of the Ostia synagogue and rather scanty—but important—epigraphical material, the Mindius Faustus and the Gaius Julius Justus inscriptions. White's study is the most extensive discussion of the archaeological evidence in English since the excavator, Maria Floriani Squarciapino, presented her preliminary reports from the excavations of the synagogue in the early 1960s. Despite the great interest that the synagogue at Ostia aroused when it was unearthed and excavated during two campaigns in 1961 and 1962, it has since been neglected by scholars.

Three women in Josephus's Antiquities are well known for their purported devotion to Jewish religious practices: Poppaea Sabina, the consort/wife of the emperor Nero, whom Josephus describes as “God-fearing” (θɛοσɛβής); Fulvia, a Roman convert of consular rank whom he pegs as the source of the expulsion of Jews from Rome under Tiberius; and Helena, Queen of Adiabene, also a convert to Judaism. In this article, I show that the stories of these three Gentile noble women, who share an interest in Jewish religious practices, are part of a larger narrative pattern in the Antiquities that repeatedly characterizes Gentile women of high standing as saviors and benefactors of the Jewish people. According to Josephus, imperial women intercede on behalf of Jewish aristocrats before every Julio-Claudian emperor, often with ramifications for the entire Jewish people. He also claims that Domitia, the wife of the emperor Domitian, was one of his own patrons. Patronage on behalf of the Jewish community is integral to the stories of both Fulvia and Queen Helena of Adiabene. Furthermore, the salvific acts of foreign noblewomen feature prominently in Josephus's retelling of the story of Moses early in the Antiquities.

The Other resembles God.

To welcome the Other absolutely is to preserve the Other as a state of irreducible uncertainty, to suspend the desire to ascertain exactly who or what the Other is, to suppress the wish to name, and to avoid assimilating or incorporating the Other into a reassuringly familiar vocabulary. The object of this paper is a tentative comparison between Eckhartian gelâzenheit and Derridean openness. I will compare the Derridean response to the uncertainty of the infinitely Other with that of the German Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1329) in order to examine their respective terms of “emptiness” and “openness” and to try to understand how Eckhart's idea of description or conception as doing violence upon the Other is, in part, adopted and, in part, rejected by Jacques Derrida. As some of the most interesting aspects of Derrida's understanding of otherness can be discerned in his early work on Levinas, I will first examine Derrida's initial skepticism toward the idea of a nonviolent phenomenology, in contrast to his more recent reappraisal of his relation to Levinas and the “welcome of the Other.”

In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin extensively quotes the Jewish scriptures and includes several citations of logia of Jesus. Furthermore, while explicit citations from Paul are peculiarly absent from the text, Justin, writing from Rome, certainly knows Paul's writings in detail and uses them. Indeed, it seems that the Dialogue provides a perfect occasion for him to employ Paul because in it he addresses the relationship between Judaism and the church, a central topic in both Romans and Galatians. Besides the appearance of Pauline quotations, several of Justin's arguments directly rely on Paul's thinking. For example, Justin probably has Galatians 3 before him as he composes Dialogue 95–96. Oskar Skarsaune's analysis of Justin's writing also indicates that Romans is one of Justin's preferred sources for quotations of the Jewish scriptures; that is, he sometimes quotes the Jewish scriptures as they appear in Paul rather the LXX. He draws especially from the Jewish scriptures quoted in Romans 2–4 and 9–11 because the chapters examine the problem of Torah and the Jews' rejection of the gospel, also two important issues in the Dialogue.

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a central figure within twentieth-century French avant-garde circles, yet the importance of his work for the study of religion is only beginning to be recognized. Between the First and Second World Wars, he not only edited journals (Documents, Acéphale) and engaged in literary and political movements, but also organized (together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) the College of Sociology, which attempted to bring the sociological methods of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss to bear on the study and pursuit of the sacred. Throughout his work of the 1930s, Bataille sought to reintroduce the sacred into modern industrial, secular societies, which, he argued, believed in God only insofar as they equated God with reason. For Bataille, the power of the sacred lies in its ambiguity and violence. Sacrifice and expenditure mark the antithesis of the instrumental rationality of modern bourgeois society; through sacrifice, then, new sovereign communities might be engendered. Religious questions, for Bataille, were irrevocably political. He thus attempted to theorize and to create a community without authority, one that might counter the authoritarian movements coming to dominate much of Europe in the 1930s.

A scholar who respects the nature of historical and archaeological evidence can hardly complain when others take his work seriously and read it carefully. So it is with gratitude that I offer this reply to Anders Runesson for his forgoing article in which my own work figures so prominently. I can honestly say that I have learned some things from it. Nor do I take undue umbrage at the clearly critical, albeit rather strident, tone. Some of it I attribute to the natural give-and-take of scholarly debate; some, to a few key misunderstandings on the part of Runesson regarding the terminology and intention in my earlier argument; and others, to the complex nature of the material under discussion. It is a matter of reading the evidence.

Modern German thought owed much to classical Greece. Yet in philosophy and theology, beginning with Hegel and his contemporaries, the debt to Platonic idealism was radically modified by insistence on the reality of history. Construed dialectically, history became a key to overcoming difficulties with both Platonic and Cartesian dualism left unresolved by Kant. In theology, after World War I dialectical theologians, including Barth and Tillich, embraced in varying degrees the existentialists' critique of Hegelian essentialism and belief in progress. This affected how they understood incarnation in christology, sacramental presence in ecclesiology, and Christian responses to what they saw as the demonic threat of German National Socialism. Anglo-American critics, especially of Tillich, often miss the dialectical nuances of his admittedly abstract theology and his religious socialist response to Marxism.

Marcel Simon (1907–1986) wrote many articles and published a number of books during a long, active career as a scholar. Yet he remains most prominently associated with the first of his books, Verus Israel, initially submitted as a dissertation. Published in 1948, Verus Israel was revised with the addition of a lengthy post-script in the original French in 1964, and translated into English in 1986. Based on research virtually complete before the war, this book is an outstanding example of new circumstances forcing scholars to revise their conceptions of the past. As Simon explains in the preface, his book is a response to the calamity of racist anti-Semitism. Although this anti-Semitism had been apparent even before the Second World War, its disastrous results had become painfully evident only in the war's aftermath. These were the issues that led Simon to re-examine the nature of the relationship between ancient Christianity and Judaism.