In the later Middle Ages, scholars frequently translated ancient and medieval Latin texts into various vernacular languages, and the text studied here provides an example of this. Widely copied and modifi ed throughout the Middle Ages, the little text, called an Ordinal of Christ, appears in over eighty versions and has a threefold significance. First, it turns up as the first reported example of an Ordinal of Christ in Catalan. Second, the version of the text does not belong to a high or late medieval tradition, such as one might expect in a late medieval manuscript, but goes back at least to the ninth and tenth centuries in the early Middle Ages. Third, the text parallels a version found largely in southern Italy and thus illustrates the contacts and connections between Catalonia and southern Italy throughout the Middle Ages.

Paul Tillich and I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the fall of 1955. It is the 50th anniversary of Tillich's inaugural year (1955–1956) as University Professor at Harvard University and my 50th anniversary as one of the first women students to attend the Harvard Divinity School. It is no accident that we came at the same time, for I chose to come to Harvard for my ministerial studies just so I could be part of its renewal, and study with professors such as Paul Tillich.

The Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas is paralleled in three sections by Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus. P.Oxy. 655, in the Houghton Library at Harvard, consists of small amounts of text, which correspond to sayings 24 and 36–39. P.Oxy. 1, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is a fragment of a codex containing sayings 26–33 (cf. also saying 77). This latter exemplar in particular shows that—with some exceptions—there is a good deal of correspondence between the Greek and Coptic versions, and therefore that it is quite possible that substantial portions of the Coptic version of Thomas go back to a Greek original.

The key question that Christoph Schwöbel raises in Christlicher Glaube im Pluralismus is one that has emerged as an imperative. A Christian theology responsible to the contemporary realities of pluralism must enter its theological analysis of the global situation of Christian faith into wider discussions of culture. Theologians cannot abdicate their role in articulating their distinctive ways of schematizing reality. They cannot shy away from making truth claims amid other competitors, and they cannot give up on the question of unity—whether metaphysical, ethical, or eschatological—while celebrating difference. Christoph Schwöbel, professor of systematic theology at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany since 2004, dares to respond to this imperative. In this recent collection of essays, he enters into the pluralist conversation with a commitment to the trinitarian centerpiece of Christianity, which he fleshes out with considerable knowledge of the Western European Christian theological and philosophical tradition.

There is something right about the hoary old claim that Protestantism spawned individualism. It has been challengedfrom all sides: by those who argue the reverse, by historians of religion who point out that introspective piety was not unique to the early modern period, and by scholars who demonstrate that early Protestants were deeply invested in ecclesiology and communal rituals. Yet this claim—even though clunky and inadequate—remains important, not least because it highlights an enduring link between the way we interpret early Protestant texts and the way we understand individualism today. Consider John Donne's famous denial of isolation, written nearly four hundred years ago: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe.” This statement compels us because it refutes what often feels irrefutable: that each person is, essentially, a solitary being, and that, while this existential state may be ameliorated, it is an unavoidable fact of life.

At the climactic moment of the cosmic drama in the book of Revelation, the seer tells how two great portents appeared in heaven, the first a woman “clothed with the sun”(12:1). Asin a dream, the scene changes, and he sees her pregnant, “crying out in the agony of giving birth,” being menaced by a “great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns on each of its heads” (12:3); thus the seer pictures Israel in danger, confronting her enemies, the foreign oppressors.