In my recent monograph entitled Torah in the Messianic Age and/or the Age to Come, I sought particularly to examine the question whether Judaism anticipated a New Torah in its ideal future, however conceived. One passage in Josephus, Antiquities, 15:136 has been suggested as relevant to this purpose because it contains the idea that “the Law was given through angels, an idea which in Acts 7:53, Gal. 3:19, Heb.2:2 is associated with the notion that it was to change?” (See Morton Smith, J. B. L., Vol. LXXII, September 1953, pp. 192) Strack-Billerbeck cite the passage in their comment on Gal. 3:19 and take it to refer to the mediation of angels, as do also Grundmann in the Theologisches Wörterbuch (Ed. Kittel), I, p. 74, and Walter Bauer in his Wörterbuch, 1952, col. 13. It is the first aim of this note to follow up a suggestion made to me by Dr. Ralph Marcus that the passage may not refer to angels but to prophets.

Il pourrait sembler superflu de dire que je n'ai pas la prétention d'éliminer par ces lignes les mystères qui enveloppent μυστήριον et sacramentum, deux termes hérissés de difficultés et dont l'évolution sémasiologique est loin d'être claire. Je voudrais présenter seulement quelques remarques qui sont le fruit d'études sur le grec et le latin des chrétiens et qui pourraient contribuer à la solution du problème de l'équivalence de μυστήριον — sacramentum. Or, ces études nous révèlent de plus en plus des tendances générales, voire des règles, d'après lesquelles les deux grandes langues de l'antiquité classique ont évolué sous l'influence exercée par le Christianisme. Sans entrer dans le détail je voudrais donner quelques suggestions d'ordre général, inspirées par l'étude des procédés qui déterminent l'établissement du vocabulaire technique du grec et du latin des chrétiens.

The cults in ancient Greece, both private and public, had many kinds of income, among which the most primitive were fees and taxes. Fees are remunerations paid for the use of various kinds of cult facilities. Taxes are contributions levied by the cult association or by the state to maintain the cult activities. When the cult becomes self-sufficient by endowments or by subsidies, fees and taxes do not play a great rôle. But in times of financial difficulties the state or the cult authorities levied taxes on all or some persons to meet the emergency. This paper is the result of an effort to collect and study all the information on this subject from our sources both literary and epigraphical.

For more than seventy years these important terms of Greek sacred vocabulary have been discussed back and forth. Recently French scholars have adduced new arguments to make their meaning clearer. Although the textual evidence, both epigraphical and literary, is not yet sufficiently plentiful to eliminate all possible doubts, it is evident that progress in the understanding of ritual terminology has been made. I should like to add some observations on the problem and to discuss some of the texts which, in the opinion of many scholars, need clarification.

The problem of the manumission of slaves by sale to a divinity or by consecration has been studied by many scholars. Nevertheless the following questions still arise. What real sense had the sale? What characterizes the sale and the consecration respectively? How do they bring about one's liberty? What is a fictitious or trust sale? Do the several manumission procedures of Delphi, of central Greece, of Macedonia, of Asia Minor and of Syria reflect the same customs and traditions? Cameron, after discussing a number of inscriptions of Imperial times relating to sacral manumission, puts the following question: “It would be interesting to inquire whether this conception is to be regarded as having survived continuously with the institution from an early period in Greece, or as having been revived and strengthened by new social and religious influence after remaining dormant in a period in which sacral manumission was no more than a legal fiction.” I should like to try to answer this question.

In a major study, “The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year,” recently published in this journal (XLV [1952] 187–252), Professor Nock has presented a new interpretation of the character and purpose of the Feriale Duranum. It is hardly necessary at this short interval to repeat his conclusions, which seem to me quite convincing, but as a postscript to Nock's study, I should like to do three things. The first is to discuss the purpose of the military Feriale when it was established, as it probably was, by Augustus. The second is to consider the distribution of the occasions in the Feriale and hence to some extent their value as breaks in the soldier's routine. Finally, I shall examine three sections of the text which for one reason or another deserve close study.

In a study entitled Letter and Spirit in Jewish and Roman Law I suggested that the antithesis γράμμα καὶ πνεῦμα (Letter and Spirit) coined by Paul was the equivalent to the Greek antithesis ῥητὸν καὶ διάνοια, which was a commonplace in ancient Greek rhetoric. After this article was printed, I discovered a passage in Origen which confirms beyond all doubt the correctness of my conjecture. This statement is found in his refutations of an argument advanced by Celsus. This pagan philosopher charged that there were many contradictions between the Law and the New Dispensation, which demanded an explanation. For instance, “Why did he give them laws by Moses that they were to become rich and powerful… Yet his son, the man of Nazareth, gives contradictory laws, saying that a man cannot come forward to the Father if he is rich or loves power.”

The study of Isidore falls roughly into three periods, mediaeval, when the text was used principally for catenae and florilegia, sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century, when it was published and a rudimentary historical account of Isidore worked out from it and from the better-known testimonia, and modern. Of the modern period the outstanding works have been H. Niemeyer's account of Isidore's life and writings, Capo's, Turner's and Lake's studies establishing the relationships of the major western MSS, and the recent work of Dom Andreas Schmid, Die Christologie Isidors von Pelusium, which, by its account of the history of the text, marks a new period in the study. Besides these works, the past fifty years have seen considerable collection of parallels between Isidore's letters and passages in classical or early Christian authors, as well as several detailed discussions of the content of the letters. These discussions have uniformly been undistinguished expositions of the obvious, and the largest collection of parallels, that of L. Bayer, merited the crushing review it was given by K. Fuhr and has since been considerably supplemented by articles which individually, however, are minor.