The claim that all the virtues are somehow one is advanced in different ways by Socrates and Plato, by Plotinus and Augustine, and by Aquinas. The doctrine of the unity and the interconnection of the virtues is thus common to a number of major thinkers in both ancient and medieval philosophy. But it has hardly been a fashionable view in recent philosophy, and it is apt to seem paradoxical. The purpose of this essay is to indicate the structure of the doctrine as Augustine expounds it and to indicate its relevance to clarifying and making plausible certain other ethical doctrines in Augustine's thought.

During the 1960s, a consensus slowly emerged in New Testament scholarship, especially in Germany, that the canonical letter of Paul to the Philippians is likely to be a compilation of fragments of originally separate letters. The case for this partition hypothesis was built almost exclusively on internal evidence, which centered around the abrupt shift in tone and topic at Phil 3:2: βλἐπετε τοὺς κύνας, βλἐπετε τοὺς κακοὺς ἐργάτας βλἐπετε τὴν κατατομήν (“Look out for the dogs, look out for the workers of evil, look out for the incision!”). This section of the letter, which runs from Phil 3:2 to Phil 4:1, is marked by a tone of polemic and personal apologia absent from the rest of the epistle. Some of the most persuasive partitioned of the letter, whom we may call the “fragmentarians,” have identified this section as a letter fragment, sometimes called a Kampfbrief and sometimes a testament, which is now found in Philippians 3.

In his collection of Jewish inscriptions, Jean-Baptiste Frey identifies as Jewish a stone fragment that contains no writing, but only depictions of an amphora, several birds, a branch of a plant, numerous circular objects with smaller circles within them, and one drawing of a fish. Frey considers the amphora to be an oil jar; the birds to be doves and a goose; the plant branch to be the lulav associated with the Jewish festival of Sukkoth; the circles to be masot; and the fish to be the tuna that Jews are said to have eaten on Friday nights and on various Jewish festivals. The stone bears no irrefutably Christian symbols, such as a chi rho, but neither does it bear such things as a seven-branched menorah, which virtually all scholars accept as an explicit Jewish symbol. Frey even speculates that were the stone complete, it would probably be found to include a seven-branched menorah.

George Bernard Shaw once described the Book of Revelation as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict,” but then modern literati have had a penchant for unkindness when it comes to the language of the Apocalypse. D. H. Lawrence found what he called its “splendiferous imagery” to be “distasteful,” and hailed it “perhaps the most detestable of all these books of the Bible.” Lawrence hated the book so much that he wrote a commentary on it. In his own monumental commentary on the Apocalypse, writing just a decade earlier than Lawrence, fellow Englishman R. H. Charles understood the book to be a product of linguistic incompetence and redactional ineptitude, egregious travesties that remained until modernity, when Charles corrected them with his own heavy-handed redaction and conjectured emendations.

Richard Rorty has suggested that religion is a conversation-stopper.1 Jeffrey Stout has questioned this claim, gently chiding Rorty for his animus toward increasing assertiveness on the part of religiously committed individuals in their address of public issues.2 Stout concludes that “conversation is the very thing that is not stopped when religious premises are introduced in a political argument.”3 He is convinced that Rorty is overly sensitive on this matter and believes, with Nicholas Wolterstorff and others, that religious people in a pluralistic democracy have not only the right but also the responsibility to share their convictions and the reasoning that leads to their opinions on vital moral and social issues. Stout quotes Wolterstorff as follows:

The discussion of the Caesarean text, like so much in the textual criticism of the gospels, really begins with Griesbach, who in 1811 pointed out that Origen used different texts in his commentaries on Matthew and on John. About 1896 either Hort or, more probably, Sanday made the further statement that Codex I resembled the text of Origen. This led to the editing of Codex I and its allies and their identification as part of a larger family, which included Codices 565, 28, 700, and the Ferrar group. The editor was very doubtful whether the connection with Origen and Caesarea could be maintained, and he did not discuss the point in that volume. He had mentioned it in the first edition of his “Text of the New Testament,” but dropped it in later ones, though it has now been restored, thanks to Streeter's investigations, in a new edition. The reason for his missing the facts was that he was secretly enamored of a suggestion, which he could not prove and therefore did not make, to the effect that the text of family I was a degenerate representative of the Greek which underlies the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe.

It has become quite common in scholarship to consider the community described by Philo in De vita contemplativa as a specific Jewish group comprising contemplative Essenes or people somehow related to the Essenes. In this study, we shall explore the meaning of Philo's masculine and feminine designations, θεραπευταί and θεραπευτρίδες, and consider the possibility that these words referred not to the male and female members of one group that was part of a Therapeutae sect, but to individuals whom Philo understood as exemplary devotees of God. We shall also consider a few matters concerning the character of the group. Overall, this study seeks to call into question the assumption that, in his De vita contemplativa, Philo is describing an Essene community in Egypt.

No single term has been so misunderstood or so debated in the history of Schleiermacher interpretation as Gefühl (“feeling”). The intensity of the controversy surrounding this term is testimony to the critical role it plays in Schleiermacher's entire theological program. Indeed, as evident in his magnum opus The Christian Faith (1830/1831), where Gefühl attains its final formulation as “the feeling of absolute dependence” (das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl), few other terms play as important a role in his account of religious experience and his doctrine of God. Not only is Schleiermacher's theological system at stake, but also the foundations of modern theology itself. Ludwig Feuerbach's assessment of the consequences of emphasizing Gefühl was unequivocal; most critics of Schleiermacher, Karl Barth foremost among them, have followed Feuerbach's pattern of interpretation:

If, for example, feeling is the essential organ of religion, the nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling.…

But the object of religious feeling is become a matter of indifference, only because when once feeling has been pronounced to be the subjective essence of religion, it in fact is also the objective essence of religion,…feeling is pronounced to be religious, simply because it is feeling.

In times of national crisis, do scholars react more nobly than the man on the street? And, in particular, what about religious academiciansmen revered for their spiritual as well as intellectual insight? In time of war, are they able to rise au-dessus de la melée and maintain a dispassionate judgment, or do they descend into the marketplace and parrot the platitudes of the popular press.

In his discussion of Romans 1:26–27, Robin Scroggs raised two important questions which have been the subject of much debate since the publication of his 1983 book. One is the question of why this passage mentions women at all in its remarks concerning same-sex acts. Scroggs commented:

Since there are no Old Testament laws prohibiting female homosexuality, why does Paul include it here? If Paul is dependent on a preformed tradition for these two verses, he of course found it in that tradition. Why the tradition included it is a question to which I see no answer.

The last two decades witnessed a boom of eschatology in theological discussions. It emerged mainly from the impact of Jürgen Moltmann's theology of hope. But a recovery of the eschatological concern in systematic theology has been due for some time, since Johannes Weiss' successful thesis of 1892 that Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God was not primarily a program for moral or social action, but had its roots in Jewish apocalypticism and envisaged a cosmic catastrophe that would occur when God in the imminent future would replace this present world by the new creation of his own kingdom without any human ado. Three decades later, in 1922, Karl Barth wrote in the second edition of his commentary on Romans: “A Christianity that does not thoroughly and without remainder consist of eschatology, would be thoroughly and totally devoid of Christ.” Strong words. And yet it proved difficult to reappropriate to modern theology the new exegetical insight concerning the basic importance of eschatology within the framework of Jesus' message and teaching. There was too deep a chasm separating the evolutionary outlook of the modern mind from the otherworldliness of apocalyptic expectations that focused on the imminent and catastrophic end of the present world. Thus it was no accident that Barth and Bultmann recovered the apocalyptic urgency of Jesus' message at the price of stripping it of its temporal prospect of a final future of this world. In 1964, Jürgen Moltmann aptly criticized such a detemporalization of eschatology for removing its very core. But the restoration of the apocalyptic outlook towards future fulfillment in Moltmann's own work turned out to focus more on certain political consequences, which he and his followers derived from the eschatological hope, than on the transcendent content of the biblical hope itself. Concerning the basis of eschatological faith in Moltmann's work, John Hick could pass the somewhat harsh verdict: “that basis is in practice relegated to the periphery of his thought and reduced to a mere uncritical use of biblical mythology” to the effect that “all the problems facing Christian eschatology in the twentieth century are systematically ignored.”

When historical reconstruction of the nature of a person or a group is carried out under ideal circumstances, we should have two kinds of evidence: we should know the self description of the subject, and be able to compare this self description with the way the subject was seen by others. These two types of evidence give historians the perspective which should allow them to draw a wellrounded portrait of the nature of their subject. When viewed in this light, the problems presented in attempting a historical reconstruction of the nature of the Pharisees before 70 CE make this case a classic example of the problems of historical work. Virtually no documents have survived that come from the Pharisees themselves. We know them as seen by Josephus (who claimed to have been and to be a Pharisee, but who in fact shows little indication of Pharisaic belief or practice in his life or writings), as they appeared to the authors of the gospels, or as seen in the hindsight of their heirs, the rabbis. Thanks to Qumran texts we may learn how the Pharisees were viewed by members of a competing group. Paul claimed to have once been a Pharisee, but was writing his letters as a Christian. The first type of evidence discussed above is thus almost entirely lacking; the second is available in abundance.

The study of medieval Judaism was revolutionized by the late S. D. Goitein with A Mediterranean Society, his multilayered study of the medieval Jewish communities in Egypt based on the documents from the Cairo Genizah. For while previously the Genizah had been mined for important rabbinic documents and for the history of the philosophers and Geonim, Goitein's research sought to provide an account of the religion and life of all classes of society.

The scholar concerned with the pre-Islamic religious history of Iran is beset with many difficulties, not the least of which is the great paucity of native sources. Consequently, he frequently must have recourse to India for parallels in the early period, and to Classical, Syriac and Armenian sources for much of his material in Parthian and Sassanian times. Furthermore, the temptation to import whole patterns of religious thought from neighboring religions, and to interpret earlier information from conditions obtaining in Iran at later periods of its history, is at times very strong indeed. With the fragmentary, often contradictory, data about Iranian religions at hand, there is also a tendency to fill in the blanks, and by so doing to create a finished and consistent whole picture of the pre-Islamic religions of Iran. It may be commendable to have a large canvas with bold, sweeping strokes, but when the details are so uncertain one may be understandably cautious in accepting the theories of even such eminent scholars as Herzfeld, Nyberg, and others.

It is normal for scholars to read a text of the Second Temple period with an eye to the particular historical circumstances and ideology that it seems to embody. For this was a period of rapid historical changes and sharp ideological conflicts, and by paying attention to reflections of history and ideology in a text, one can often better understand its meaning and situate it chronologically with greater accuracy. And so, scholars regularly ask: What can be deduced on the basis of this text about the precise period in which its author lived? What is there in the content of this text that can tell us something about its author's beliefs?

Within recent years the subject of Ruler-Worship has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars, and much has been written upon it from various aspects, notably by those who are specialists in ancient religion. If I appear then to be trespassing I can only plead in excuse that the subject is of great, indeed of absorbing, interest for anyone who is a student of ancient civilization, and especially of the Roman Empire. What I offer here are some fruits of my reading in the ancient authors and the modern interpreters of their thought: all that can be done, of course, in short compass is to stress some results already ascertained, and to offer some observations of my own in the hope they may prove useful. But my debt to other scholars is obviously large: let me here mention with gratitude Adcock, Altheim, Bolkestein, Edson, Ferguson, Gow, Immisch, Pfister, Pippidi, K. Scott, Tarn and O. Weinreich, but above all A. D. Nock and Miss L. R. Taylor, who after Beurlier have contributed so much to advance our knowledge of ruler-cult. Sometimes I have ventured to prefer my own opinion, but I can echo the amiable Vitruvius in declaring— “neque alienis indicibus mutatis interposito nomine meo id profero corpus neque ullius cogitata vituperans institui ex eo me adprobare, sed omnibus scriptoribus infinitas ago gratias.”

The Psychomachia of the fifth-century Latin poet Prudentius provides a straight-forward portrait of heresy generally shared in the west: The wolf, with gory jaws, conceals himself in a soft fleece, Counterfeiting milk-white sheep while carrying on bloody murders by devouring lambs.It is by this means that Photinus and Arrius disguise themselves, those wolves so wild and savage.

The חבורה (fellowship) was a religious society founded in the villages and towns of Jewish Palestine during the Second Commonwealth in order to foster observance of the laws of tithing and ritual purity. The sources on the fellowship are preserved in rabbinic literature, and the חבורה has therefore been associated with the Pharisees; one must, nonetheless, retain the distinction between the חבורה and the whole Pharisaic sect, since there is no evidence that all Pharisees were members of a fellowship. Membership represented a status recognized by other members and not a formal affiliation with an organized society. The חבר (member) of such a fellowship undertook to carry out even in the company of non-observant men those ritual laws which were generally neglected. Thus they taught their observance by example and precept. At the same time, the members distinguished themselves from the common society by their strict adherence to ritual laws which separated them in crucial relationships of daily life.

Recent studies and archaeological work have focused attention once again on an old problem—the origins and development of the synagogue—by bringing two sides of the issue to light. On the one hand, some studies have reconsidered theories of synagogue origins in the Babylonian, Persian, or Hellenistic periods. The result is that several traditional assumptions typified in the works of Julian Morgenstern, Solomon Zeitlin, George Foot Moore, and Louis Finkelstein have been questioned. The question of origins has come to rest on the Palestinian setting and on the nature of the “synagogue” not as institution in the later Talmudic sense, but as “assembly.” There is no clear archaeological evidence for synagogue buildings from Second Temple Palestine. Only after 70 CE and the destruction of the Temple, did it emerge as the central institution of Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism.

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.