It is still an accepted opinion of biblical scholarship that the regulation governing the offering of half a shekel in Exodus 30:11–16 belongs to one of the late trends of the Priestly Code. This text in Exodus, which enjoins upon the people of Israel the offering of half a shekel for the service of the tent of meeting in the desert, is thought also to reflect the conditions of the early Second Commonwealth, when an annual tax of half a shekel was collected for the maintenance of the sanctuary.

God is the Creator of the Universe, the Ruler of the Universe and of the Fate of man. He enjoins his commandments upon man, which man must keep. He is the High God, elevated above man and not to be reached by man. In antiquity he had no cult and no sacrifices, nor were prayers directed to him. Man believes in this God and fears him. But man needs also a God who is his helper, who cares for him in his sorrows and his anxiety. Man believes in this God and trusts him. These two differentconceptions of God are differently emphasized in different religions. The great achievement of Christianity was to combine the two; this conditioned and furthered its spread and its victory.

It is possible to view the natural world in two ways: as necessary, bound by consubstantial ties to whatever else has being; or as contingent, possessing being only through the free power of something else which is itself necessary. These two positions in their purest form are naturalism and supernaturalism, the one monistic and the other dualistic. According to the first, the natural world is all that is; and self-understanding and self-realization are the proper activities of man. According to the second, the natural world must bow before its Creator, Who brought it into being from pure nothingness; and the proper activities of man are work and worship. Exemplary of these positions are the Timaeus of Plato and the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:4a.

Speculation about the “change” in the name of the apostle Peter will undoubtedly always be in order. In this respect the recent article of Cecil Roth of Oxford raises an interesting point. He suggests that the apostle's name Peter prevailed in time over Simon because of a current tendency of contemporary Judaism to avoid the use of the name Σίμων or װעמש. The latter name was “commonly or even methodically modified or eliminated, for some reason or the other, among the Jews at the beginning of the Christian era. One finds it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the modification of the name of the Apostle by the elimination of ‘Simon’ was connected with this and due to the same cause, whatever that may have been.” Roth offers parallels of persons whose name was Simon, but who were known more usually by a patronymic or a nickname (ben Sira, ben Zoma, ben Azzai, ben Nanos, bar Kochba), and suggests that it was a peculiarly “patriotic” name, borne by great national and revolutionary leaders such as Simon Maccabee, Simon the High Priest (Sir 50.1–21), Simeon ben Šeṭaḥ (politician-Rabbi of the second century B. C), Simon the rebel (Josephus, JW 2.4,2 #57; Ant. 17.10,6 #273), Simon the son of the founder of the Zealots, Judah the Galilean (Josephus, Ant. 20.5,2 #102), Simon bar Giora (leader in the First Revolt), Simon bar Kochba (leader of the Second Revolt).

Martin Heidegger, teacher and one-time rector of the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, is without question one of the most mysterious and puzzling personalities, as well as one of the most enigmatical philosophical thinkers of our age. A spectator who watches him come from his Black Forest hideout to enter the Freiburg university lecture hall sees him not only garbed in a costume which is itself peculiar, but enveloped in an air of remoteness and even of mystery, which seems to mark him off sharply from the lives and fortunes of ordinary men. And, during the brief period when he ventured to leave the world of speculative thought, to express himself on political matters, the effort can hardly be said to have been crowned with success, since the purport of his remarks was that Adolf Hitler was a man of genius, and a worthy member of the tradition that began with Socrates, and Plato. His later retraction has been accepted by many, but others who watched him at that period have found his words and actions hard to forget or forgive. Nor are the puzzles he presents limited to the field of politics. His philosophy itself is so difficult that those who call themselves his followers are at odds with one another as to just what it means, and his own frequently expressed judgment is that from the start he has been completely misinterpreted. The point on which all seem to agree is that what he is now saying contradicts what he said earlier.

In the history of Western Christianity — and hence, to a large extent, in the history of Western culture — the Apostle Paul has been hailed as a hero of the introspective conscience. Here was the man who grappled with the problem “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do …” (Rom. 7:19). His insights as to a solution of this dilemma have recently been more or less identified, for example, with what Jung referred to as the Individuation Process; but this is only a contemporary twist to the traditional Western way of reading the Pauline letters as documents of human consciousness.

Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”

Agmina of the Furiae are twice mentioned in the Aeneid, viz., IV 469 Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus and VI 571–572: torvosque sinistra / intentans (sc, Tisiphone) anguis vocat agmina saeva sororum. The use of agmen in this context is surprising, because Virgil, and the Augustan poets in general, retain the classical conception of three Furiae; Virgil mentions Tisiphone, Allecto and Megaera, and Ovid speaks about poenarum … deae triplices (Metam. VIII 481). It is only in the Silver Age — the first instances are to be found in Seneca's tragedies and in Valerius Flaccus — that a greater number of Furiae comes to be mentioned; originally this is an evident imitation of the two passages under discussion (cf. e.g. Sen. Med. 960–961: cui cruentas agmen injernum jaces / intentat with Aen. VI 572) but gradually it becomes clear that a greater number of goddesses of punishment and revenge is meant.

In 1861, a French priest published in Paris a pamphlet entitled “The Modern Papacy Condemned by Pope Saint Gregory the Great: Excerpts from the Works of Saint Gregory.” The author, René-François Guettée, was a Gallican, deeply involved in the so-called Roman Question. He proposed to demonstrate to his opponents, the advocates of absolute papal supremacy, that his side was really more orthodox because it conformed to the views of St. Gregory. From the letters of Gregory he drew support for his argument that all bishops share the same dignity and that claims by the bishop of Rome to a superior position represent a corruption of early Church practices. And upon those readers who rejected his thesis he placed the burden of explaining why Pope Gregory did not merit as much credence as modern popes. Father Guettée therefore turned to Gregory for help in building a case against the present-day papacy. It was not the first time someone had done this.

A few years ago Arnold Ehrhardt wrote an erudite and stimulating article as a criticism and development of Eduard Lohse's Die Ordination. A few observations in regard both to the laying on of hands in the Jewish background and to the seating of a candidate in the chair of office will serve to carry the discussion a step further.

Americans in “search” of the “goals,” “prospects,” and “purpose” of the United States share an interest in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This was the age of the democratic revolution in Western civilization which produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, those primary and permanent legacies paramount to our national existence. Although remote in time this period is the common experience of Americans because our lives are still regulated by the political instruments it produced.

If in the Civil War God was preserving American nationality, giving the nation a baptism of blood, after that sacramental rebirth the question naturally arose, why had nationality been preserved, and what purpose was the regenerated nation to serve? In asking the question Protestant clergymen assumed that history had meaning, a plot, and that the United States would play a role in it. When they looked forward, what did they see ahead for America on the world stage? Upon investigation that forward look emerges as more than a blurred daydream. Leaders of Protestant thought analyzed American destiny in terms of sophisticated contemporary interpretations of history. From their analysis grew serious intellectual ideas of destiny which in retrospect appear as a prelude to later imperialism.

Apart from the Gospels themselves, there is perhaps no Christian writing which has enjoyed an influence and an authority at the same time so far flung and so profound as the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus. Yet, outside the studies made by Maury in 1850 and Lipsius in 1871, hardly anything has been done toward a proper assay of this most important of the multitudinous New Testament apocrypha. For that reason, most of the recent articles concerning it, in the standard works of reference, still repeat the erroneous concepts of a century and more ago.

Commentators on Lycidas have usually traced the origin of Milton's line, “Under the opening eyelids of the Morn,” to a marginal reading in the Authorized Version of Job. As several scholars have observed, “the alternative reading for ‘dawning of the day’ [Job iii. 9], offered in the margin as more true to the Hebrew, is ‘the eyelids of the morning,’” and in Job xli. 18 [Heb. 41:10] this image occurs in the text itself — “By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.”

One spring in the latter half of the month Adar, some time after the death of Salome Alexandra (76–67 B.C.), “there was a certain Onias, who, being a righteous man and dear to God, … in a rainless period prayed to God (ηὔξατο τῷ Θεῷ) to end the drought, and God … heard his prayer and sent rain …” The story of Honi (Onias), so plainly told by Josephus, is reported much more dramatically in the talmudic sources. According to one source, the drought had lasted three years.

The last lines of CD plate xi (lines 21–23) have baffled commentators although the text is practically intact, except for a lacuna at the very end of line 23. The words employed in the passage by themselves are easily understood. It is their combination which causes difficulties. Especially the latter part of the passage under review—xi. 22b–xii. 1a—as yet has not been convincingly interpreted. The legal matter there dealt with remains unexplained. When editing CD for the first time S. Schechter frankly admitted: “The meaning of the law is entirely obscure to me.” And with C. Rabin's painstaking edition at hand H. Bardtke still maintains: “die Vorschrift Zeile 22b–23 kann nur unbefriedigend erklaert werden.” In view of this impasse a new attempt at a solution may be permitted.

During the last couple of years two articles have appeared in these pages, both concerned primarily with what one of them calls “the theology of nominalism.” This in itself is significant because it reflects a growing interest among theologians and ecclesiastical historians in the theological positions characteristic of those late medieval thinkers who belonged to the “nominalist” or “terminist” school. But more significant is the fact that the authors of the two articles should adopt diametrically opposed approaches to these positions, for it illustrates in a very concrete fashion the pioneer state in which the study of later medieval scholasticism still lingers. Much of the land on this particular frontier is not merely untenanted but even uncharted, and those brave or foolhardy enough to work in the area enjoy a freedom of movement bewildering to others whose business confines them to the more settled regions of earlier or later centuries. It is not so much that the wilderness is trackless as that one is still free to choose from among several possible routes each of which has its own potent inducements to offer to those who are anxious to grasp the lay of the land. There is still a great deal of debate about the respective worth of these various routes and nothing that can be said at present is likely to put an end to it.