One of the most important and controversial issues in Gnostic studies is the age of Gnosticism. Was it a post-Christian heresy? Was it roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity? Was it Christianity's twin, as someone has called it? Or was it a fully developed movement preceding Christianity and influencing it? Ingeneral, German New Testament scholars, under the influence of Rudolf Bultmann, have assumed a pre-Christian Gnosticism as the basis for their interpretation of the New Testament. Other scholars such as Charles H. Dodd and Robert M. Grant have questioned their heavy reliance upon late Mandaean texts to support such a conviction. With the recovery of the Coptic Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi a number of scholars, most notably James Robinson, have hailed these new materials as evidence for Bultmann's hypothesis:

There has been little substantial textual work on Erasmus' paraphrases of the New Testament. This study of the paraphrase of the Gospel of John, by examining the changes in the various editions, the use of patristic commentaries, and the characteristic emphases of the text itself, attempts to further our understanding of his work on the New Testament. I shall discuss first the composition of the paraphrases insofar as this relates to Erasmus' self-consciousness about the project of writing paraphrases of the New Testament.

William Penn intended no new synthesis of thought. His practical social reforms, combining the Quakers' radical hope for the total transforming of men, ethics and society by God's Spirit with a humanist's trust in reason and conscience already at work in all men universally, were a new stance for Quakers. But Friends noted mainly his exuberance and pragmatism and his uncritical openness about ideas. In Europe and America as a whole, he was best known in his own time for his practical career: he was the man of peace with the Indians, the founder of Pennsylvania, the champion of toleration. For these he was later celebrated in the paintings of “the Peaceable Kingdom” and the writings of Voltaire.

According to William Hanna “it had for many years been the highest object of [Thomas Chalmers'] literary and professional ambition to leave behind him a complete body of Divinity containing the fruits of his maturest reflections, both on the credentials and contents of the Christian Revelation.” Thus in 1845, after the epochal events of the Scottish Disruption had been put behind him, Chalmers undertook the project of writing his Institutes of Theology which were published in 1849, two years after his death. In approaching the systematic problem Chalmers felt that he was contravening “the order of every system and every text-book in theology that we are yet acquainted with” and proposing a radically altered arrangement of topics ”from that in which Calvin and Turretin, Pictetus and Vitringa have delivered them.” Chalmers' assumption that a continuity exists between Calvin and the theological systems of the seventeenth century need not detain us except to point out that Chalmers merely reflects a tradition, uniformly established until recent times, in which theology as “system” was projected retrospectively from its formulation in seventeenth-century thought back onto the theological work of the Reformation.

Witnessing the widespread internal discord plaguing the new Russian regime after the abdication of Nicholas II in March of 1917, one contemporary activist expressed fear that centrifugal forces.from within constituted the greatest challenge to the democratic revolution. Signs of disharmony quickly appeared among the revolutionary leaders themselves. The liberals in the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and the moderate socialists in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet found themselves at swords' points even before the first Provisional Government was officially established, and as months passed the animosity grew. Not long after the establishment of the new government the bickering spread beyond the ruling circles, disrupting orderly working relations between the new regime and the institutions surviving from the old. It appeared as though the collapse of the monarchy encouraged divisiveness precisely when survival depended on cooperative action.