“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind (adam) in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion….’ And God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Gen 1:26–27 clarifies that the Hebrew term adam stands for the generic species of humanity which is composed of men and women. If there is any doubt on this interpretation, Gen 5:2–3 declares and defines again: “When God created humankind, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them humankind when they were created.”The “image of God in man and woman” opens us to transcend both the masculine and feminine metaphors for God which abound in the Bible and to transcend our historical selves and social institutions in recognition of the Holy One. It would appear that whatever one's interpretation of the “image” and “likeness” of God, one would have to recognize that the biblical text makes explicit that in our resemblance to the Divinity and in our dominion over the earth and animals, men and women share a common human dignity.

In light of our present knowledge it seems clear that the Essenes, despite all their intentions to be “true Israel,” in fact constituted a digression from the Judaism of their times, both in their mode of life and in certain of their basic concepts. As to their concepts, one can think of dualism, determinism, astrology, manticism, and perhaps also their highly developed hierarchical angelology; as to their modes of life, illustrations include their extreme segregation, their living in communes, common property, common meals, solar calendar, and baptism as a principal part of their ritual. Many attempts have been made to trace these traits within the Stoa, Cynicism, and Neopythagoreanism, as well as in the Persian religon. Some have been content with comparing the Essenes to other sects of the Hellenistic era. In the following pages I assume the well-established theory of the identity of the Essenes depicted in Philo and Josephus with the community of the Qumran scrolls and propose to show that the accounts of Philo and Josephus did not contain commonplace topoi of classical Utopias.

Within the last fifteen years, scholars have shown considerable interest in the ritual life of women in antiquity, and have been particularly successful in recognizing the traces of women's initiatory rituals in various Greek and Roman ceremonies and myths. With regard to the Greek materials, the Arrephoria and Brauronia festivals have been treated in this light, as have two ceremonies in which details of the Demeter-Persephone mythos were reenacted: the Thesmophoria and the Haloa.

One of the most inclusive of the Armenian Canon lists is that compiled by Gregory of Tatʿew (1346–1410 C.E.). He was a man of great and comprehensive learning, head of the monastery of Tatʿew, in the province of Siunikʿ. This was a most important center of Armenian learning, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

One of the celebrated moments of the Reformation age occurred in Leipzig in the summer of 1519. The young Wittenberg theologian Luther, with his colleague Carlstadt, engaged in debate with the even younger scholar from Ingolstadt, John Eck. The present article is an assessment of a well-known conclusion reached about that debate. I mean Luther's judgment that Eck “imitated Proteus” and contradicted himself, rejecting against one debater a position he had affirmed against the other. The charge, which Luther published, did nothing to enhance Eck's reputation at a time when he had already cultivated an assortment of enemies on other grounds.

As a youth of nineteen, Jonathan Edwards was full of questions and anxiety about his conversion. Like many another Puritan seeker, Edwards was eager to obtain the reward of faith but found it impossible not to doubt the genuineness of his religious pretensions. Doubt and self-distrust were hardly unusual in the religious life of a New England Puritan. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan has observed, they were an expected, even prescribed, part of the Christian pilgrim's journey toward God. “This was the constant message of the Puritan preachers: in order to be sure [of one's standing before God] one must be unsure. … [T]he surest earthly sign of a saint was his uncertainty….” Edwards' reflections upon his experience, however, brought to light another, more interesting reason for hesitation—and one that was anything but conventional. He observed a marked discrepancy between what he had experienced and what the theorists of conversion—among them his esteemed grandfather Solomon Stoddard—said he ought to experience. Furthermore, far from glossing over this discrepancy between theory and experience, Edwards brought it to the very center of his attention. He did not seek to evade his difficulty but determined instead to make this aporia the basis for an inquiry that eventually led him to reject the step-by-step model of conversion that had provided the framework for New England's discussion of the knotty problem, never satisfactorily resolved, of how to formulate a reliable procedure for determining who were the visible saints. Even those skeptical about the possibility of arriving at such a procedure, like Solomon Stoddard, phrased their objections within that framework. Stoddard never doubted the truth of the preparationist, step-by-step description of conversion; he did doubt that any reliable procedure for distinguishing true faith from its imitations could be constructed on the basis of that description. Edwards' eventual rejection of his grandfather's open communion practice was a consequence of a critical reevaluation of the step-by-step model upon which New England thought and practice had been based.

John Hick has recently observed that within the “spectrum of disarray” in recent Christian theology regarding life after death, some “moderately traditional theologians,” while retaining the idea of an afterlife, have moved to an avowal of universal salvation. In part the importance of this trend lies in the fact that theologians of a universalist persuasion—Hick himself being a notable example—may now increasingly be accounted significant rather than peripheral figures. While universalism has always been an available option for a few, constituting since the early Christian centuries “a small underground stream of belief,” it has usually been strongly opposed by orthodox thinkers.