Not so long ago a little treatise on the Apostles' Creed was edited by the late Dom R. H. Connolly, and established as the property of Ambrose of Milan. In this treatise the statement may be found that “when therefore the holy Apostles all came together they compiled a short formula of the faith so that we might shortly be instructed about the whole course of the faith.” We are not concerned here with the question on what occasion the holy Apostles did come together. Apocryphal traditions know of several such meetings of the Apostles, usually with the Virgin Mary, and it was presumably one of these which was in the mind of the great bishop of Milan. The significant fact is rather that he denied here that Christianity ever went through a pre-credal period. His great authority could not fail to make a lasting impression, especially upon the Western Church. It is evidently on the basis of this his assertion that we find, in the orations of Pseudo-Augustine, a Creed that is divided as follows: “Peter said: ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.’ Andrew said: ‘And in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord.’ James said: ‘Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of Mary the virgin.’ John said: ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.’ Thomas said: ‘He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead,’ ” and so on till at last Matthias finishes with the words, “and the life everlasting. Amen.”

Many observant visitors to ancient Ostia must have noticed the remains of a small circular building in the middle of the Forum on the south side of the Decumanus Maximus, the continuation of the Via Ostiensis (Figs. 1-3). It came to light in the excavations of the Forum about forty years ago and was believed by the excavator Guido Calza to be a nymphaeum. Also in his posthumous detailed description of the oldest part of the city, the Castrum, the structure still appears as an ‘imperial nymphaeum.’ It was erected over the northeast corner of a very early rectangular building (Fig. 1 A) dated by Calza at the end of the fourth century B. C. Although the so-called nymphaeum obliterated the part of this building's eastern wall, which it straddles, this structure had been levelled before, when the authorities of Ostia decided to create at the crossing of the Decumanus Maximus and Cardo Maximus, in the center of the ancient Castrum, a monumental square.

The sole daily prayer of the Synagogue, in the proper sense of the word prayer, preces, that is of a request for well-being, is the Tefillah, the “Intercession,” also called Amidah, since it is recited standing. The prayer consists of eighteen sections, each concluded by the same formula: “Blessed be Thou, YHWH.” Thence, the popular name of the prayer: Shemone Esreh, “Eighteen” (benedictions).

In the following reflections I shall start from what I consider an undeniable fact, namely, that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality. It is that over and above the objections which the modern intellect entertains against it on theoretical grounds. These — which for brevity I will simply grant en bloc — are by themselves indecisive. As transcendental, the object of the idea — immortality itself — is beyond proof or disproof: it is not an object of knowledge. But the idea of it is. Therefore, the intrinsic merits of its meaning become the sole measure of its credibility, and the appeal of such meaning remains as the sole ground of possible belief — as certainly the lack of such appeal is sufficient ground for actual disbelief. But since what is meaningful depends, beyond the mere condition of logical consistency, largely on the dispositions and insights of the mind that judges it, we must interrogate these for their prevalent unresponsiveness as well as for any possible hold which the idea, even in its present eclipse, may still have, or reclaim, on our secularized estate. Thus an examination of the problem at this hour will be as much an examination of ourselves as an examination of the issue of immortality; and even if it should throw no new light on the latter, on which in more than two thousand years probably everything has been said there is to say, it may yet throw some light on the present state of our mortal condition.

The modern discussion of Patriarchal religion may be said to begin with the brilliant essay of Albrecht Alt, Der Gott der Väter, published in 1929. Alt proposed to use new means to penetrate into the pre-history of Israel's traditions of the old time. He repudiated the methods of such earlier scholars as Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen, who attempted to reconstruct the pre-Yahwistic stage of the tribal forebears of Israel by sifting Israel's early but fully Yahwistic sources for primitive features, primitive in terms of an apriori typology of religious ideas derived largely from nineteenth century idealism. Such procedures, Alt recognized, yielded merely the superstitious dregs of Israelite religion at any of its stages. As early as 1929, it was obvious to him that the archaeological data bearing on the second millennium gave a very different picture from that painted by the older historians. At least it was clear that the religion of Israel's neighbors was on a very much more sophisticated level than that being predicated for the pre-Mosaic tribes.

In their struggle against the Church of Rome, a number of sixteenth century English reformers became students of ecclesiastical and secular history. To support their contention that the Roman Church had deviated from New Testament principles, these reformers studied the available records concerning the dogma and ritual of primitive and early medieval Christianity. To prove their charge that for eight hundred years the Church of Rome had usurped the temporal power of European and English rulers, they turned to the medieval chronicles.

The Bible, we are continually reminded, was written with an intent remote from that of the philosopher. To examine the Bible for its logical implications might therefore appear futile. The present inquiry, however, is undertaken in a more Socratic spirit. Socrates carried his search for truth into the most unlikely quarters. Unimpressed by pedigrees, he winnowed ideas in banquet hall and market place, rejecting none until they stood condemned by their own inner contradictions. The aim of the following pages is to apply the Socratic method to the Bible; more specifically, to examine some logical implications of biblical anthropomorphism.

When Schleiermacher appeared in the lecture hall at the University of Berlin, instead of reading to his students a polished narrative of his completed thinking, he spoke from simple notes and laid everything before them “as problems” to be thought through again in their presence. He was by nature, David Friedrich Strauss later recalled, decidedly one of those men in whom liveliness and a quicksilver-like mobility predominate, If he spoke from the pulpit, a tone of solemnity counter-balanced this vivacity, but in lecturing his manner was restless, as he moved from one idea to another, examining it now from this side and now from that, until he would have made his auditors dizzy were it not that his power of speech seemed to hold the listener by the hand and help him over the fissures in the presentation. “Imagine now,” Strauss declared, “the task of capturing such a lecture in writing! It likens itself to that of photographing a dancer in full motion.”

The following remarks are intended to be merely general indications of overall problems which nonetheless, I believe, are necessary before one investigates specific words or concepts which may be borrowed by one culture from another.

For many people the problem of evil is a major stumbling block to belief in God. A history professor asks, why did a good God permit Hitler to incinerate millions of Jews? A parishoner wants to know why his beloved wife must lie dying of cancer? A female Pepsis wasp plunges its stinger into its tarantula victim, injecting just enough venom to paralyze, but not to kill, the spider host, so that the wasp larvae may eat the living but helpless body. Why has the syphilis germ come to be in the course of the evolution of life? It lives, survives, and thrives only in higher organic hosts, which are its victims. Treat some kinds of bacterial disease with our modern “miracle drugs” and, in reaction to the medication, mutating genes produce new, hardier strains of the destructive microbe. Why is there pain — especially when it seems “excessive,” “prolonged” and “unnecessary”? If God is good and loving, and if His power is adequate, why is there physical and mental suffering in our world? If the evolutionary process is the divinely appointed, creative method, why has so much of it taken a course of brutality and aggression? Raising the question at the most fundamental level of process, why has evolution taken place by “mutations,” many of which must be classified as “evil” when they result in the suffering of living forms? For many minds the fact of pain, and back of it, the phenomenon of “evil,” or “inept” mutation remains the unhealed core of the problem of evil, and a barrier to religious faith.

The striking text which Codex Bezae presents, aside from evoking much controversy and several novel theories, has long been at the center of the yet unsolved mystery of the so-called “Western” text, which is itself one of the most urgent and yet most enigmatic areas of New Testament textual criticism. B. H. Streeter did not exaggerate when he said that many a scholar “… has met his Waterloo in the attempt to account for, or explain away, the existence of the Bezan text.”

The question of ascribing to William Tyndale or to George Joye the 1533 treatise The Souper of the Lorde (Short-Title Catalogue 24468) was rightly decided in Joye's favor by W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, but somewhat more careful attention to the contents of the treatise might have removed even the little doubt which that investigator allowed to shadow the ascription to Joye. His admirable summary of the most persuasive external evidence was indeed conclusive enough virtually to eliminate Tyndale from consideration as author, in spite of the opinions of such notable Tyndale scholars as J. F. Mozley and S. L. Greenslade. But internal evidences clinch the case for Joye.

The search for the presumed “sources” of Muhammad's religious ideas, as these are expressed in the Qur'an, has inspired a considerablerange of studies, varying in tone from tentative to polemical. Most writers on the topic seek to demonstrate either a predominantly Jewish or a predominantly Christian “influence.” It is relatively easy, of course, to compile a catena of passages from the Qur'an which can be paralleled by Scriptural texts or by haggadic or apocryphal materials or compared with the practices of Jewish or Christian communities. The argument tends to become inconclusive on the whole; Jewish scholars who argue for a Jewish source or sources are apt to forgetthat the Old Testament was as much a part of Christian as of Jewish Scripture and that even haggadic supplements had long since been taken up into Christian writings; Christian scholars who argue for a Christian source or sources are somewhat embarrassed by Muhammad's decisive rejection of Christological doctrine;and each side can produce valid arguments against the other.

Probably no two traditions of philosophy differ more widely than those of classical Greece and India. It is only when we force our way through the logical surface to the seemingly illogical practices andgoals of an earlier age that we can see similarities between the two cultures. These similarities, however, are sometimes so striking that the Indian evidence may help our understanding of Greece and the Greek our understanding of India. One gains such a reciprocal understanding, I think, from examining what I shall call the cults, meaning by this the sum of practices and goals as opposed to the philosophy, of the Greek Cynics and the Indian Pāśupatas.

Hebrews 13.9–14 is among the most difficult passages of the entire New Testament. Here, in the context of a warning against “diversified and foreign doctrines” (διδαξαì πoικíλαι καì ξεναι), a Christological argument occurs (13.11-12). It is obviously the intention of the writer to ground his objection to the “foreign doctrines” on this Christological basis. But the character of the doctrines opposed in these verses has remained an enigma to commentators inasmuch as the function of the Christological argument in this polemical setting has not been recognized clearly. However, a closer examination of the Old Testament passage which underlies the Christological argument in Hebrews 13.11 may provide a key for a fresh solution of the complex problems of this passage.