The fascinating legend of Solomon's magical wisdom was widespread in Late Antiquity, and new evidence for it has surfaced in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts. Yet the key literary text for understanding the legend remains the miracle story of Eleazar in Josephus's Antiquitates Judaicae 8.42–49. In this article, I would like to examine the story's form, content, and function. First, it is necessary to clarify the story by a formal analysis and by relating its form to other miracles within the corpus of Josephus, and to similar accounts of miracles in Late Antiquity. Next, I shall examine the way in which this miracle functions in the Antiquitates from the perspective of Josephus's overall apologetic purpose, his view of miracle and magic, his portrait of Solomon, his knowledge of the Jewish legend of Solomon's magical wisdom, and his immediate context for the story. Finally, I shall propose a modest hypothesis about Josephus's treatment of the Eleazar miracle in relation to his social location as a Jewish apologist to educated Greco-Roman readers in the first century CE.

Until Titus's destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the national and religious life of Palestinian Jewry was organized around the cultic system of the Temple. Despite many changes in the political status of the nation and of Jerusalem itself, the Temple continued to serve as the seat of the priesthood, the destination of sacred pilgrimage, and the instrument of cultic expiation. Other places and forms of worship are attested during the second commonwealth, and by the advent of the common era groups such as the Qumran community had turned away from Jerusalem altogether. Yet there can be little doubt that the Temple was perceived as the preeminent symbol of Israel's God. Excavations of first-century Palestinian synagogues have revealed a basic architectural design of orientation toward the sanctuary. Although geographically and religiously remote from the Temple, the Jews of the diaspora continued, writes Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE), to “hold the Holy City where stands the sacred Temple of the most high God to be their mother city.”

The belief in the greatness of individual human beings who are acknowledged as benefactors of the city, the nation, and humankind is as old as the beginnings of Western culture. When the first Christian apostles encountered this belief, it was already well established in the Greco-Roman world. And, with all its intriguing lure, it is still an important and pervasive current in our present situation. Indeed, this belief is very much alive as all of us face the demand for excellence in our teaching and our studies, as well as the expectation that graduates will emerge as recognized leaders in religious communities and in our society at large.

Is apophasis dead? Can there be a contemporary apophatic theology, or critical method, or approach to comparative religion and interreligious dialogue? If such approaches are possible, then a resource of virtually unfathomable richness lies largely untapped. I suggest that apophasis has much to offer to contemporary thought and that, in turn, classical apophasis can be critically reevaluated from the perspective of contemporary concerns.

The Text The last sixteen lines of the remnants of the Exagōgē by the playwright Ezechielus depict the appearance of a wondrous and mysterious ζῷον. Since the fifth or sixth century, exegetes, with the singular exception of Israel Abrahams (see below, notes 33 and 56) have identified this wondrous creature with the mythical phoenix. This paper argues, however, that the ζῷον in the Exagōgē is a huge eagle that serves as a metaphor for God, drawn from Exod 19:4 and from chaps. 1 and 17 of the book of Ezekiel.

Is a human being capable of self-government? Christians who defied the Roman government that hounded them as criminals emphatically answered yes. Early Christian spokesmen, like Jews before them and the American colonists long after, claimed to find in the biblical creation account divine sanction for declaring their independence from governments they considered corrupt and arbitrary. Unlike its Babylonian counterpart, the Hebrew creation account of Genesis 1 indicates that God gave the power of earthly rule to adam—not to the king or emperor, but simply to “mankind” (and some even thought this might include women). Most Christian apologists from the first through the fourth centuries would have agreed with Gregory of Nyssa who, following the lead of rabbinic tradition, explains that after God created the world “as a royal dwelling place for the future king” he made humanity “as a being fit to exercise royal rule” by making it “the living image of the universal King.”

In the ongoing scholarly search for the roots of Islamic theology, students of Kalām are entrenched in two main camps: those who see early Islamic theology as a product of the encounter with Christian theology, and those who, without denying certain influences, emphasize the independence of Muslim thought and regard Kalām as a genuine, original reflection of the inner development of Islam. Until now, the arguments of one group of scholars have done little to convince the other. Indeed the scarcity of sources from the formative period of Kalām renders any evidence inconclusive. Yet it is not only the paucity of material, but the very nature of the question, which makes a definite answer practically impossible. For it can always be argued that interest in questions such as God's unity, theodicy, and anthropomorphism might appear within any monotheistic system. Thus, although Islamic theology can often be shown to be strikingly similar to Christian theology of an earlier period, it is often easier to speak about parallels than about sources.

Jonathan Z. Smith, in discussing the transformation of the notion of sacred space in Judaism and the shift from a “locative” type of religious activity to one not limited to a fixed place, points to the necessity “to take history … seriously” and to examine closely how that transformation took place. We can take up this charge and illuminate the larger processes at work by focusing on the narrower problem of the proper protocol required when approaching sacred space. This will enable us to see how the postbiblical tradition revises, while at the same time it preserves, the biblical model of a sacred center.

Justin, a philosopher converted to Christianity, addresses these words to the Roman senate as he protests a recent case of arbitrary arrest and execution of Christians. Although outraged by the verdict, he cannot fault the judge, Urbicus, praetorian prefect of Rome, and personal friend of the imperial family. Justin knows that Urbicus only followed orders in pronouncing the mandatory death sentence against those convicted of atheism as evinced by their refusal to worship the gods or to sacrifice to the divine genius of the emperor. Instead Justin invokes the story of Genesis 6—the story of the fall of the angels—to indict the whole system of imperial power, and to attack the divine pantheon that supports it as a false government, a form of demonic tyranny.

In a previous study, the idea of the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine between the Reformation and 1660 was examined. The result of that survey pointed to some of the causes that led to the emergence and development of that idea in English Protestant thought. Three factors were seen to be instrumental in generating a hitherto novel principle in Christian theology: the military Turko-Catholic threat to Protestant Christendom, the Puritan millenarian speculations between 1640 and 1660, and England's moral responsibility to the Jews. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fear of Catholic Turkish military power led theologians to believe that the Jews' conquest of Palestine would necessarily be preceded by victory over Islam and Catholicism. Consequently, they supported this Restoration as a means to their political end. Moreover, they believed that such a Restoration would lead to the fulfillment of the Pauline expectation of the millennial kingdom; the Jews' Restoration to Palestine would inaugurate England's messianic age. Also by concentrating on Romans 11, these English evangelists felt that they owed the Jews a debt which they could repay only by converting them to Christianity and restoring them to Palestine. This became the Englishman's burden of responsibility to the Jews whose rejection of Christ in the first century had allowed the overall salvation of the Gentiles.

The case of Richard Simon and the suppression of his book, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in 1678 stands at a point where the interests of both Church and State in maintaining control of the book trade intersected. As such, the case is of interest in two important areas: first, from the point of view of the social and political history of the ancien régime in France, this case exhibits the intense concern for maintenance or extension of the powers of jurisdiction of the authorities which is so characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. In some instances this preoccupation with autorité and droit led to an unseemly public jockeying for power, and it is interesting to see how the book trade is seen as a vital element in this struggle.

I propose to discuss what might be called the “mechanics of conversion” in the countryside of the sixth-century later Roman Empire. This process consisted fundamentally in implanting monasteries in districts where few villages had been Christianized, or where the population was nominally Christian but so badly instructed that earlier pagan cult practices persisted. There is considerable evidence for rural conditions in the hagiographic lives of monks and in the ecclesiastical histories of this period. One of the principal difficulties in this sort of study is the geographic distribution of the sources. Hagiographic texts are, in effect, local histories, largely confined to the environs of the monastery. Thus, we are reasonably well informed about western Asia Minor and Galatia in the sixth century, for which sources like this exist, but hardly know anything about paganism in Greece until the tenth century, when monasteries finally began to appear in rural districts.

In the light of these warnings from two philosophers who are attended to very carefully by contemporary theologians it might be expected that theologians would use the term “experience” with considerable caution. Exactly the opposite, however, seems to be the case. Contemporary theologians are talking a great deal about experience and, as we shall see, without much clarity or precision. This is probably the result of the swing of the theological pendulum to the left in the latter half of this century. It is also probably determined by the “hunger for experience” (Gadamer, Biersdorf) which has emerged in Western culture since the sixties. This in turn I take to be an aspect of a contemporary romantic movement which, like its predecessor in the last century, is marked by a reaction against the effects of modern science and technology and their accompanying secularism and rationalization of society, and by a longing for a deeper experience of the self, the world, and the divine.

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), well known for his book The Idea of the Holy, and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), even more famous for his hermeneutical programs of demythologization and existential interpretation, had, according to Bultmann himself, “been friends at Breslau.” Although Bultmann admitted in 1969 with incorruptible fairness that “the calling of the systematic theologian Rudolf Otto was a great gain for the theological faculty at Marburg,” he also had to state that “Otto and I grew so far apart that our students, too, were aware of the antithesis between his work and mine.” Already ten years earlier, in his first autobiographical draft of 1959, Bultmann mentioned “tensions with R. Otto, Hermann's successor,” which “led to lively discussions” among the students at Marburg. Those tensions date back at least to the early twenties, as two letters of Bultmann to Karl Barth reveal. In the first letter, written at the end of 1922, Bultmann stigmatizes the notes of Otto to F. Schleiermacher's Reden, Über die Religion, as “totally misleading.” In a letter written in April 1927 Bultmann expresses the hope that the opposition at Marburg to the Swiss theologian Eduard Thurneysen might be overcome “in six months, when Otto will be in India.” Thurneysen belonged to the new movement of so-called Dialectical Theology.

The following exposition of a certain pattern of the spiritualization of sacrifice in the Christian and Hindu traditions is an experiment in “comparative theology”: that discipline within theology which seeks to reflect upon data from two (diverse) religious traditions taken together, for the sake of the new light thereby shed upon the two sets of data and on related issues, particularly in one's own “home” tradition. In particular, I will juxtapose a certain understanding of the development of the Biblical theology of sacrifice with one line of development in orthodox Vedic liturgical theology and its heirs: the Pūrva (or “prior”) Mīmāṃsā of Jaimini (ca. 200 BCE), the Vedānta (Uttara or “latter” Mīṃāmsā) of Rāmānuja (ca. 1000 CE), and the Śrīvaiṣṇava theology of Vedānta Deśika. It is not my intention to break new ground in the study of either the Biblical or Mīmāṃsā traditions, but rather to show how certain information that is already available regarding each of these traditions might be used in a comparative fashion in order to illuminate the other, and to ask about the value of the method herein employed.

An abstract of this essay would reveal two interests, one civil and one religious. The first has to do with a public debate over values in American elementary and secondary education and what this debate symbolizes about national life in general. Specifically, I want to suggest that the stated intentions of citizens who demand religious instruction in the public schools could only be fulfilled, logically, if this instruction included doctrines of eternal punishment—in short, the possibility of hell. This is especially true if they wish to restore moral instruction “as it used to be.” My second argument urges that such a teaching would impose on schools a doctrine that has disappeared or been drastically diminished in the preachments of most American religious groups. It is a doctrine that is hence not culturally available.