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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.