The question of revelation is a formidable question in the proper sense of the word, not only because it may be seen as the first and last question for faith, but also because it has been obscured by so many false debates that the recovery of a real question in itself constitutes an enormous task. My lecture today will be devoted to just this enterprise.

In a recent publication a scholar suggests that the Talmud preserves teachings only against astrology, and claims that astrology never obtained a foothold within Judaism, remaining only a sectarian phenomenon “at variance with normative Judaism.” The suggestion and claim should not go unchallenged. The present paper looks at the debates over astrology preserved in the Talmud, scans the major relevant sections in the Pseudepigrapha—with an introduction of a Jewish astrological document which should become a new addition to the Pseudepigrapha—reviews the astrological documents found in Cave 4 near Khirbet Qumran, and points again to the abundant evidence of zodiacal wheels and other astrological symbols in early Palestinian synagogues. The necessary breadth precludes exhaustive discussion in any area.

Several recent publications have presented collections of various types of evidence for the Egyptian cults in the Greco-Roman World. Although valuable, they do not give sufficient critical analysis of the evidence through detailed study of particular sites. The present article attempts to provide for Corinth a more substantial picture of the Egyptian cults than has previously been available.

The MS published here in all its extant fragments represents the remains of 3 successive columns, about 30 letters to the line, 34 lines to the column, from a scroll written at about the turn of the era. Contrary to the writer's earlier published impression, its text is not such as can be supposed to underlie the form presented in later Septuagint codices; it is instead a considerable reworking of the original LXX to make it conform both in quantity and in diction to a Hebrew consonantal text nearly indistinguishable, within the limited scope of our evidence, from that of MT.

For the diction of this Treatise has not been chosen at haphazard, but with great exactness and exceeding precision (Maimonides, Introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, p. 15).

In 2.32 of The Guide of the Perplexed, at the very outset of his section on prophecy, Maimonides states: “The opinions of people concerning prophecy are like their opinions concerning the eternity of the world or its creation in time” (p. 360).

In a recent, extensive article in this Journal, J. T. Milik made public some of the conclusions which he had drawn from his studies of the Qumran Enoch fragments, conclusions which have serious implications for the history of Jewish literature in the last centuries before the destruction of the Temple. Two of Milik's conclusions about the Enochic literature will be examined here: first, that there was at Qumran an Enochic Pentateuch, and second, that the Similitudes of Enoch (chaps. 37-71 of the Ethiopic Enoch book) are a late, Christian composition.

A number of scholars in this century have noticed the image of God or Jesus as mother in the spiritual writings of the high Middle Ages. The image has in general been seen as part of a “feminine” or “affective” spirituality, and neither of these adjectives is incorrect. The idea of God as mother is part of a widespread use, in twelfth-century spiritual writing, of woman, mother, characteristics agreed to be “feminine,”and the sexual union of male and female as images to express spiritual truths; the most familiar manifestation of this interest in the “female” is the new emphasis on the Virgin in doctrinal discussions and especially spirituality. And the frequency of references to “mother Jesus” is also part of a new tendency in twelfth-century writing to use human relationships (friendship, fatherhood or motherhood, erotic love) in addition to metaphysical or psychological entities to explain doctrinal positions or exhort to spiritual growth.

In the extant fragment (corresponding to 10:3-11:2 of the Greek text) of the Coptic translation of the Didache, after the prayer over the bread and the permission for “prophets” to improvise the benedictions if they so wish (10:7), there is a passage which has no parallel in the Greek. It has much potential importance for the early history of the liturgy; however, none of the several interpretations which have been offered to date is entirely satisfactory. The text and a provisional translation of the passage will be first presented, followed by our own analysis and interpretation.

As many of you know, I have been engaged for some time in a study of Islamic conceptions of life after death. It was for purposes of research in this area that I spent last spring in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. There I had the opportunity not only to consider contemporary writings on this subject but to talk with a number of persons who have been concerned with Qurʾānic exegesis and the formulation of Islamic theology. With reference to this modern perspective I would like to think with you today about some aspects of the Islamic experience of the divine in relation to the human—in this world as well as in the world to come.

The late seventeenth century in England is, theologically, a critical period, a time when old forms of thought and traditional methodologies were being challenged. Two theological events of the 1690s stand out as true signs of the changing times: the appearance of a number of collections of Socinian tracts, in which, in fact, the term “Unitarian” is first used in English literature. Also, in 1696, John Toland published his short but challenging Christianity Not Mysterious. In the following essay, I an interested in showing the methodological similarities and discontinuities between the Socinians and Toland, especially in regard to their scriptural interpretation and mutual insistence on the inadmissability of the concept of mystery to Christian theology.

Abraham, born in Chaldaea, had in youth already left a fatherland in his father's company. Now, in the plains of Mesopotamia, he tore himself free altogether from his family as well, in order to be a wholly self-subsistent, independent man, to be an overlord himself. … The same spirit which had carried Abraham away from his kin led him through his encounters with foreign peoples during the rest of his life; this was the spirit of self-maintenance in strict opposition to everything—the product of his thought raised to be the unity dominant over the nature which he regarded as infinite and hostile (for the only relationship possible between hostile entities is mastery of one by the other). With his herds Abraham wandered hither and thither over a boundless territory without bringing parts of it any nearer to him by cultivating and improving them. … The groves which often gave him coolness and shade he soon left again; in them he had theophanies, appearances of his perfect Object on High, but he did not tarry in them with the love which would have made them worthy of Divinity and participant in Him. He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike.

It is an irony and something of an enigma that the Bible, one of the shaping forces in the theological development of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), has largely been ignored in the assessments of this colonial divine. Edwards himself acknowledged its influence, especially during his youthful years. “I had then,” he wrote, “and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy Scriptures, of any book whatsoever.” From his meditation on its pages he derived great personal pleasure as well as guidance and substance for his preaching. His enthusiasm for scriptural study never failed. Six months before his death he disclosed to the trustees of the College of New Jersey that he had undertaken two major exegetical projects with the hope of publishing “an explanation of a very great part of the holy scripture; which may…lead the mind to a view of the true spirit, design, life and soul of the scripture, as well as to their proper use and improvement.”

Tillich is widely held to be among those Protestant theologians who proclaim considerable scepticism about the arguments for the existence of God. This particular form of scepticism is not an attack on any individual argument or set of arguments, but rather is a wholesale rejection of the possibility of there being any “argument” for the existence of God at all.

Can the existence of God be rationally demonstrated? This question has occupied philosophers and theologians for centuries and in a particular way since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This essay will examine the question of the knowledge of God as it is met by two contemporary Catholic theologians, Bernard Lonergan and Hans Küng. These two scholars are not chosen arbitrarily for comparison. Not only is each of them on the forefront of current theological development, but I shall argue that on the question of God the ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts of the former are significantly complemented by the latter.

A crucial issue in contemporary theology is the doctrine of God and especially the nature of the divine reality. What kind of reality is God? How is God's reality like, unlike, and related to other kinds of reality? There are many ways to talk about the reality of God. I want to focus on one way, namely, God as being or beingitself, not because I believe that it is the best way to talk about God but because it is one of the oldest ways, because it seems to be undergoing something of a revival, and because I am baffled and intrigued by it.

In the wake of Kant's critique of speculative metaphysics, many students of religion and theology have sought immediate access to the real and a foundation for doctrine and belief in religious experience. It was thought by some that a mode of experience might be discovered that was unscathed by the activity of the imagination in the construction of the forms and categories, and that would be broader than Kant's exclusively moral account of religion. It is not accidental, then, that the phrase “religious experience” has come to be reserved almost exclusively for aspects of experience that are allegedly prereflective, that transcend the verbal, or are in some way free of the structures of thought and judgment that language represents. The search has been for some channel of cognitive immediacy, whether the chosen mode of experience was volitional or affective.

Maurice Friedman, the leading scholar of Martin Buber's work, notes that “the question must even arise whether the philosophy of dialogue, the I-Thou relation between man and man, cannot stand by itself as an autonomous ethic, grounded in Buber's anthropology, but not necessarily tied with the relation between man and God.” Friedman then suggests that Buber's philosophy of religion and interpretation of the Bible do provide an important source of his ethics. An examination of Buber's thought reveals, however, that the tie between his philosophy of dialogue as an ethics and his view of the relation between man and God is indeed not necessary in some ways and perhaps not even possible.