In many aspects of social life Japan shares with the whole world the consequences of the World War, particularly in the intricate connections between social unrest and spiritual agitation. Japan had passed through two wars in recent times; they aroused the nation to national self-consciousness, but they brought also many new problems. Yet those wars were fought far from Japan itself, and did not bring home the disasters and miseries of war. In the World War Japan took a part, but it remained for the people a matter of distant lands. Thus they were comparatively indifferent to the various issues raised by the war, such as the combat between militarism and democracy, the questions of international justice and the self-determination of nations, the problems of peace and social reconstruction. Moreover, their indignation against the aggressive Occident led the people to discredit the pleas of the allies against Germany, and often to incline to sympathize with the German claim of “a place in the sun.” These circumstances tended to keep the Japanese comparatively untouched by the problems created by the war. But the collapse of the great empires and the final outcome of the war could not fail to produce a profound impression among the Japanese. Although the people at large did not realize the whole situation, yet the gravity of the changes and problems was more or less fully grasped, and serious thought was stirred on social and religious questions.

The most important question which a man has to decide in this world is that of his work in life. The majority of men must settle this problem in the light of conscience and common sense, their knowledge of their world, what can be done and what needs to be done in the world, and their knowledge of themselves, their natural inclinations and abilities.

There is a mediaeval Italian painting which has long been a favorite of mine and of which copies hang in the studies of many men of my profession. It is a picture of St. Jerome translating the scriptures. The miscellaneous assortment of friendly beasts with which the artist has enlivened an otherwise quiet scene at first attracted my childish mind, but now that I have become a man I find the picture still attractive. It is more than an imaginative picture of an historic figure or an historic event or even of a single profession. It is symbolic, and it means something not merely to the student but also to the preacher and the layman.

If the scholars of various countries are to enter once more into the old fellowship of a common task, which was interrupted by the war, one of the first requirements is that all the national groups should acquaint themselves with the work done in the interval by the others. In the Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 1921, I published for the benefit of German scholars a survey of English and American literature on the New Testament from 1914 to 1920, and I have been glad to prepare likewise for this Review, and so for American and English colleagues, a critical account of the most important works on the New Testament produced during these years in Germany and the other countries named in the title of this article.

No one has ever really doubted the oft-asserted theory that no part of the middle ages can be studied apart from the Christian Church. All-embracing in its influence from the fall of Rome to the Reformation, it is generally conceded to have reached its zenith during the pontificate of Innocent III, not only because of the perfection of its organization at that time but also by reason of its readiness under his leadership to take issue with any or all of the secular powers of Europe over a variety of questions which, in only too many instances, had little obvious connection with the Christian faith. Its ambitions were large but, by methods which were sometimes unscrupulous, they were almost always realized.

Catholic writers on Scholastic Theology do not hesitate to admit that no work contributing new and valuable additions to this science has been published since the days of Bellarmin, Suarez, and Lugo. The collapse of scholastic philosophy after the fifteenth century could not fail to affect also scholastic theology, which in losing all contact with the new scientific progress lost also its strong appeal to speculative minds. Moreover, the Church, instructed by the events of the Reformation, had become so suspicious of novelties that any attempt to introduce new additions to the traditional teaching of theology was more likely to bring a thinker into the hands of the Inquisition than to lead towards a cardinal's hat.

In the introduction to my first article (Harvard Theological Review, October 1921) I have already remarked that it is neither necessary nor possible to present the literature of mediaeval church history with the fullness which is desirable for the history of the early church. In a general survey everything that has only a local interest must be omitted, and even in what remains the wheat must be winnowed from the chaff. The reviewer need not complain of lack of material; indeed what is valuable greatly exceeds in amount what is unimportant. This is especially true of those comprehensive treatises which deal either with the Middle Ages as a whole or with special periods.

The Christian interpretation of the Old Testament was early set upon finding in it a figure corresponding to the Son, or the Word (Logos), in the New Testament, a divine being, intermediary between God the Father and the world in creation, revelation, and redemption. For Christian theology, with its philosophical presumptions, a God who visibly and audibly manifested himself to men in human form and action was necessarily such a being; the Supreme God, in his supramundane exaltation or his metaphysical transcendence, could not be imagined thus immediately to intervene in mundane affairs. In this assumption and to a considerable extent in their particular interpretations the Fathers had a precursor in the Jewish theologian Philo.

The term teknonymy is applied to the custom of naming a man after his son. It is unusual in Western Europe, where the name received at birth is rarely changed, but as a practice of primitive peoples it has long been known to anthropologists. Indeed the term is of anthropological devising, apparently invented by Tylor, the father of the craft, and duly noted in Sir James Frazer's great repertorium of anthropological data, The Golden Bough. But neither Frazer nor Tylor seems to have referred to the teknonymy of a civilized people, the Arabs, who have developed the system as fully as could well be done. Almost every Arab has a personal or direct name, the ism, and an indirect one, or surname, taken from his child, the kunyah. He may have a number of other names as well, derived from his tribe, his rank, a sobriquet, a common pseudonym, or a patronymic. But it is the name and kunyah that most closely correspond to the given, or Christian, name and the surname of Western Europe. This kunyah contains the Abu, ‘father,’ indispensable to all Western writers who seek to establish an oriental background for their stories, culminating in the literally preposterous ‘Abou Ben Adhém’ of Leigh Hunt's famous poem. As a matter of fact kunyah may mean ‘patronymic,’ but the kunyah that contains Abu, ‘father of’, is so much the most common that ordinarily, when the word kunyah is used, we think of the teknonymic system rather than the other.

It is curious, and perhaps significant, that the two most important volumes on the Iranian religions which have appeared within the last decade should have been written by scholars who were not professed Iranists. Professor James Hope Moulton, the author of the Hibbert Lectures on Early Zoroastrianism (London, 1913), was a theologian and a hellenist; Professor Raffaele Pettazzoni, who has just given us his La Religione di Zarathustra (Bologna, 1920), is a student of comparative religion of the finest and sanest type. Pettazzoni seems not to have had the advantage of consulting Moulton's volume; but while from one point of view this may be regrettable, from another it has worked for good, since two scholars have reached independently results which, when combined, put the genesis of Iranism in an entirely new light and go far toward the solution of many perplexing problems, if, indeed, they may not have solved the riddle as a whole. Of Moulton's work I have expressed an opinion elsewhere, and subsequent reflection has only confirmed that judgement.

In his article ‘A Decade of Luther Study’ (Harvard Theological Review for April 1921, p. 111) , Preserved Smith says of A. V. Müller: “His own thesis, doubtless carried too far, is that everything in Luther can be found in his predecessors, and that there is practically nothing original at all in the Reformer's thought.”

In two articles, to which Preserved Smith does not refer, Müller has collected concrete evidence in support of his view. He there compares the theology of two members of Luther's order (the Augustinian) with that of Luther, showing that there is a perfect agreement on many important points between Agostino Favaroni and Jacobus Perez on the one hand, and Luther on the other.

Johannes Weiss, Das Urchristentum, Göttingen, 1917.

Alfred Loisy, Les Actes des Apôtres, Paris, 1920.

F. J. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity, Volume I, London, 1920.

Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1921.

Roland Schütz, Apostel und Jünger, eine quellenkritische und geschichtliche Untersuchung über die Entstehung des Christentums, Giessen, 1921.

B. H. Streeter, ‘Fresh Light on the Synoptic Problem,’ Hibbert Journal, October, 1921.

The purpose of this article is not so much to offer a review of the books mentioned above as to indicate briefly their nature and contents, and to discuss the varied yet similar points of view which they represent toward some of the problems in the story of Christian origins as studied today.

The well-known Armenist of the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes at Paris, Professor Frédéric Macler, has laid New Testament scholars and those who are interested in the Caucasian languages, more particularly Armenian, under a decided obligation by the publication of this elaborate study of the text of Matthew and Mark in the Armenian version. What makes the book of especial value is the fact that we have here a large number of variants drawn from Mss. which were inaccessible to the editor of the only variorum edition of the Armenian text hitherto published — that of Zohrab, Venice, 1805. This is peculiarly grateful to the Armenist, while the New Testament critic finds a large body of readings from various Armenian Mss. or manuscript groups collected, translated, analyzed, and compared with the Greek, the Old Syriac, and the Peshitto by a competent scholar.