The history of Persia from its very beginning until today, from Cyrus the Great to Riza Khan Pehlevi — a history covering twenty-five centuries equally divided by the Arab conquest of the year 642 into a pre-Islamic and an Islamic period — has seen an uninterrupted and continuous association between Iran and Israel. Jews have been living on Iran's soil from the dawn of the first Persian empire on, as an inseparable part of Iran's national destiny and development. Jews were the eye-witnesses of all the historical events in Persia under every dynasty — the Achaemenids, Parthians and Sassanids, the Omayyads and the Abbasids, the Seljuks, Mongols, Safavids, and Kajars, under every ruler, Caliph, Sultan, Il-Khan, Emir or Shah. Jews were the contemporaries of all the manifold religious movements and sects that were born on Persian soil, such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Shiʻa, Sufism, Bahaism; they were companions of the great classical poets, of a Firdūsī, Ḥāfiz, Saʻadī, Jāmī, and of all the other great Persian masters of art, literature and philosophy who made their everlasting contributions to world culture.

Eusebius of Caesarea occupies a unique position in ancient Christian thought. His central problem is to explain and justify a Christian society which is to transform the Roman Empire and which will become the new world civilization supplanting Hellenism and Judaism. Earlier thinkers do not face this problem. The Roman Empire is for them one of the powers ordained of God, but it is pagan and they expect it to remain so. Consequently the question of human government is only peripheral to their thought. Nor do later thinkers see the problem quite as Eusebius does. In the East, for example in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, the question of human government again becomes peripheral to Christian thought, and Eusebius has no successor as a “political theologian.” In the West, Augustine gives a general answer to the problem of a Christian society in a Christianized Empire, but his solution contradicts that of Eusebius. To Augustine, the structure of the Christian Roman Empire is still that of Babylon, and human society is still a mixture of two opposed cities, the earthly city and the city of God.

Ούκ ᾒδειτε ὃτι έν τοῖς τοῦ Πατρός μου δεῖ εἶναί με;

Several recent translators of the New Testament prefer the rendering, in my Father's house, to the alternative, in the things of my Father, about my Father's business. They have very early precedent for this, in Tatian's Diatessaron and the Syriac versions.

Mt. 543, which reads, ‘Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy,’ has long puzzled historians of Judaism. Strack-Billerbeck (ad loc.) profess themselves unable to find a written source for the second half of the maxim quoted, and think it is to be explained as a popular saying based on II Sam. 19.7 (so the Hebrew; English, 6) where Joab rebukes David for loving those who hate him and hating those who love him. This is not quite satisfactory, however, for all the five other maxims quoted in the chapter (and introduced by the same or almost the same formula) are either verbal quotations or close verbal reminiscences of verses of the Mosaic Law. (Mt. 5. 33, parallel to Num. 30.3, is, of the five, the one most remote from its presumptive original.) Therefore it has been suggested, e.g., that the second half of the maxim in 43 was not intended to be a part of the quotation, but was a bit of exegesis, added by Jesus or by some Christian editor, to indicate the popular understanding of ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor’ (Lev. 19.18).