This Spring I received a long distance telephone call from Dean Samuel Miller, who invited me to give this year's Ingersoll Lecture on human immortality. Three days later, Dean Miller was dead. When I heard the sad news, I, as many of you no doubt, began to think about the way he had influenced me, especially during my theological training here at Harvard Divinity School. One of my most vivid memories was a point which he emphasized in his class on Religion and Literature. Sam Miller felt strongly that in our modern 20th century two of the most profound and important experiences of human life are becoming more and more insulated from everyday existence. These two experiences, birth and death, have the potential for affecting the character and quality of the rest of life. But in each instance, they are falling victim to modern technological efficiency and adding to the process of dehumanization rather than counteracting it.

Dr. Pahnke's field of interest, just described, is of very great importance. I can say this even though he and I might have some differences as to methodology. Questions must be asked in terms in which they can be answered. Thus Dr. Pahnke has sketched for us a new and promising approach to problems in an old field, and I am with him all the way in this interest.

Birth and death are the most elemental symbols of the mystery we are to ourselves. Birth: the original moment of creativity through which new life comes into being with all the potentialities for joy and sorrow and meaning which we know to be most deeply human. Death: the dissolution and passing away, and even violent destruction, of all of this, disappearing forever from human consciousness. Events of such importance can never be left by men to lie undisturbed in their bare facticity: they will be elaborated and interpreted in myth and theory; they will be transformed in their character and their import for human life by deliberate techniques of control, as well as by the more unconscious impact of long established custom and practice. There are no obvious criteria for deciding what is significant and what is true, what is right and good, with regard to such events. The most we can do, perhaps, is formulate a negative criterion: above all, with events of such real and such symbolic import for human life, we want to avoid serious illusion or delusion.

Not all religious discourse or talk is about God, and not all that is about God is also about the world. Let us here pay attention, however, to that religious talk which is about both God and the world, not in bare conjunction (e.g., “God exists and the world exists”), but in some richer relationship (e.g., “God is present in the world”). And let us call this latter sort God-and-the-world talk. Such talk is interesting to theologians and to plain men, and it is therefore of interest to the analyst of religious language.

The problem of evil has always been a great enigma. But there is something even more enigmatic about Emerson's handling of the problem. Critics have found that in the writings of Emerson this becomes an enigma shrouded in a mystery. We shall first sum up the important critical opinions about the Emersonian solution of this problem, then elucidate his theory of evil, and finally demonstrate how he overcomes the antinomy between the philosophical problem of evil and the personal problem of evil.

In composing his history of the monarchy the Chronicler incorporated material from the canonical Books of Samuel and Kings into his text. Although the Hebrew text of Chronicles in these parallel passages is not identical in every respect with the Hebrew text of Samuel and Kings, the correspondence of the two Hebrew texts is very close. Since the Greek translation of Samuel and Kings undoubtedly preceded that of Chronicles, the question arises whether the translator of Chronicles into Greek made use of the Greek translation of Samuel and Kings, and if so, in which text form or recension. The present investigation is confined to a comparative study of the synoptic parallels in the Greek texts of I Paraleipomena and I–II Reigns.

After exhorting the brethren not to hold the faith with acts of partiality (2:1), the author of the Epistle of James presents an example of partiality in the assembly (2:2, 3), followed by a reproach in the form of a rhetorical question (2:4). Dibelius has rightly warned against historicizing this example, as though it presented an actual incident for which the author gives advice. But even when James 2:2, 3 is understood as an example employed for paraenetic purposes, still we must ask how this example was understood —i.e., what type of situation is depicted and what is the point of the example?

In a recent study of the Greek text of 1 Esdras we argued that it frequently reflected an old, often nonexpanded Semitic Vorlage despite the many corruptions and secondary expansions peculiar to the “apocryphal” text. Esdras B [hereafter: G], on the other hand, was also found to differ from the received Hebrew text, but its variants were small enough that its underlying text-type could be called Proto-Massoretic. This analysis conflicts with that of Bernhard Walde, Wilhelm Rudolph, and others, who would assign the same geographical and chronological horizons and nearly identical Vorlagen to 1 Esdras and G. We shall test our interpretation, therefore, by studying the differences in the Hebrew texts of Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 on the basis of the translation of Ezra 2 in 1 Esdras 5. Although the latter has many omissions and doublets —in fact, it is in relatively poor shape —not enough attention has been paid to its alternation between Ezra-type and Nehemiah-type texts.

Although Pontius Pilate is known primarily because of one episode —his sentencing Jesus of Nazareth to the cross —and from one source — the New Testament, there are five discrete incidents involving him which are reported in extra-Biblical sources. They are: the so-called “affair of the standards” at Jerusalem, his construction of an aqueduct in the same city, the episode of the golden shields in Jerusalem, his repression of armed Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim, and, finally, his citation to Rome by the proconsul of Syria, Vitellius, and his arrival there after the emperor Tiberius died in 37 A.D. Josephus is our source for all these incidents except for the golden shields affair, which is reported only by Philo in his Embassy to Gaius.