In a study recently published in this journal, Lawrence Wills has identified, in a wide range of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian literature, a recurring pattern that is sometimes characterized in those sources as a “word of exhortation” (λόγος παρακλήσεως: Acts 13:15; Heb 13:22; cf. Acts 2:40; 1 Macc 10:24; 2 Macc 7:24; 15:11; Apostolic Constitutions 8.5). Toward the end of his article, Wills suggests that the form of this word of exhortation may define a point on a larger rhetorical trajectory within Greco-Roman Hellenism, and that “we can perhaps go further and note the actual compositional techniques that have passed over from Greek rhetoric into Jewish and Christian oratory.” In this assessment Wills is, I believe, quite correct, and in this essay I wish to build upon, and at specific points to refine, his analysis of the form of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian sermons.

At the end of the second century, four gospels became canonical. Today they are present everywhere in the world at the beginning of the New Testament and at the heart of the Christian Bible, side by side and in the same order, endowed with the same authority. The text of these four gospels has been fixed for a long time, notwithstanding the existence of thousands of textual variants which have troubled European scholars since the eighteenth century. Today no one dreams of publishing interpolated versions of these gospels or of doctoring our holy books. Biblical scholarship devoted to the study of these gospels now occupies a firm place in the programs of numerous theological faculties and departments of religious studies.

Mani established his religion on very broad syncretistic grounds, in the hope that it could conquer the whole oikumene, East and West, by integrating the religious traditions of all peoples—except those of the Jews. Although Manichaeism as an organized religion survived for more than a thousand years, and its geographical realm extended from North Africa to Southeast China, this ambition never came close to being realized, and the Manichaeans remained, more often than not, small and persecuted communities. Yet, in a somewhat paradoxical way, Mani did achieve his ecumenical goal. For more than half a millennium, from its birth in the third century throughout late antiquity and beyond, his religion was despised and rejected with the utmost violence by rulers and thinkers belonging to all shades of the spiritual and religious spectrum. In this sense, Manichaeism, an insane system, a “mania,” appeared as the outsider par excellence.

It has been customary to identify the author of the Itinerarium Egeriae (It. Eg.) as a nun or a “grande dame” from one of the western provinces of the later Roman empire—Spain, Gaul, or even Italy. Yet, a reexamination of the evidence suggests the possibility of a different solution regarding not only the author's religious affiliation and status in society but also her geographical origin. The newly proposed identification is linked with major developments of Christianity in the West, in particular with its spread within urban milieux and with the receptivity of contemporary society to the idea of pilgrimage.

One of the perennial, and more vexing, problems in religious thought and philosophy has been the question unde malum. In ancient, medieval, and modern thought, the issue has been viewed mostly in its theological context. From the perspective of traditional monotheistic theology, the problem thus presents itself: If God is truly all good and all powerful, then why would God cause or even allow evil, whether natural (e.g., earthquakes, floods, human disease) or moral (murder, rape, and the like), to exist? Inasmuch as the existence of evil, at least from the phenomenological point of view, is an indisputable fact, it would seem that either divine omnipotence or benevolence must be limited.

In his foundational work on the problems of anxiety and self-affirmation, The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich refers to the twentieth century as an age of anxiety. He describes the century as an era in which humankind has become deeply and disturbingly aware of the threats of meaninglessness and spiritual nonbeing. This anxiety, Tillich asserts, has become a central theme for modern artists and writers, whose works have frequently depicted humankind and society as teetering on the brink of an ontological and spiritual abyss. As Tillich was aware, however, the concept of anxiety did not magically appear in literature in the year 1900. Although Tillich considers the anxiety of meaninglessness to be paramount in the present day, he gives extensive treatment to other anxieties (for example, the anxieties of guilt and death) that deeply concerned writers in earlier times. Tillich mentions T. S. Eliot, Camus, and Sartre, but he also hails Flaubert and Dostoyevsky as explorers of the “deserts and jungles of the human soul.” Another nineteenth-century novelist, who should not have passed without notice, escaped Tillich's attention: Herman Melville.