A curious parallel exists between two early Christian discussions of prophetic or divine knowledge. Both deal with the Christian problem of sense knowledge about the divine in a thought world dominated by Platonic thinking: how can Christians base their knowledge of the divine upon the reports of the apostles who claim to have seen God in a human shape? The first of these discussions arises from criticisms from outside; Celsus, the second-century Platonist critic of Christianity, calls the Christians a carnal race who say that God is corporeal and has a human form, and complains, “How are they to know God unless they lay hold of him by sense-perception?” (C. Cel. 7.27, 37). The second comes from within the Christian camp, and is to be found in the Clementine Homilies. In this rather enigmatic text Simon Magus, the arch-heretic, accuses Peter in his reliance upon his apostolic experience of “introducing God in a shape,” and opposes to apostolic sense knowledge his own visionary experiences (Hom. 17.3). The examination of these two texts demonstrates that in their common terms and the common shape of their arguments the issue of the knowledge of the apostles was common in Christian polemics. It was also a problem for philosophically minded Christians who would prefer to place the knowledge of God, even if historically mediated by Jesus, in the intelligible knowledge of the soul, rather than in the senses.

In recent years, scholars have maintained that sections of the genuine Pauline epistles (especially 1 and 2 Corinthians) and even entire epistles are selfapologies in which Paul defends his apostleship. In the ancient sources, the term “apology” is not restricted to self-defense; the most characteristic Jewish Hellenistic apologies were propaganda on behalf of the law rather than an author's defense against personal accusations. Some fifty years ago, Günther Bornkamm proposed that Paul adapted and modified Jewish Hellenistic apologetic traditions in Rom 1:18 — 3:21. For the most part the thesis of Bornkamm's article and its implications for interpreting Romans have been benignly neglected; even those who accept it only emphasize its pertinence specifically for Romans 1–3. Ernst Käsemann, for instance, believes that with Romans 4, Paul fully embraces “rabbinic methods” and other more traditional Jewish modes of argumentation. This article challenges Käsemann's claim and affirms that Romans 4 is best understood as apologetic theology.

The literature on the history of biblical criticism is voluminous, but remarkably consistent in its postulation of the Reformation and the Enlightenment as the two mainsprings of modern biblical criticism. That this history is written almost exclusively by heirs of the liberal Protestant tradition ought to sound a warning bell, especially since the extremely rare dissenting accounts of biblical criticism come from the Roman Catholic camp.

It often happens that the papers of a departed master are gathered and winnowed by a faithful disciple in search of one last harvest of truth: an act of respect mingled with a desire for reflected glory. But in Jonathan Edwards's editing of the diary of David Brainerd the elder served the younger.

Since the end of the Second World War, both in scholarship and in the practical affairs of churches, there has been a burgeoning interest in the material setting of early Christian worship. Scholarship on the subject is impressive, both in its scope and its quality. On the practical side, European Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, have been faced with the often daunting task of rebuilding their places of worship. At the same time, they have been at pains to recover the principles of early church planning and design. The themes that have emerged out of this search for the past have had a profound effect in shaping the attitudes of post-war European Christendom.

This paper is about the relevance of Jacques Derrida's thought to biblical interpretation. It focuses specifically on the question of determinacy: whether there is something definite and determinate which is the object of textual interpretation, or whether texts are subject to an infinite number of incompatible, but equally valid, readings.