As a scholar I am expected to deal with my subject matter in an objective way. If this were to mean without emotional concern, and without a personal standpoint, I have to admit failure in advance…. I do not hesitate to admit that in giving this lecture my aim is to contribute … to a change of attitude and behavior towards nature.

Issues of identity and difference in the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians have provoked a long history of scholarly debate, particularly around the narrative of Jews and Gentiles becoming “one new humanity out of two” in 2:15, . Should one read this passage, 2:11–22, as “an attempt throughout to articulate [the identity of the] in relation to Jews and Gentiles in the Roman world,” that reflects “significant engagement with the life and fate of the Jewish people”? Or does the text “look back on an achieved unity between Jew and Gentile in the Church as the one body” that has left behind “heated struggles with rival groups”? Furthermore, how do these identity categories of “Jew” and “Gentile” relate to the theological distinctives of the epistle? While the deutero-Pauline status of the text remains widely accepted, this does not put to rest the question of the text's overall relationship to Pauline theology. Does the account of a single new humanity in Ephesians represent the apex of development in the ideas of the Pauline school, or does it stand in disjunction to Paul's original vision?

In the Syriac Book of the Cave of Treasures, which in a general way we may reckon among the rewritten Bible texts, in ch. 27.6–11, an apocryphal fourth son of Noah appears, Yōnṭōn by name. This figure resides near the seashorein a far-easternland and possesses oracular and astrological wisdom. In 1980, Stephen Gero interpreted this figure against a Jewish background. Recently, however, Clemens Leonhard, following Witold Witakowski, has questioned this approach and denied any prehistory to Yōnṭōn; he regards him as an “invention” of the Syriac author of the Cave of Treasures. In the present article I aim to investigate whether it is possible indeed to trace a Jewish origin of Yōnṭōn's appearance in the Cave of Treasures. Taking Gero's interpretation as a starting point, I will first investigate the setting in which a figure like Yōnṭōn could have evolved within a Jewish context. Secondly, I will attempt to actually identify Yōnṭōn in earlier Jewish sources. In this I will follow a recent assertion of Su-Min Ri, that Yōnṭōn originates in the Biblical person of Yoqṭān (Gen 10:25). While Ri's assumption derives from the possibility of a misspelling, I will produce internal evidence which renders the identification of Yōnṭōn and Yoqṭān very probable, thus justifying the direction of thought taken by both Gero and Ri over against the allegations of Leonhard and Witakowski. Moreover, the following discussion will shed light on how Jews received influences from Hellenistic astronomy and astrology and how they read these concepts into, or set them in opposition to, the Bible.

In 2005–2006 Harvard Divinity School observed the fiftieth anniversary of the admission of women to the school, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women's Studies in Religion Program. This special issue of the Harvard Theological Review extends the celebration of these two anniversaries by gathering highlights of their intellectual fruit. The year-long celebration began with a convocation at which Harvard President Lawrence Summers joined Divinity School Dean William Graham and the faculty, staff and students in marking the historic anniversary. The convocation address, “A Short Half-Century: Fifty Years of Women at Harvard Divinity School,” is included as the first entry in this issue. Throughout the year, distinguished alumnae delivered prestigious named lectures, and panels recalled particularly salient outcomes of women's presence. The year concluded with a session at which the first women students who entered in 1955 returned to HDS to reflect on their experiences and careers.

The relationship between Israel, the nations, and Israel's God in the eschatological future has long occupied exegetes and theologians. The meaning of the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion and the servant's charge to become a “covenant to the people (), a light to the nations ()” (Isa 42:6) is a significant locus of dispute. Some argue that here the text charges the Israelites to missionize the Gentiles, while others contend that Second Isaiah holds only a passing interest in the status of foreigners. These disagreements are not unfounded, for the text itself contains seemingly contradictory exclamations right next to one another. In Isa 45:22, for example, YHWH proclaims: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!” In the very next verses, however, Isaiah depicts the nations as subservient to Israel and elsewhere as even licking the dust of the former exiles' feet (49:23)—an image which, at least at first glance, seems incompatible with the notion that foreigners and Israelites similarly benefit from YHWH's saving acts.

What happened to the Essenes after the first Jewish revolt? The answer to this seemingly simple question has proven elusive. Prior to the war, the Essenes stood alongside the Pharisees and Sadducees as one of the most prominent social factions in Judaea. Josephus and Philo allege that they numbered in the thousands and that they could be found in cities and towns throughout the country.

The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., and the concurrent loss of formal independence, was arguably the single most fundamental event affecting the future of the Jewish people during the subsequent centuries. The immediate reaction to the destruction of the Temple among the populace was one of despair and a feeling of a “loss of center,” as is evidenced in some of the post-destruction literature. This response was tempered and moderated to a certain degree by the subsequent rabbinic leadership, through moderation of the mourning practices, institution of formal commemoration rituals, and the substitution of other forms of worship and religious behavior in the wake of the loss of the Temple rituals. Nevertheless, the memory of the Temple as a defining element in the Jewish worldview retained a place of importance in post-destruction Jewish literature, in both legal corpora such as the Mishnah, and non-legal traditions, as exemplified by aggadic tales composed during the first centuries of the Common Era.

President Summers, Dean Graham, esteemed colleagues, honored guests, students and graduates of the Divinity School, new and old. It is a great pleasure to address you on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Divinity School. I am particularly honored by the presence of those of you who were here in 1955 when women first enrolled as students. For some of us who were not, 1955 may seem long ago—part of an archaic past of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and racial segregation, when women were welcome in few professional settings and ordained by few denominations.

Heracleon was a great second-century Christian thinker, and the author of the first known commentary on a New Testament text, the Gospel of John. Although we do not have Heracleon's commentary itself, Origen integrated a great deal of it into his own commentary on the fourth gospel.

Before melancholy, gratitude. First to Elizabeth and Ernest Monrad, for their countless gifts to Harvard University and, today in particular, to the Divinity School. It is a great honor to hold the Elizabeth H. Monrad Chair in Christian Studies and I hope I can do so in ways that at least partially reflect the grace and generosity of the chair's namesake and of its donors. My gratitude to Bill Graham, Dean of the Divinity School, is enormous, both for his professional confidence in me and for his persistent and inspiring vision of what Harvard Divinity School is and can be. It is wonderful to be here and for that I thank my colleagues—the faculty, administration, staff, and students of HDS. And finally, for helping me think through this particular bit of work, special thanks to Constance Furey, Stephanie Paulsell, and Melissa Zeiger.

The copious works of Eusebius of Caesarea are rarely investigated for their importance as testimonials to ancient knowledge of racial groups or to classical conceptions of ethnicity. Ancient ethnographical literature is not, however, an unimportant background for reading the bishop's works; nor are conceptions of race and ethnicity absent from his prolific literary output. In fact, racial assumptions are integral features in the development of various aspects—especially ecclesiological—of Eusebius's thought. Eusebius's prominent characterization of Christianity, which remains consistent throughout his entire literary career, is “the Church from the nations.” Such an appellation carried within itself the impulse to describe and define further the “nations” from which members of the Church were drawn. Persians, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians and other “barbarian” nations, as well as Greeks, left behind the identities of their former lives when they adopted the new way of life and the new identity offered by Christ.

“The Ways that Never Parted” is the title of a recently published collection of articles that reflects an increasing tendency in scholarship. A significant number of scholars no longer interpret the emergence of Christianity from Judaism as a clear separation between the two religions either at the end of the first or the beginning of the second century. Instead, they envision a prolonged process which, according to some, may even have lasted until the late fourth century. This process is thought to have been shaped by both segregation and rapprochement, creating ambiguity and “fuzziness” rather than clear boundaries. A central notion is the idea of sororal relations between Judaism and Christianity. These scholars no longer see Judaism as the mother figure giving birth to the daughter religion, while remaining unchanged herself, but rather as a sister developing and changing during the first centuries of the Christian era. This interpretation then sees Jews as an integral part of the Roman Empire, which eventually became Christian and (im)posed certain religious challenges.

Patristic exegesis soared to sublime heights with the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs. This nuptial tale, replete with evocative imagery and multivalent symbolism, supplied fertile ground for the mystical musings of Origen (ca. 185–254 C.E.) and Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–395 C.E.). Although its overt eroticism engendered some apprehension, the profound symbolic meanings deployed by the church fathers enabled the church to embrace fully the Song of Songs as a deep reservoir of theological insight. Always provocative and potentially scandalous, it perennially generates hermeneutical difficulties. Since exegesis invariably reflects the social and historical location of the interpreter, disparate themes and issues will resonate with different readers in different eras. For a generation of scholars attentive to the problem of racism, Song 1:5 merits particular attention because of its complex employment of racial imagery. In this verse the Bride proudly declares: “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Qedar, like the curtains of Solomon” ( []; ). Both the Hebrew and Greek word for “black,” and , have negative connotations, and the ambiguous sense of the conjunction between and constitutes the grammatical crux of the hermeneutical debate.

In 1943 the SS Gauleiter, “district administrator,” of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, commissioned a performance of The Merchant of Venice at the famed Burgtheater to celebrate the deportation of allthe Jews;Vienna had become Judenrein “cleansed of Jews.” When Werner Krauss, the Nazis'leading actor, first appeared on stage as Shylock, he made the audience shudder. According to the newspaper account:With a crash and a weird train of shadows, something revoltingly alien and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage…. The pale pink face, surrounded by bright red hair and beard, with its unsteady, cunning little eyes;the greasy caftan with the yellow prayershawl slung round; the splay-footed, shuffling walk; the foot stamping with rage; the claw-like gestures with the hands; the voice, now bawling, now muttering—all add up to a pathological image of the East European Jewish type, expressing all its inner and outer uncleanliness, emphasizing danger through humor.

The Psychomachia of the fifth-century Latin poet Prudentius provides a straight-forward portrait of heresy generally shared in the west: The wolf, with gory jaws, conceals himself in a soft fleece, Counterfeiting milk-white sheep while carrying on bloody murders by devouring lambs.It is by this means that Photinus and Arrius disguise themselves, those wolves so wild and savage.

Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax sets out to validate the long-standing suspicion that Professor Morton Smith, late of Columbia University, forged his famous discovery of aletter of Clement of Alexandria, which quotes from a longer(“secret”)Gospel of Mark. This academic folklore has been passed on like an esoteric tradition since 1975, when Quentin Quesnell called on Smith to make the manuscript of this letter available for forensic testing in order to rule out the possibility of a recent hoax. Quesnell had difficulty substantiating his concerns. In his article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, he postulated that a modern scholar might have devised the letter as “a controlled experiment” in order to examine how scholars react to new evidence. Yet the manuscript of this letter, which Smith found in 1958, was inscribed on the last pages of a seventeenth-century book that purportedly was kept in a locked room of a monastery in the Judean desert. What modern forger would leave his creation there and gamble that someone would discover it in his lifetime? For this scenario to seem at all plausible, Quesnell needed to imply what he personally suspected, namely, that Smith forged it himself for this purpose. Accordingly, Quesnell described his hypothetical modern “mystifier” as someone who shared Smith's abilities, opportunities, resources, and interest in what people make of the document.

Religion is deeply implicated in contemporary U.S. public life, as demonstrated in the increasing analysis of faith in any given presidential, congressional, or judicial candidate's political viewpoints; in ongoing presidential executive orders that approve government support and funding for faith-based initiatives; and in the continued lobbying by religious groups about a variety of moral and social justice issues such as euthanasia and immigration, to name a sample of recent flashpoint issues. What role do religious claims play in U.S. public life? How does Christian theology help clarify that role? What is the particular contribution of Christian feminist theology to understanding and rethinking that role?

But I know that it can only be gained by abandoning everything.—St. Teresa of Avila

Shortly after his death, the influential fourth century bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, was recognized for introducing the contemplative traditions of the Egyptian monks to the urban Christians of Alexandria and for bringing the desert monks into communion with the Alexandrian episcopacy. Athanasius accomplished this by quite intentionally bridging the distance—physical and spiritual—between desert and city. Over time, with his tireless effort, the daily spiritual practices of the monks became those of the urban Christian and the monks came increasingly under the sway of the Alexandrian episcopacy. As a consequence of his commitment to bringing the desert closer to the city, Athanasius thoroughly integrated ascetic practice into his theology and it proved to be a decisive component of his ecclesiastical politics.2 A letter Athanasius wrote to a certain Marcellinus provides valuable insight into the shape of Athanasius's spiritual program, its relationship to previous Hellenistic philosophical traditions, and, especially, the crucial function of the psalms in the reformation of the self.

As one of the central concerns of De hominis opificio, Gregory of Nyssa attempts to reconcile the biblical claim that God made human beings in the image of God (, Gen 1:27) with the reality of humanity's present misery and corruption. How, Nyssen asks, can God invest human beings with rational faculties that equip them as God's viceroys over creation and yet find themselves subject to the dominion of non-rational, sensual impulses? He answers the question by distinguishing human nature in its present form and orientation from those lofty, intellectual aspects of human nature that God intended for humanity in the beginning and in the resurrection. He characterizes the former by passions and pain; the latter, by the blessedness of communion with God. But this raises some key questions: If the passions cause our present misery, what does that say about gender and sexuality? Does he associate them solely with our present condition? Do they represent an accommodation or a cause of our present corruption? Or do gender and sexuality form part and parcel of human nature as God willed it from the beginning?