Users of Bible Translations and especially makers of them have reason to be interested in the grandson of Ben Sira. He is perhaps the earliest identified person of either species. He lived in Egypt twenty-one centuries ago having arrived there, as he tells us, “in the thirty-eighth year under Euergetes the King,” which is probably 132 B.C. That is of course too early to speak of a finished Bible, though he does know the law and the prophets and other books and knows them also in another tongue than Hebrew. It was another Hebrew book—what we call Ecclesiasticus—written by his own grandfather, that he himself translated into Greek. With other translations this was accepted into the Greek and Christian Bible and so has come down to us in the Septuagint, while its original in Hebrew was not ultimately so received in the Hebrew or Jewish Bible.

The schismatic “Church of the martyrs” which arose in Egypt after the last persecution possessed, at the time of Nicaea, twenty-eight bishops besides its founder Meletius. Nothing survives to tell us with what rites these men were made bishops. But the schism was so nationalist in character that it is likely to have followed Egyptian church tradition. It has been contended that this tradition, as regards episcopal succession, was peculiar, and followed a pattern different from that established for the propagation of a Catholic hierarchy by the Fourth Canon of Nicaea. The aim of this article is to show that this contention finds support in the Meletian story.

On May 8, 1847, The Literary World—the newly founded vehicle in New York City for the program of “nativist” literature—reviewed an exhibition at the National Academy. The magazine had just undergone an editorial revolution and the new management was endeavoring to tone down the strident nationalism of the first few issues; still, the exuberant patriotism of the reviewer could not be restrained, for he had just beheld two exciting landscapes of Staten Island painted by J. F. Cropsey.

Despite the well-known and well-attested tradition that the Law was given by angels, W. D. Davies has recently presented a case for interpreting δι΄ ἀγέλων in Josephus, Antiquities, 15:136 as a reference not to angels but to the prophets as ambassadors of God. Together with other arguments he adduces the fact that in the LXX the word ἄγελος is occasionally used to refer to prophets and priests, and for the latter he cites Malachi 2:7 (sic, not 2:1), where a priest is described as angelos Kyriou. Thus a Greek precedent for the usage of Josephus may be found as early as ca. 250 B. C., the approximate date of the LXX.

In the Note by Paul Winter, ῞οτι Recitativum in Luke I, 25, 61, II, 23, in the July Number on page 213, lines 1–2 the words “preposition ὅοτι” should read conjunction ῞οτι.