Many observant visitors to ancient Ostia must have noticed the remains of a small circular building in the middle of the Forum on the south side of the Decumanus Maximus, the continuation of the Via Ostiensis (Figs. 1-3). It came to light in the excavations of the Forum about forty years ago and was believed by the excavator Guido Calza to be a nymphaeum. Also in his posthumous detailed description of the oldest part of the city, the Castrum, the structure still appears as an ‘imperial nymphaeum.’ It was erected over the northeast corner of a very early rectangular building (Fig. 1 A) dated by Calza at the end of the fourth century B. C. Although the so-called nymphaeum obliterated the part of this building's eastern wall, which it straddles, this structure had been levelled before, when the authorities of Ostia decided to create at the crossing of the Decumanus Maximus and Cardo Maximus, in the center of the ancient Castrum, a monumental square.

The modern discussion of Patriarchal religion may be said to begin with the brilliant essay of Albrecht Alt, Der Gott der Väter, published in 1929. Alt proposed to use new means to penetrate into the pre-history of Israel's traditions of the old time. He repudiated the methods of such earlier scholars as Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen, who attempted to reconstruct the pre-Yahwistic stage of the tribal forebears of Israel by sifting Israel's early but fully Yahwistic sources for primitive features, primitive in terms of an apriori typology of religious ideas derived largely from nineteenth century idealism. Such procedures, Alt recognized, yielded merely the superstitious dregs of Israelite religion at any of its stages. As early as 1929, it was obvious to him that the archaeological data bearing on the second millennium gave a very different picture from that painted by the older historians. At least it was clear that the religion of Israel's neighbors was on a very much more sophisticated level than that being predicated for the pre-Mosaic tribes.

The following remarks are intended to be merely general indications of overall problems which nonetheless, I believe, are necessary before one investigates specific words or concepts which may be borrowed by one culture from another.

The search for the presumed “sources” of Muhammad's religious ideas, as these are expressed in the Qur'an, has inspired a considerablerange of studies, varying in tone from tentative to polemical. Most writers on the topic seek to demonstrate either a predominantly Jewish or a predominantly Christian “influence.” It is relatively easy, of course, to compile a catena of passages from the Qur'an which can be paralleled by Scriptural texts or by haggadic or apocryphal materials or compared with the practices of Jewish or Christian communities. The argument tends to become inconclusive on the whole; Jewish scholars who argue for a Jewish source or sources are apt to forgetthat the Old Testament was as much a part of Christian as of Jewish Scripture and that even haggadic supplements had long since been taken up into Christian writings; Christian scholars who argue for a Christian source or sources are somewhat embarrassed by Muhammad's decisive rejection of Christological doctrine;and each side can produce valid arguments against the other.

Probably no two traditions of philosophy differ more widely than those of classical Greece and India. It is only when we force our way through the logical surface to the seemingly illogical practices andgoals of an earlier age that we can see similarities between the two cultures. These similarities, however, are sometimes so striking that the Indian evidence may help our understanding of Greece and the Greek our understanding of India. One gains such a reciprocal understanding, I think, from examining what I shall call the cults, meaning by this the sum of practices and goals as opposed to the philosophy, of the Greek Cynics and the Indian Pāśupatas.

Hebrews 13.9–14 is among the most difficult passages of the entire New Testament. Here, in the context of a warning against “diversified and foreign doctrines” (διδαξαì πoικíλαι καì ξεναι), a Christological argument occurs (13.11-12). It is obviously the intention of the writer to ground his objection to the “foreign doctrines” on this Christological basis. But the character of the doctrines opposed in these verses has remained an enigma to commentators inasmuch as the function of the Christological argument in this polemical setting has not been recognized clearly. However, a closer examination of the Old Testament passage which underlies the Christological argument in Hebrews 13.11 may provide a key for a fresh solution of the complex problems of this passage.

“In manu enim illius et nos et sermones nostri, et omnis sapientia et operum scientia, et disciplina.” Liber Sapientiae vii:16.

When the English nominalist and Dominican friar Robert Holcot († 1349) reaches the sixteenth verse of the seventh chapter in his Wisdom commentary, he seizes the opportunity to underscore his main theme which he had so passionately presented on the preceding pages as well as in his Sentences commentary: Wisdom is a gift of God: man's claim therefore that he can have a natural knowledge of God is false.

“I will not return evil to anybody, with good will I pursue man, for with God rests the judgment of every living being and he is the one to repay man for his deeds. … And the trial of a man of perdition I will not handle until the Day of Vengeance. But my anger I will not turn away from the men of deceit, and I will not be content until He has established judgment.” 1 QS x, 17-20.

An expedition under the writer's archaeological direction and sponsored by Drew University, McCormick Theological Seminary and the American Schools of Oriental Research completed its fourth season of excavation at Tell Balâtah, the ancient Shechem, in 1962. The site lies at the eastern opening between Mts. Ebal and Gerizim, forty-one miles north of Jerusalem. The earlier Sellin expedition had reported two strata of Hellenistic settlement at the site, though the date and extent of the occupation were not clarified. The Drew-McCormick Expedition has been particularly concerned with the Hellenistic occupation for two reasons: (1) The opportunity to clarify an obscure age in the cultural history of Palestine and especially to develop a ceramic typology, with chronologically fixed points, so that a more precise means of dating may be available for the archaeology of the period; (2) the problem of the historical meaning of the Hellenistic ruins at Shechem.