Certain biblical laws can be satisfactorily explained only on the basis of their concern to avoid a blurring of the two opposites, life and death. The famous prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother's milk (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Deut 14:21b) is to be explained in this way. In cases where the mother's milk was so used, an ancient observer must have noted that the milk that is naturally associated with the life of the animal was given a reverse role and was now applied to the dead animal. The law represents a reaction against the uncomfortable position of having to juxtapose the natural state of life before death with the unnatural state of “life” after death.

In the introductory essay to a collection of studies on Luke-Acts published in 1966, W. C. van Unnik says that the twovolume work has become “one of the great storm centers of New Testament scholarship.” Old questions are being raised afresh and old answers face fresh review. Among the old questions is that of the sources used by Luke in the writing of Acts. However, the only study of recent vintage referred to by van Unnik is that by Jacques Dupont, The Sources of the Acts (1964). There are no essays in the Keck-Martyn volume itself which deal specifically with the question. Without disputing the importance of other questions (text, style, and especially theology), the sparse attention given of late to source-criticism of the speeches of Acts is not entirely felicitous. One essay does treat the speeches (Eduard Schweizer, “Concerning the Speeches in Acts,” 208-16), but only those in the first seventeen chapters and only in terms of their structural identity. Schweizer's opening remark is interesting: “Ever since Martin Dibelius' essay about this subject, it has been more and more widely recognized that the speeches are basically compositions by the author of Acts who, to be sure, utilized different kinds of materials for particular passages” (208). The question of the sources of the speeches is a difficult one, and any suggested answers are, at best, tenuous. It is however the premise of this essay that further work in the area is warranted, possible, and of contributory value to the rest of Lucan scholarship, a conclusion drawn from an analysis of two of Paul's speeches in Acts: his address to the mob of Jerusalemites (22:1-21) and his Abschiedsrede or parting address to the Ephesian elders at Miletus (20:18-35).

Several months after the Coptic text had gone to press I had for the first time the opportunity to examine the papyrus under ultraviolet light. From this final collation resulted a few refinements in the text.

In spite of intensive research, it has proven difficult to set aside terms and concepts that have been current since the time of the Reformation. Thus, we continue to speak without further reflection of the “German Peasants' War” although this limitation has long since proven untenable. For a period of almost two centuries, the so-called tumultus rusticorum, best translated as social unrest or countryside agitation, was a phenomenon extending across all of Europe, from Italy to the Low Countries and from Southern France to Bohemia.

In June of 1533, Thomas Cranmer wrote to Nicholas Hawkins, Archdeacon of Ely, and reported to him that a certain John Frith had been ordered by Henry VIII to undergo an examination for suspicion of heresy before a tribunal which included Cranmer himself and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. The interrogators discovered that Frith “thought it not necessary to be believed as an article of our faith, that there is the very corporal presence of Christ within the host and sacrament of the altar.” Frith must have defended his own position in a winning manner, for both Cranmer and Gardiner were reluctant to see him persist in his heretical opinion. Cranmer, in this same letter, owns to having “sent for him three or four times to persuade him to leave… his imagination;” and we have it on Frith's testimony that, after his arrest, he visited Gardiner's residence in what was probably an effort on the Bishop of Winchester's part to win the young reformer back to Catholic belief.

“It is impossible for men to judge the inner motives of any superior acquaintance.”

William Foxwell Albright

In a still valid survey of one hundred years of biblical research, Herbert F. Hahn offers the following status quaestionis:

Interpretation of the Bible in the present day has reached a point of crisis. A seeming return to the age-old emphasis on the doctrinal content of Scripture and its essential unity throughout the sacred books—a return to traditionalism which nevertheless denies that it is a step backward—has dominated recent discussion of biblical interpretation.… The crisis grows out of a loss of confidence in the historical approach on the part of many who formerly favored it.