The notion of a meaningful life in secular modernism is often caught between two worlds: a deep human yearning for cosmic meaning, on the one hand, and a seemingly random, impersonal, contingent universe on the other hand. This is often referred to as absurdity. One response to absurdity is classical theism, and another is scientific reductionism. A third response, and the subject of this article, is religious non-theism. This article: (a) explicates the primary tensions of absurdity, in relation to both human expectations and discussions of beauty in contemporary physics and cosmology; (b) analyzes the arguments and motivations of religious non-theists and the attitude of awe toward the cosmos as a rapprochement between—or at least alternative to—classical theism and scientific reductionism, as a sort of post-secular response to absurdity; and (c) begins a critique of the religious non-theist perspective, explicating four worries, expressed as the Commitment Problem, the Standards Problem, the Moral Problem, and the Awe Problem.

One of the most frequently occurring terms in Paul Tillich's theology is meaning (in his English writings) or Sinn (in his German writings). But Tillich used both in multiple senses, without acknowledging or even appearing to be aware that he was doing so. He wrote only in German till he immigrated to the United States at the age of forty-seven. He used the German Sinn abundantly in his native tongue, and with a variety of meanings: a universal medium for understanding the world; “sense,” as in “making sense” or what is missing in “senseless” (sinnlos) statements; “the unconditional” (“das Unbedingte”); a “thing pointed at” (in Tillich's theory of symbols and signs); a grand metaphysical quality of some undefined sort; the object-correlate of an act of cognition; and “God.” He drew on the German Sinn when he began to write in English but, because of the grammatical status of meaning as a verbal noun, the English term allowed Tillich to ascribe agency to things that in his view bear meaning, for example the thing that grasps us when we are in the state of faith. In addition, the English word meaning for Tillich meant “comprehensibility,” “value,” “direction,” from existential philosophy (what is missing when life is meaningless); “ultimate concern” (the “meaning which gives meaning to all meanings”); in the plural, something undefined that the human person “lives in”; and “God.” The change from German to English accompanied a change in his conception of faith, raising the possibility that the new language moved Tillich's theology in a new direction.

While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three concepts of liberty—negative, positive, and republican—this article offers an original reading to Babylonian Talmud Giṭ 12a–13a. The talmudic passage's pivotal question—whether liberty is necessarily beneficial to a slave—enables us to reconstruct its fundamental, albeit implicit, understandings of both slavery and liberty. The talmudic approach to slavery and liberty emerges as concrete, and hence yields a thick and multi-faceted notion of liberty. Considering that a person might prefer the benefits of slavery reveals a paradox in Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty. Therefore, as this article concludes, his conceptual distinction between two concepts of liberty is unsustainable and needs to be replaced by a concrete and thick notion of liberty.

Comparative theology generally begins from a study of texts, scriptural texts that have been canonized, and commentaries on these texts—as well as philosophical, theological and mystical treatises. Though this textual focus gives us access to some of the most subtle and nuanced reasonings developed in various traditions, I am concerned that this textual focus may limit our understanding of religion, and I am convinced that broadening the scope of comparative theology beyond texts will also contribute to the theological creativity of this approach. I hypothesize that, depending on the sort of source from which we theologize, different questions will come to mind relating to different theological problems. Indeed, turning to material and ritual practices, in addition to textual sources, will reveal aspects of the divine that remain invisible when one stays within the limits of textual study. I do not, in any way, want to turn this into an either/or story in which reading texts is placed over against engaging ritual and material practices. What I envision is a complementarity between textual and ritual comparison, not a privileging of one over the other.

While numerous scholars have compared the Priestly regulations in the Pentateuch to ancient Near Eastern “ritual texts,” the Priestly legal material more generally corresponds in form and style to ancient Near Eastern casuistic law collections than to descriptive or prescriptive “ritual texts.” At the same time, ancient Near Eastern law collections do not contain any ritual or religious ordinances, relating instead primarily to civil and financial affairs or social law and order. This paper examines the formal, substantive, and generic affinities between the Priestly laws and the casuistic Greek “Sacred Laws” inscribed on stone and other materials throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin from the sixth century BCE onwards. Analysis of related Northwest-Semitic and Punic texts, as well as potential precedents from the Hittite world, further contributes to our understanding of the Sitz im Leben of the casuistic Priestly law.

Dubitatio is a complex figure of speech in which a speaker explicitly weighs her or his options in the course of making a difficult decision. Dubitatio was typically used to display a protagonist's character as revealed in her or his decision-making. In Philippians 1:22–26, Paul uses dubitatio to draw the readers into his deliberations whether to commit suicide in prison. In so doing, he not only reveals to them his own character but their character as well, in as much as it is their inordinate grief over his imprisonment that will ultimately determine Paul's decision. Dubitatio occurs already in Homer, but it was made famous in Greek tragedy, where it largely defined the genre. The tragic dubitatio was parodied in subsequent comedy and, by the Roman period, was beginning to appear in other genres, including political oratory, various poetic genres, history, and epistle. Paul's apt use of dubitatio in Phil 1:22–26 shows an obvious familiarity with the figure. By attending to Paul's use of dubitatio in Phil 1:22–26, we can arrive at a fresh and convincing interpretation of this challenging crux interpretum.

Elaborate depictions of the court system in Second Temple and rabbinic literature signify its centrality for the Jewish legal tradition. Rather than offering positivistic descriptions, these representations are better thought of as templates of how to organize justice. While historically less informative, they are vivid expressions of the early Jewish legal imagination and its fascinating fixation on the architecture of justice.

A measure of the ahistoric quality of early accounts of judicial administration is their considerable exegetical strata. This article surveys how four seminal Second Temple and rabbinic works constructed accounts of the judiciary on the foundation of Scripture. The variances among them unfold from decisive hermeneutical choices, beginning with the threshold question of which among several, internally inconsistent, biblical sources to select as a base text. What animates these various choices, in turn, are competing conceptions of the origin and nature of legal authority within a religious tradition that enshrines the role of law.

According to Numbers 35:9–34, someone who had killed an innocent person intentionally was to be killed by an avenger of blood. However, someone who had killed an innocent person inadvertently was allowed to take up residence in a city of refuge where he (the legislation appears to be focused on males) would be shielded from being killed by this avenger. After the death of the high priest, the inadvertent killer could leave the city and return home safely.

This paper analyzes the six most common and substantial explanations for why an inadvertent killer could leave a city of refuge and return home after the death of the high priest, and shows why they cannot be correct. Another explanation is then offered, the basic elements of which are as follows.

An inadvertent killer was confined to a city of refuge in order to equalize the circumstances of the killer and his family/kin group with the circumstances of the victim and his family/kin group: specifically, the confinement of the killer in a city of refuge removed his presence and labor from his family/kin group just as the death of the victim had removed his presence and labor from his family/kin group. The legists behind Numbers 35:9–34, however, deemed it right and fair to limit the duration of that equalization to what the victim and his family/kin group had actually lost: the unfulfilled balance of the victim's natural lifespan. Since there was no way to know when the victim's natural lifespan would actually have come to an end, the legists availed themselves of the high priest's representational function, and used his death to represent when the natural death of the victim would have taken place. An inadvertent killer was, therefore, released from confinement after the high priest died, and his circumstances were normalized.

Much of the written evidence for Greco-Roman associations provides information about meeting frequency, group activities, venues for gathering, and membership requirements. At the same time, many inscriptions and papyri also contain short narratives that directly contribute to the common identity of the association. These narrative elements often take the form of a vision, a dream, or an oracle that a patron receives that encourages him or her to found the association or direct its practices in some way. I suggest in this article that many of Paul's audiences would have received his story about encountering the risen Christ as rather commonplace given the frequency of these similar claims among voluntary associations. In other words, the article explores how Paul's (mainly non-Judean) audiences would have slotted his claims into their cultural repertoire of ideas, especially if they considered his Christ group to be just like the many other associations with which they were already familiar. Association inscriptions offer an important collection of examples that can be analyzed alongside Paul's claim to have seen the risen Christ.

The study proposes an analysis of the concepts of ousia and hypostasis in the theology of the Council of Antioch which condemned Paul of Samosata in 268 CE. The authentic reports preserved from the assembly unveil the fact that the synodals who condemned Paul of Samosata employed the two terms interchangeably to denote the individual entity or person rather than the common essence or nature of the Father and Son. Additionally, they defended Christ's divinity before time and simultaneously assumed a certain subordinationism. The study additionally explores the Sitz im Leben of this theology, an accepted language embraced in the Eastern part of the Roman world in the third century. The article further traces the elements of this Antiochene theology in the fourth century in what was traditionally viewed as the “Arian” councils held in Antioch in 341 and 345 as well as in such authors as Eusebius of Caesarea and the Homoiousians. While Antioch 341 and 345 distanced themselves from Arianism, it is more coherent to interpret them, together with Eusebius and the Homoiousians, through this new hermeneutical lens, namely Antioch 268, rather than the traditional polarization between Nicaea and Arianism.

The earliest prologue to the Life of Pachomius constructs the apostle Paul as an exemplary father and argues that Pachomius conforms to such a Pauline model. Prologues composed later make no such comparison but cite Antony as the model ascetic before turning to the narration of Pachomius’s life. This paper follows the Pauline thread of the earliest prologue by examining the use of the figure Paul and Pauline literature in the surviving Vitae. I argue that certain narratives cast Pachomius’s legacy after a Pauline prototype. Paul’s ascent to paradise in 2 Corinthians 12 and Paul’s survey of torments in the Apocalypse of Paul are rewritten in some of the Coptic and Arabic Vitae as episodes in Pachomius’s life. This use of Paul as a prototype for ascetic hagiography creates a vision of ascetic holiness incompatible with that constructed in the Life of Antony. Other narratives in the Pachomian Vitae, however, construct Pachomius after an Antonian prototype and reflect ascetic ideals promoted in the Life of Antony. The paper closes with reflections on possible historical circumstances for the shift from a Pauline model of asceticism to an Antonian one in the composition of Pachomian Vitae.

In Book Two of De Specialibus Legibus (Special Laws), Philo of Alexandria presents his readers with a “festival manual”: a list of ten holidays, their origins, and the practices associated with each one. Philo names the first festival in his list ἡμέρα πσα, “every day,” about which he muses: “If all the forces of the virtues remained unvanquished throughout, then the time from birth to death would be one continuous feast.” In what historical, intellectual, and literary context might we best understand Philo's “every day festival”? And how can we understand Philo's view of quotidian time in the context of his conception of time and temporality more generally? In this paper, I argue that Philo's presentation of this festival of the every day, and, more generally, his perspective on daily time, is an engagement not only with biblical texts but also with contemporaneous Stoic perspectives about time, especially those articulated by the philosopher Seneca the Younger. I thus read Philo's De Specialibus Legibus in conversation with Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life), analyzing their similar perspectives on daily time and suggesting several ways of understanding the connections between the two texts. I conclude by explaining how appreciating the similarities between Philo and Seneca's ideas about quotidian time also allows us better to understand Philo's exposition of the other festivals, especially his presentation of the Sabbath.

Lactantius’s Divine Institutes is a conversation with many partners. His affinity for Stoic thought in general, and Seneca in particular, is especially pronounced. Throughout the Institutes we find a delicate back-and-forth between Lactantius’s claim of a novel philosophy centered on the Christian Gospel and his attraction to—and dependence on—the pagan philosophy he hoped to supplant. This interplay is distinctly relevant to Lactantius’s portrayal of the figure of Jesus in Institutes IV. In this paper, I argue that Lactantius shapes his story of the nature and work of Jesus in part to give an answer to a primary Stoic question: where is the sapiens? Indeed, the figure of the sapiens, the “Stoic sage,” had presented something of a problem for the Stoa: Stoic cosmology demanded he exist while Stoic history had failed to find him. By Seneca’s time, a resigned acceptance of the absence of such figures of incarnate wisdom was commonplace; the figure of the sapiens had begun to fade away into the realm of theory, separated from imperfect human practice. In redressing this concern, Lactantius portrays his Christ: the true sage and exemplum, wisdom and virtue incarnate. In short, to Seneca’s resignation, Lactantius offers a rebuke and a corrective by a clever re-shaping of both Christian and Stoic expectation.

Coleridge directed his Aids to Reflection (1825, 1831) to young men preparing for Christian vocations, missionaries in particular, and planned, but did not write, a seventh supplementary essay, which may be reconstructed from Coleridge's œuvres, to correct what he thought was inadequate preparation. Missionaries are educators whose preparation must include scientific biblical criticism: Christianity evolves with culture generally. Anthropography is required in order to foster inter-cultural exchange, including insight into a tradition's metaphors. Missionaries engage in proselytism, insists Coleridge, in the strictly limited sense of conversion through the exemplary conduct of the missionary as a fully realized human being.

The Hollywood Jesus epics re-visualize the gospel story against the anxious backdrops of secularization, cultural pluralism, and moral skepticism. While these epics are often derided for their lack of theological insight, cultural awareness, or aesthetic taste, this article argues for a re-appreciation of the genre's internal pluralism and hermeneutical significance. Focusing on Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927) and Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), it reflects on the epic as a tradition-forming moment in the Jesus story's reception. Both DeMille and Ray offer competing interpretations of Jesus, thus illustrating how the genre functions as a site of christological and hermeneutical reflection. Against this backdrop, I argue for a reinterpretation of the genre and, further, proffer a hermeneutical exploration of cinema more broadly as a central moment in the dialogue between Christianity and popular culture.

Scholarship on Phil 2:6–11 has long wrestled with the question of “interpretive staging.” While acknowledging that Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature as well as Roman apotheosis narratives provide important matrices for the hymn, the following study pinpoints a third backdrop against which Paul's dramatic christology would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. Echoes of Dionysus's opening monologue from Euripides's Bacchae in the carmen Christi suggest that Roman hearers of Paul's letter likely understood Christ's kenotic metamorphosis as a species of Dionysian revelation. This interpretive recognition accomplishes a new integration of the hymn's Jewish and imperial-cultic transcripts. Jesus's Bacchic portraiture supports a theology of Christ's pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar. These Dionysian echoes also elevate the status of slaves and women, and suggest that “the tragic” remains modally present within the otherwise comic fabula of the Christ myth.

In Jewish philosophy, be it medieval or modern, a comprehensive Jewish theological discourse about Christianity is conspicuously absent. There are, however, two prominent exceptions to this rule in modern Jewish philosophy: The Italian Sephardic Orthodox Rabbi Eliah Benamozegh (1823–1900) and the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). In both men's thought, Christianity plays a pivotal (and largely positive) role, so much so that their Jewish philosophies would not be the same without Christianity, which has no precedent in Jewish thought. Though Rosenzweig was not aware of his Sephardic predecessor, there are some striking parallels in the two thinker's Jewish theologies of Christianity that have far-reaching interreligious implications. These parallels concern as well the basic paradigm for a positive evaluation of Christianity—the paradigm of the fire (particularist Judaism) and its rays (universal Christianity)—as well as the central flaw both of them attribute to Christianity: a built-in disequilibrium that threatens the success of its legitimate mission. These parallels are all the more striking as two thinkers arrived at their conclusions independently and by different paths: the one (Benamozegh) took recourse to Kabbalah, the other (Rosenzweig) to proto-existentialist philosophy. A comparative study of these two protagonists’ Jewish theologies of Christianity seems thus imperative.

An “interreligious epilogue” at the end of the article exposes the contemporary need for a reassessment of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity from a Jewish perspective—especially in light of the deep theological revision that characterizes the approach of the Catholic Church towards Jews and Judaism following “Nostra Aetate”—but at the same time delineates the theological limits of the current Christian-Jewish interreligious endeavor. In this light, the pioneering theology of Christianity in the works of Rosenzweig and Benamozegh might yield some relevant insights.

In this essay, the Rosh Hashanah Shofar service poems by the Jewish poet Yose ben Yose (fourth or fifth century CE, Land of Israel) are read through the lens of the Late Antique practice of acclamation. Yose's surviving body of works is limited, but he was influential within the Jewish tradition, and his poems have long been noted for their use of formal features such as fixed-word repetitions and refrains—features which align not only with poetic norms from the biblical period to Late Antiquity but also with the practice of acclamation. Jews attended (and performed in) the theater and games; they were familiar with rhetorical and oratorical training and related literary norms; and they were integrated socially, commercially, and politically into diverse and varied communities. The affinity of Jewish liturgical poetry from antiquity for other forms of poetic composition reflects Jews’ general embeddedness in Late Ancient culture. Reading Yose's poetry as shaped by the conventions of acclamation highlights how Yose and his congregants were not only distinctly Jewish but also thoroughly Roman.

Was there a “Q community”? There are many who think that any quest for a “Q community” is a fool's errand. In this paper, I revisit this vexing question by focusing on several distinctive textual coordinates with which we can map Q's author within the social, textual, and theological landscape(s) of Second Temple Judaism. Since the author of Q was capable of crafting innovative scriptural allusions and adapting inherited Jesus traditions, I suggest that Q is not an isolated “Galilean” phenomenon but a textual production that combines Galilean Jesus traditions in conversation with contemporary Jewish apocalyptic traditions and can be located alongside the wider “Essenic” networks that pre-dated and co-existed with the Palestinian Jewish Jesus movement.

This article explores Maimonides’s position with regard to mercy in various aspects—ethics, law, and theology—and examines its unity. The first section discusses Maimonides’s view on the question of mercy in the moral plane: is mercy a virtue? It begins with a short discussion of the Aristotelian stance and then analyzes Maimonides’s view. It shows that Maimonides rejected the philosophical critique of mercy and deemed it a virtue. The second section discusses Maimonides’s view in the judicial plane: may a judge show mercy in judgment and be lenient when ruling? It also explores how Maimonides justifies the negation of mercy in the legal plane in contrast with his view of mercy as a virtue. The third section explores Maimonides’s view of mercy in the theological context. In his discussion of the divine attributes Maimonides interprets the attributes of “merciful and gracious,” and offered a metaphorical interpretation. Since humans are mandated to imitate God, this interpretation has consequences in the normative sphere. The theological discussion therefore raises the question of the moral and legal standing of mercy from a new perspective. It also raises the question of the relation between Maimonides’s position in the Guide of the Perplexed and that in his halakhic compositions. Are these two apparently different positions compatible?