In the first of his letters ex Ponto (vv. 51–58) Ovid mentions the confession of sins practised in the religion of Isis by the faithful (in the presence of a priest?). One man, seated before the altar of the goddess (Isiacos focos, v. 52), confessed that he had offended her divinity (numen violasse fatentem, v. 51); a second, deprived of his sight in punishment for some similar crime, went along the public road crying out that he had merited the castigation (se meruisse, v. 54). Ovid affirms that he had seen all this with his own eyes (vidi ego, v. 51). It may be that his vidi ego is purely rhetoric. Confession of sins, however, was certainly practised in Egypt ab antiquo, as is proved by a group of Theban inscriptions of the epoch of the XlXth Dynasty (about 1300 B.C.) dedicated to various divinities, amongst whom is a local goddess assimilated to Isis-Hathor. Moreover, ophthalmia was very common in Egypt.

The term ‘renascence’ in the title of this paper is perhaps a misnomer. Neither the blame for its misapplication, however, nor the credit for a just use of it, should be laid at my door. For it has been employed frequently of late with reference to various developments in several Muslim countries. And the chief aim of the following brief examination of the origins and trends of thought within the world of Islam is simply to discover what meaning, if any, it may have in this connection.

The scientific study of religion which has gone on for the past fifty years has reaped a rich and varied harvest; but a thoughtful observer might hold with good reason that its most important result is this, that all investigators, whether themselves religious or not, have come to recognize candidly the tremendous motive power of religious emotion and the actual validity of religious experience. Yet singularly enough comparatively little attention has been paid to ancient religious feeling for its own sake. Classical scholars have made fruitful researches into the objective phenomena of ancient religion, particularly Greek and Roman cults; they have considered the relation of religion to philosophy and morals; and after many aberrations they have even found firmer paths through the morass of mythology. But we still await an adequate study of the subjective side of ancient religion.

Ammon was made known to old Greece by the Greeks of Cyrene, Kimon visited the oracle at Siwa, Pindar wrote a hymn to Ammon, and the Athenians made his cult public at some undetermined date earlier than 371/0 B.C. Like Sarapis, Ammon seems never to have been extremely popular; Isis out-did them both. Nevertheless Ammon arrived long before, the others: the preserved records happen to show that he was receiving sacrifices from the Athenian generals themselves in a year (333/2) when the cult of Isis, which we learn about then for the first time, was still a cult of immigrants. Why Ammon, alone of all Egyptian gods, should have succeeded thus early is no mystery: he had an oracle, and he had Greek intermediaries.

In the campaign of 1931–32 at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates there was found among the military archives in the temple of Artemis Azzanathcona a papyrus document containing a list of the festivals which were officially celebrated by the Roman garrison in the city. This document, of unique interest and importance, placed by internal evidence in the reign of Severus Alexander between the years A.D. 223 and 225, contains among its entries the two lines quoted above. In them is prescribed for celebration on two different dates a hitherto unknown festival which is of some little importance both for the religious life of the Roman army and for the history of Roman festivals during the Empire. An attempt will be made in this paper to interpret its nature and to touch briefly on both these aspects of its significance.

The legend of Barlaam and Ioasaph, one of the most popular and influential of medieval romances, entered the western world by way of a Greek version, which fathered, directly or indirectly, translations into almost every European language, and inspired an entire cycle of literary influences. This Greek version was itself descended from a long line of Asiatic redactions, harking back through Georgian and Arabic to Pehlevi and to the Sanskrit prototype (now lost). Thus the Greek version occupies, so to speak, a focal position. It is at once the source of the European, and the culmination of the Asiatic, traditions. Its hero, Prince Ioasaph, can look backward to his earliest incarnation as the Buddha of the Lalita Vistara, and forward to his latest — as a saint of Rome and Byzantium; while many of the tales told him by the monk Barlaam to convert him to Christianity change little on their long journey from some such work as the Pantchatantra, via the Greek Barlaam, to the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, or the Gesta Romanorum.

Some manuscripts of the Harclean Gospels contain a subscription which gives certain important information concerning the origin of the Philoxenian and Harclean versions of the New Testament. According to the subscription the Syriac translation of the Four Gospels was made from the Greek text in the city of Mabûg in the year 507–508 after Christ. This was in the time of Mar Philoxenus the Confessor, who was bishop of Mabûg from 485 to 519 A.D. Later the translation was carefully compared with two (or three) approved and accurate Greek codices and revised accordingly. This was done in 615–616 A.D. by Thomas of Harqel (or Heracleia) in a convent situated at the Enaton near Alexandria. The subscription was written by Thomas himself.

When Alexander VI promulgated the bull Inter caetera on May 4, 1493 granting Spain a large part of the new world, there seems to have been no doubt that the natives who dwelt in the ‘very remote islands and mainlands’ would be willing and able to accept the teachings of the Catholic church. For Alexander had been informed that in those far off lands were

very many peoples living in peace and, as reported, going unclothed, and not eating flesh. Moreover, … these very peoples … believe in one God the Creator in heaven, and seem sufficiently disposed to embrace the Catholic faith and be trained in good morals. And it is hoped that, were they instructed, the name of the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, would easily be introduced into the said countries and islands.

These optimistic predictions were not fulfilled and, as the Spanish conquest of the Americas proceeded to reveal the existence of millions of natives, the action of the papacy in the conversion and protection of these masses of Indians became an important matter, for as that studious seventeenth century jurist, Antonio de Leon Pinelo, declared:

Inasmuch as the Indies were conceded to the kings of Castile principally in order to favor and convert the Indians, no harm must come of this concession.

Juvenal in his First Satire (vv. 115, 116) remarks on the curious fact that Pecunia, though so devoutly worshipped, yet has no temple of her own

ut colitur Pax atque Fides, Victoria, Virtus, quaeque salutato crepitat Concordia nido.

She is not actually like them an object of cult. The modern reader, while relishing the bitterness of the gibe, is left vaguely wondering how the Romans could seriously worship such ‘personifications’ as Pax or Fides, and his wonder will only increase, if he follows up the subject and traces the cult of the ‘Virtues’ in literature, in inscriptions and, above all, in the imperial coinage. When we talk of ‘personifications,’ we feel ourselves at once in the realm of poetic or artistic imagery and fancy; the ancient Roman, when he spoke of similar figures, felt himself in the realm of religious fact.

In the Journal of Theological Studies for October 1935 I discussed certain of the more interesting readings of the Chester Beatty Papyrus in John on general grounds, endeavouring to discover how far the evidence of the papyrus might reasonably be allowed to modify the conclusions of particular editors in particular passages. It became obvious in that study that the text of the papyrus in John does not belong specifically to any of the recognised groupings, and that in many cases it would appear not to have retained the reading which is intrinsically probable, or which is the best attested.

The expression ‘plain meaning’ is here used in the sense of Hebrew peshat, since this paper is not primarily a study in the higher criticism of Deutero-Isaiah. But I may perhaps be allowed to make three brief preliminary statements of belief concerning the relation of the passage under discussion to the rest of the book: First: that the conception of the Servant found in 42.1–4 is closer to that found in the whole of Deutero-Isaiah than it is to that in the last of the so-called Servant-poems, 52.13–53.12. Second: that the first Servant-poem describes the people of Israel, as do chs. 40–55 generally, and not an individual. Third: that the suffering of the Servant has been unduly emphasized from the early Christian period onward, largely because the sublime portrayal of humility and suffering in ch. 53, which is strikingly different from most of the book, has obscured the predominantly consolatory and triumphant aspects of the Servant as God's instrument. With this introduction I should like to comment on the Masoretic text.

That Bede knew and used several Latin versions of Acts is abundantly clear from his own statements. Moreover, his special interest in this book of the New Testament is suggested by the fact that he composed two separate commentaries on it and may have proceeded, in part at least, from the comparative neglect of Acts by earlier commentators. Neither Bede's Commentary on Acts nor his Retractation can be dated precisely, but this much can be regarded as certain, that the former is an early work, while the latter was composed towards the end of his life. Thus twenty years or more may have elapsed before Bede, following the example of the eximius doctor Augustinus, revised errors that he had committed in the Commentary, defended himself against the attack of critics, and added much new material that was the fruit of his ripest scholarship.

In the course of a valuable discussion of the Di Indigetes, Koch seeks to prove that the epithet means Stammväter, using as his material certain passages of Greek authors which seem to equate indiges with γενάρχης. Of these the chief is the famous fragment of Diodorus Siculus preserved in a Vatican MS. and first published by Mai, Scriptorum Veterum Noua Collectio, ii, p. 116.