The historic Ingersoll lectureship on the Immortality of Man requires of the lecturer both some legitimate extension of its terms and some necessary limitation of his field. One is justified in supposing that the pious layman who planned the foundation was not thinking in highly technical terms, but like laymen of our day was thinking of a widely shared belief in the post mortem survival or revival of those who die. If he had wished to specify the indiscriminate persistence of the individual as a philosophical tenet of the nature of man, he could well have used the more familiar term — the immortality of the soul. On the other hand, if he had wished to be faithful to the wording of much of the Bible and to the Church's creeds, he would have spoken of the Resurrection of the Dead.

One of the most debated points in Paul's labored effort to explain why women should not pray or prophesy with their heads unveiled (1 Cor. 11:2–16) is the reason given in the phrase of verse 10 διὰ τοὺς ἀγγέλους. It is therefore obvious that attention ought to be called to a similar passage in the two column fragment from Cave 1 at Qumran. Whether 1 QSA is or is not part of the Manual of Discipline (1 QS) it is also a fragment of rules for the Community. It was published in Qumran Cave I. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, I, edited by Barthélemy (Oxford, 1955). I give below the relevant passage Col. 2 lines 3–9 from the translation by H. Neil Richardson.

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.

In the literature of Judaism and Christianity ‘evil eye’ is a term for niggardliness. This probably is a usage independent of the term ‘evil eye’ of magic. It belongs rather to that nomenclature of what I may call physiological psychology that is so conspicuous, especially in the Old Testament. Emotions are located in different parts of the anatomy — pity in the bowels, anger in the nostrils, and so forth. The eye is, among other things, the seat of niggardliness as in the phrase of the book of Tobit: “Let not thine eye be grudging when thou doest alms.”

The attitude of the Society of Friends to the Bible is a chapter of Quaker history that has yet to be written. Among biographical features it would include the names of several Quaker scholars — including Robert Barclay (1648–1690), the apologist, Anthony Purver (1702–1777), who singlehanded made a complete translation of the Bible, S. P. Tregelles (1813–1875), the textual critic, though he joined later other denominations, Thomas Chase (1827—1892), President of Haverford College and a member of the American Bible Revision Committee, and, not the least, the versatile and venerable Rendel Harris (1852–1941).

Fifteen years ago when some two million Americans of Norwegian ancestry were celebrating the centennial of the first migration from Norway to America I published in these pages an account of the Quaker antecedents of the famous voyage of the sloop Restaurationen. From English, Norwegian and American sources it was possible to recount the story of a group of Norwegian prisoners of war in prison ships on the Thames who were befriended and converted by English Quakers and returned home in 1814 to Stavanger and elsewhere to establish Quaker meetings. One of these men, Lars Larsen, with men of like independence, such as Cleng Peersen who preceded him and Knud Andersen Slogvig who followed, organized an escape from the clerical oppressions in Norway, purchased a small ship, and landing in New York in October 1825, proceeded inland to found in western New York the first of many Norwegian settlements in the United States. The following scattered data are now collected to indicate some earlier contacts between the English Quakers and Norway.

The story of Quakerism in Norway and the story of Norwegian immigration to America have been told more than once, each by its separate historians, but they need to be dovetailed together. The following paper is an effort to make some combination between them, appropriate to the current centennial year of 1925.

A group of German biblical scholars have presented to Professor Hermann Gunkel of Halle, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (May 23, 1922), a volume of studies on the religion and literature of the Old and New Testament.

The first part comprises eleven papers and relates to the Old Testament. In the first two articles H. Gressmann and P. Eissfeldt discuss some of the patriarchal stories of Genesis from two different points of view, that of “Stoffkritik” and of “Quellkritik” respectively.

A new and not unfruitful stage in the literary criticism of the gospels seems to be marked by the recent publication in Germany of three important books. For nearly a century the Synoptic problem has absorbed the attention of scholars. The fascinating riddle of likeness and difference in our first three gospels challenged them to find a solution. It became clear that this was a question of written sources, and for many minds the “two-document hypothesis,” that Mark and some other common written Greek material (Q) are embodied independently in Matthew and in Luke, has come to provide a working basis of investigation, although the categorical denial of this view by the Papal Biblical Commission makes it impossible for Roman Catholic scholars to accept it in its current form. There remain, however, the question of other Greek sources, as, for example, the sources for Mark's and for Luke's special material, and the question of the possibility of Semitic originals, on which no conclusion has been attained and on which perhaps more light may soon be expected from further studies.