Bible Review

Philo, De Somniis 1.135; see also De Opificio Mundi 73.

Philo, De Plantatione

Plato, in fact, contended that the entire cosmos is a living creature, see Timaeus 30B; so too the Stoics. Aristotle’s thinking on the subject of stars is inconsistent from text to text. “On the question of whether the stars themselves are empsucha [ensouled] he seems to have found it difficult to make up his mind” (W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: VI. Aristotle: An Encounter [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981], p. 256, n. 1).

St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 6:3.

Review of discussion in Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 170–173 also Ernest L. Martin, The Birth of Christ Recalculated (Pasadena, CA: Foundation for Biblical Research, 1980), pp. 4–25.

Baruch Halpern, The First Historians (San Francisco: Harper, 1988).

Some in the scholarly World have also disparaged the seminar’s work, usually on the grounds that one cannot settle historical questions by voting. Of course, that is true. What voting can do is to measure the degree of scholarly consensus. Although that consensus will change over time, the voice provides a useful measurement of where the discipline presently stands.

Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). The fifth gospel is the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945. In addition to containing the texts of the five Gospels printed in four colors, the over-500-page volume will include an extended introduction and commentary.

See footnote summary on pp. 460–461. Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, 4th rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Hemed Press).