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Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. , No. , July . Printed in the United Kingdom # Cambridge University Press Reviews Theologische RealenzyklopaX die, XXVII: Politik}Politologie – Publizistik}Presse. Edited by Gerhard Mu$ ller. Pp. iv­­pull-out map. Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter, .DM. The longest article here is on Preaching (Predigt), a most difficult theme for church historians amid the individualities and intentions and eccentricities of thousands of minds. It does not wholly avoid the fault of becoming a catalogue of names, and does not quite face the amount of unacknowledged borrowing. But it is a valuable article, best of all by its originality on preaching in the Dark Ages; the Lutheran ideals are well described; the most celebrated of all, the French from Fe! nelon to Massillon, are so well treated in brief that the reader wants much more; it is hard to think that Tillotson is to be put above Andrewes and Donne and Jeremy Taylor. The next long article is on Predestination which is powerful in its various sections and bothers the reader’s soul (at the end a treatment of Karl Barth’s restatement). The third long article is on Priest and Priesthood but the historical part, so far as it touches Christianity, is good but unreasonably short. Among the Fathers we have Prudentius and Priscillian and Prosper, in the Middle Ages the Praemonstratensians (statistics needed) and a very interesting article on Pseudonymous works, which rejects Abelard’s autobiography and the letters with Heloise. In the Reformation we have Pomerania and Prussia – this last imagines that Prussia disappeared for ever in , but it was too strong a cultural and religious tradition over four centuries to vanish at the beck of occupying armies. James Cameron gives us Presbyterianism. On liturgical practice there is Procession. Protestantism is here, and difficult, but repays study. Prostitution is disappointing to the historian because it mostly avoids the history of the moral problem inside the Churches. There is a beautiful article, with illustrations, on devotion to the Passion. This ought not to be missed and it might be because (as PassionsfroX mmigkeit) it is out of alphabetical order at the end of the volume. S C,O C C Jahrbuch fuX r Antike und Christentum, – . Edited by Ernst Dassman, Klaus Thraede and Josef Engemann. Pp. incl. fig.­ colour pull-out plan, colour plates and black-and-white plates. Mu$ nster Westfalen: Aschendorff, .DM. X; The issue of the Jahrbuch maintains the same high standard of early Christian historical and archaeological research set by its predecessors. Particularly welcome is Caroline Bammel’s final article, which is devoted to the importance attached in the ancient world to astrology as well as the analogy of the endless progress of the seasons, as aids towards penetrating the mystery of human death. While there was no disagreement as to the finality of death contrasting with the annual renewal of nature, Christian apologists, such as Minucius Felix, pointed to the progress of the individual beyond death towards final Judgement, at which Christians would enjoy bliss while damnation awaited their pagan opponents. This is a fitting reminder of the loss sustained by early Christian scholarship with the premature death of a fine scholar. The core of the publication, however, lies in Gerhard Wirth’s long study of the effects of Constantine’s conversion and enthusiastic support of the Church on the future history of the empire. The HomooU usios formula adopted at Nicaea was unacceptable in the east, except to Athanasius, because of its Sabellian associations. Its adoption contributed to the gradual but irreversible separation of eastern from western Christendom. Constantius strove throughout the twenty-four years of his reign to find a compromise between the rival interpretations of the faith, an attempt wrecked by Julian’s openly declared apostacy in , at the moment when his efforts were apparently on the brink of success. Dealing with a later period, Ulrike Koenen relates the appearance of the nails of the True Cross in the Byzantine imperial insignia to Ambrose’s sermon De obitu Theodosii, in which the bishop sought to guarantee possession of these relics to the imperial house. Christianity would thereby be glorified and the emperors themselves protected. Among archaeological articles Michael Schmauder dismisses St Nostrianus from the cubiculum in the catacomb of St Gaudiosus in Naples and replaces him with a fifth-century haloed figure of Christ. Heinzgard Brahman concludes from an examination of papyrus fragments in Vienna that in the Coptic Church the Anaphora was usually dedicated to Cyril of Alexandria; though the Anaphora of Athanasius found at Qasr Ibrim in (see Jahrbuch xxx [], Plate d), should also have been mentioned. A similar examination of a fifth-century fresco in a church at Trani representing the homage of the Magi suggests to Dieter Korol that at that time there already existed a fixed cycle of biblical events to be depicted on the walls of basilicas in the west. Altogether, this is a useful collection of studies, all in some way increasing knowledge of the early Christian Church and its environment. As usual, the scholarly reviews of recent books adds to the Jahrbuch’s value. Production and illustrations are of the highest quality. G C C,W.H.C.F C Noah’s flood. The Genesis story in western thought. By Norman Cohn. Pp. viii­­frontispiece and colour and black-and-white plates. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, .£.. For several thousand years, since the story first appeared in Genesis, the tale of Noah and the Flood has been told and retold to suit the needs of an ever- changing western society. Norman Cohn has never been intimidated by large themes and he has chosen now to survey the whole long tale in a small but crisply written survey that begins with its origin in Mesopotamian myth and concludes with present-day fundamentalism. (This is the same man who made his reputation some forty years ago with that classic work, The pursuit of the millennium.) The book is pleasantly written with some entertaining illustrations and sufficient annotation to help the student who would like to dig further. It is written from an enlightened secular vantage point, but is not without sympathy for the religious views which have usually surrounded the subject. The longest part of the book is devoted to the challenges to the story that arose in early modern times, when philosophers and geologists began to discover anomalies in the traditional story. This is ground which has been well covered already by such scholars as D. C. Allen, Ernest Tuveson, Paolo Rossi and Martin Rudwick, all of whom are acknowledged here, but it is nice to have their work summarised so concisely and fitted into a large frame. It means necessarily that arguments and contexts are drastically abridged, so that it is sometimes hard to understand how deep and plausible were the commitments then, and how complicated were the contemporary arguments. In particular, the practical progress of geology and palaeontology is skimped in favour of more general ideological changes and it is not always easy to make out the connection (if there was any) between the two. On the whole this is the story of scientific progress, for which Cohn makes no apologies, and we are happily spared any Kuhnian reflections about shifting paradigms. S U J M. L Philippi,I:Die erste christliche Gemeinde Europas. By Peter Pilhofer. (Wissen- schaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, .) Pp. xxii­ incl. maps. Tu$ bingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), .DM. ; Peter Pilhofer’s substantial study of early imperial Philippi focuses on archaeological and inscriptional evidence and complements the now dated standard works of Collart () and Lemerle (). A second volume, comprising an up-to-date catalogue of inscriptions, will follow. Pilhofer’s first chapter describes the city and its hinterland; the artisan, commercial and agricultural basis of the city’s economy, including purple dyeing; the population, consisting of a Thracian labouring mass dominated by a Graeco-Roman elite, amongst whom Greek culture vied with Roman manners; and the religious scene, dominated by the cult of the Thracian Rider or ‘Aulanite Hero’, Dionysus, and the Roman Silvanus cult. In his subsequent chapters on Paul’s letter to the Philippian church, the account of Paul’s visit to Philippi in Acts, Polycarp’s letters, and the historical development of the Philippian church into the second century, Pilhofer is principally concerned to exploit his thorough knowledge of the inscriptions. His epigraphic illustration is most successful in his exegesis of Philippians, where he emphasises such cultural features as the competition for honour, ancient reciprocity and patronage. On the puzzle of the episkopoi (i. ), Pilhofer argues that it is no surprise to find that the Philippian Christians found an unusual title for their leaders. Only the Silvanus-worshippers of Philippi have an aedilus; procuratores are uniquely found amongst Philippian cult-associations of the Thracian Hero. Citizens celebrated with painful exactitude every office, major and minor, in their stone monuments, from the most detailed inscription of a Roman soldier known thus far to lengthy immortalisings of actors and musicians. It is unsurprising too that Paul highlights an ‘account of giving and receiving’ (iv. ) in his letter to a city where public and private benefactions seem to have bound toddlers to enslaving norms of reciprocity from their first steps (Kinderbeine, ). Pilhofer demonstrates that Paul has turned the language of worthy citizenship, common in the inscriptions, to Christian application (i. ). Pilhofer’s work is one-sided, since the full range of literary sources is not taken into account and reference to secondary literature often limited to standard commentaries. He seems unaware of the now well-established and highly relevant comparative approaches to New Testament texts from social anthropology (for example Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey), which form a larger context into which his analysis might be set.

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