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  • Reprints and Reissues
  • Michael Slusser

Ordinarily the Journal will not send reprints and reissues of titles published earlier out for full review, but readers may still wish for more information than a simple listing can provide. The following brief discussion is intended to meet that need.

Schuyler Brown's The Origins of Christianity: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament, originally published in 1984, has appeared in a revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The cloth edition is $39.95, the paperback $14.95. The revisions appear to be minor, and do not affect the bibliography. A new paperback, The Oxford History of Christianity, edited by John McManners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), offers the text of the 1990 Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, and several maps, but not the plates. The price is $15.95.

The Renaissance Society of America has launched a reprint series with The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine; Latin text and translation into English by Christopher B. Coleman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), reprinted from the 1922 Yale University Press edition. The price for this handsome paperback is $16.95.

Hackett Publishing Company of Indianapolis continues its program of republishing good out-of-print translations with new introductions. Peter Brown provides the introduction to Augustine, Confessions, translated by F. J. Sheed in 1942 and 1943, while Stephen F. Brown gives a new introduction and very helpful bibliography to Philotheus Boehner's translation of Bona venture, The Journey of the Mind to God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum).

A curious re-issue is Adolf von Harnack, Histoire des dogmes, really his Grundriß der Dogmengeschichte, in the 1893 French translation by Eugène Choisy (Paris: Cerf, 1993), as part of the series "Patrimoines—Christianisme" (160 FF). Pages 461-473 contain a new "Postface" by Kurt Nowak of the University of Leipzig entitled "Un christianisme sans dogme."

Teachers of the first part of a two-semester Church History sequence may consider D. Larrimore Holland's abridgment of the History of the Church edited by Hubert Jedin, published as The Early Church (New York: Crossroad, 1993). Holland has condensed the first three volumes of the earlier ten-volume set into 765 pages. His abridgement drops all the notes, maps, and indices, and shortens the text by selective omission rather than general rewriting. The content represents the scholarship of the 1960s, and the $60.00 price may be too high for classroom use.

Two other titles have just been re-issued in paperback: Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord's Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1994—original edition 1981), and Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994—original edition 1990). [End Page 101]

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