Dictionary of Biblical Theology ed. by Xavier Léon-Dufour (review)

672 BOOK REVIEWS indeed. But would a saint have preached those last defiant sermons? The question is not merely rhetorical." (p. 194) Considering the tendency of people of average education to lump together the entire period from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance as a period of intellectual stagnation and darkness , the author might have added more balance to his discussion of the merits of Galileo. He writes: (Galileo) "Combined experiment with calculation and thus went counter to the prevailing system which held that laws and processes of nature were best learned by going not directly to nature, but to Aristotle." Balance could have been gained by noting that overreliance on Aristotle was a recent development. As Langford points out in his article on Galileo in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (vol. VI, 250), it developed "under the influence of Renaissance humanism." Through its influence, "the tendency to attribute definitive authority to the texts of Aristotle grew even stronger, and philosophical writings were generally more textual and philological than original or creative." Langford also notes Galileo's debt to earlier scholars: "Galileo, then, represents in many ways the combination of certain scientific trends that existed before him, especially at Paris, Oxford and Padua of a new beginning of science that led to Newton and beyond." (p. 255) The question of the number of burnings that took place under the Inquisition is a difficult one and has not been fully researched. The medieval Inquisition was sparing in its use of the stake, as was the Spanish Inquisition under Thomas Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor. Apart from the burnings that occured during the witchcraft craze, in which Protestant countries shared, it may be misleading to speak of condemning " thousands to the stake to be burned alive for some alleged deviation in doctrine or some alleged involvement in witchery." (p. 143) Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. WILLIAM A. HINNEBUSCH, o. P. Dictionary of Biblical Theology, New Revised Edition. Edited by Xavier Leon-Dufour. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. 712 Pp. $17.50. Like the original edition published in 1967, this new edition (translated from the second French edition, 1968) makes available to English readers a wealth of information and insight in the area of Biblical Theology. This edition represents a significant advance over the earlier edition, primarily in the area of new articles, but it also retains some of the deficiencies of the former. A built-in deficiency in any such dictionary is the nebulous state BOOK REVIEWS 678 of Biblical Theology. This dictionary, by the way it treats the subject matter, opts for a systematic understanding of Biblical Theology, an understanding which is itself un-biblical. Uon-Dufour, in the new article "Jesus Christ," recognizes that "the mystery of Jesus ... cannot be reduced to a single system," (~71) yet he seems to attempt to do just that. The view of Biblical Theology taken by this work is most clearly manifest in the index which was added in this edition, an index which offers a systematic arrangement of all the subjects treated in the dictionary. There are forty new articles in this edition which fill in most of the important areas neglected in the first edition. Among them are " Apparitions of Christ," " Conscience," "Jesus Christ," "Predestine" and "Providence "; however, there is still no article on Paul . The foreword claims that "most of the articles have been revised and corrected," (v) but a comparison of fifty articles showed that very few had been altered and what changes there were were minimal. Some notable inconsistencies between articles, inevitable in a collaborative work, have been eliminated from the earlier edition such as the conflicting views on paraclete found respectively in the articles " Consolation " and " Paraclete," but other revisions that one might have expected were not made. The article "Resurrection ," for example, is identical with the earlier one although the new article "Apparitions of Christ " brings new insights to the divergencies manifest in the various layers of tradition, insights that certainly would have improved the article " Resurrection." In spite of the above criticisms, the new edition retains all of the virtues of the previous edition with enough significant improvements tl...