Praise and Exception
To the Editor:
This is just a note of appreciation from a Christian reader for COMMENTARY and its many fine articles. . . . Having done doctoral work on Old Testament literature, I have found especially enlightening Rabbi Jakob J. Petuchowski’s articles, “Erich Fromm’s Midrash on Love” (December 1956) and “A Conference on the Psalms” (April).
Walter Kaufmann’s polemic against Toynbee (April) was also instructive. One can agree with almost everything Mr. Kaufmann says, despite the existence of a certain parochialism in the author himself (e.g. in his estimate of Moses); and I should like to call Mr. Kaufmann’s attention to the fact that recent scholarship finds strong indication that perhaps the Fourth Gospel is more colored by Jewish (Essenic) thought than by Hellenic philosophy. At least the work on the Dead Sea Scrolls has opened the question, and it is now impossible to assert without qualification “that the Fourth Gospel is not pre-Hellenistic.”
G. Thomas Fribdkin
Green Lake Presbyterian Parish
Spicer, Minnesota
_____________
