In the aftermath of their invasion of the South Arabian kingdom of Ḥimyar in 525 CE, the Aksumites of Ethiopia erected a series of inscriptions in Gəʿəz documenting the invasion. Although these inscriptions survive in very fragmentary condition, enough is preserved to indicate that the Aksumites presented their victorious campaign in religious terms, often quoting passages from the Bible. This manner of presentation provides insight into how the Aksumites conceived of themselves and their military venture in Ḥimyar, an undertaking that, while motivated by strategic concerns, had strong religious overtones in that it pitted Christian Aksumites against Ḥimyarite Jews. At the same time, the Aksumites took pains to emphasize their Ethiopian identity in this corpus of inscriptions, as evidenced by the fact that the inscriptions in question were composed in Gəʿəz, the Ethiosemitic lingua franca of Aksum, rather than in the local Sabaic language. That these inscriptions may have been erected as parts of symbolic stone thrones, as were similar Aksumite inscriptions erected elsewhere, would also have served to emphasize the Ethiopian identity of Ḥimyar’s conquerors. Thus, to the extent that the Aksumites identified with the Israelites, they saw themselves as an Israel in a Christian, Ethiopian guise.

Patristic exegesis followed certain hermeneutical rules different from the modern principles of scientific interpretation of the Scripture. The main feature was christocentrism: Jesus Christ was the first hermeneutical key to understand the Bible. The second principle is the unity of the Scripture: the Old Testament is read and interpreted in the light of the New Testament. The third characteristic is the twofold way of reading the Word of God: literal and spiritual; both are complementary and need each other to achieve the full comprehension of the biblical message. The fourth is typology and symbolism: each literary motif of the Scripture (person, thing, event, etc.) can be a carrier of many meanings useful for spiritual purposes, exceeding the historical context. A special attention is attributed also to the tradition of the Church, the Eucharistic perspective and the fact that Church Fathers and ancient Rabbis interpreted and explained the Old Testament in the contexts of their communities of faith, independently but sometimes following similar intuitions.

In 2010, three Polish scholars published A Preliminary Report on the Wanli Kanjur Kept at Jagiellionian Library, Kraków.1 It was at this time the world began to know that the Jagiellonian Library has an incomplete collection of the Tibetan Kanjur printed in the Wanli period (1573–1620), as well as many other Tibetan texts, manuscripts and xylographs.2 The library also possesses a huge collection of Chinese Buddhist literature, including the Yongle Northern Canon. There is also a scripture that does not belong to the Chinese Buddhist Canon, or Daoist Canon, or Baojuan ����.3 In June 2017, the author discovered one volume of the Buddhist text entitled Saddharmapuṇdarīka Sūtra in the Tangut language. This is particularly precious as it is the only extant copy worldwide. These volumes of the Tibetan Kanjur and the Yongle Northern Canon were obtained by a German scholar and collector named Eugen Pander (1854–1894?) who got acquainted with the reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist Master Thu’u bkvan Khutugtu of Yonghe Temple in Beijing. The volumes were shipped to Berlin around 1889 where they were placed in the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin and later moved to the State Library in Berlin. In 1943, the Allied Forces began to bomb Berlin and the Germans made an effort to hide their treasures. They transported over 500 boxes of books from the State Library in Berlin to Książ castle, and then to the Cistercian monastery in Krzeszów. After WWII the region was on the Polish side of the border. All the treasures, including Beethoven’s manuscript of the “Ninth Symphony,” and the Mozart’s manuscript of “Magic Flute,” were transferred as a deposit to the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

This paper focuses on three issues. First, it is about the context and environment of pre-Nicene theology. It is emphasized that pre-Nicene theology did not neglect ca-techetical and liturgical reflection (ad intra) while at the same time successfully ente-red into a critical and creative dialogue with both the Semitic and Greco-Roman world where first Christians lived (ad extra). For contemporary theology its means that it cannot reject historical reasoning, placed in space and time. The second part stresses that, in spite of different situations and all historical and cultural contexts, theology before Nicea was above all an understanding of Sacred Scripture to which the key is the Risen Christ as the source and definitive fulfilment of the inspired writings. Finally, the third part of the paper focuses on the existential and spiritual experience from which pre-Nicene theology originated. For this theology the Gospel of Christ is not just the rule of faith but also the rule of life. This leads to a conclusion that a contem-porary theologian is a to take up an existential-personalistic reflection on Revelation using the historical-hermeneutic method .

Article The Bible in Polish Modern Literature contains reflections on the period 1945-2009, especially about an essay on the Bible written by laics, staying on more or less catholic position. Almost all were poets: Roman Brandstaetter (1906-1987), Jan Dobraczyński (1910-1994), Anna Kamieńska (1920-1986), Czesław Miłosz (1911- 2004), Marek Skwarnicki (*1930), Anna Świderkówna (1925-2008), Tadeusz Żychiewicz (1922-1994) and others. These authors began to study the Bible in the middle of their lives, when they were ripe to discuss theological and existential problems of the Holy Scripture. In the contrast to them there are the writers staying on the atheistic or agnostic position: Zenon Kosidowski (1898-1978), Artur Sandauer (1913-1989). Only one author, A. Świderkówna, was really a specialist in a biblical branch as the professor of the ancient mediterranean archaeology on the Warsaw University. She could write series her books Conversations on the Bible which became the bestseller in the end of 20th century.

For all biblical essayists a very important issue was the philological question connected to the langauge of the Bible and with the „semantic energy" of translation (Miłosz). The biblical essayists used the old polish Bible (1600) translation of Jacob Wujek SI or modern group translation made 1965 in Benedictiner Abbey in Tyniec (by Cracow). Beyond a communistic censorship in years 1945-1989 all mentioned writers could publish their articles and books. The most important center of these initiatives was Cracow (weekly „Tygodnik Powszechny" and monthly „Znak", also lisher), Warsaw (Publisher Pax), Posen.