Lowe, Ben

What sources informed the resurrection narrative of Jesus in the Gospel of John? Some scholars argue that the author of John used the Synoptic Gospels along with oral traditions as sources, but others maintain that John used only independent traditions to write his resurrection story. This paper argues that John did not use the Synoptics for this narrative because the reconstructed history of the Johannine community provides an adequate basis for postulating independent traditions which succeed at explaining both the similarities and differences between John and the Synoptics. While it does not claim to prove that the author was unaware of the Synoptics, it maintains that the evidence for the use of those Gospels in addition to tradition is too weak, whereas independent traditions alone can account for the material.

The mid-Tudor period for a long time has been portrayed as a period of
trouble and turbulence that was of little historical significance. The rulers and
intellectuals of the period were cast as fanatical, intolerant religious bigots whose
actions at best delayed the progress of English government. Actually the opposite
is true. After the death of Edward VI, a group of evangelicals fled the restoration
of Roman jurisdiction by Mary I. These English Protestants are known as the
Marian exiles and they fashioned some radical political ideas to support a
traditional, albeit evangelical political culture. They did this by trying to find a
Biblical justification to oppose the Catholic restoration of Mary and return
England to the godly church and state of Edward VI. Looking to restore the
reformed church, they inadvertently legitimized what had before been seen as
sedition into the modern idea of revolution.

Descended from Celtic goddesses and the fairies of folklore, the literary character
of Morgan le Fay has been most commonly perceived as a witch and a one-dimensional
villainess who plagues King Arthur and his court, rather than recognized as the legendary
King’s enchanted healer and otherworldly guardian. Too often the complexity of Morgan
le Fay and her supernatural abilities are lost, her character neglected as peripheral. As a
literary figure of imaginative design this thesis explores Morgan le Fay as a unique
“window” into the medieval mindset, whereby one can recover both medieval
understandings of magic and female magicians. By analyzing her role in key sources
from the twelfth to fifteenth century, this thesis uses Morgan le Fay to recover nuanced
perceptions of the supernatural in medieval England that embraced the ambiguity of a
pagan past and remained insulated from continental constructions of demonic witchcraft.

The heart of Thomas More's very influential History of King Richard III is the Tower scene, whose authenticity has been thought to be guaranteed by the eyewitness testimony of More's good friend Bishop Morton. Analysis of the scene and other parts of the history reveal that the details of the scene are untrustworthy as history, and that the parts of the scene that are unique to More's history can be explained as a creation influenced by both literary and didactic factors. An analysis of the apparent symbolism of the scene is included.

Within his own intellectual context, John Locke's argument for the people's natural right of resistance in the Second Treatise of Government was profoundly original. But he derived its conceptual foundation and rhetorical ornament from the six political texts immediately available to him when he wrote the Second Treatise in 1681-82. Locke based his "very Strange Doctrine" of popular resistance to political tyranny upon the natural right of rational individuals to judge and punish criminals in the state of nature. Textual analysis demonstrates that none of his six texts presented this argument. Locke did, however base his resistance theory upon such moral concepts as natural law, natural equality, and natural liberty, which--as textual analysis further indicates--he derived from texts by Samuel von Pufendorf and Richard Hooker. Locke's radical argument further benefited from Ciceronian and Biblical rhetoric. He intended this rhetoric to be comfortingly familiar to his intended readers, the English gentry of the 1680s, and therefore effective in persuading them to resist the invasion of their rights by King Charles II in 1681-82.