This article argues that Karl Jaspers’s account of the rise of the Axial Age phenomenon is deficient owing to his failure to consider the natural law as a plausible cause for its development. The Axial Age concept—which precedes Jaspers, who nevertheless popularized it—claims that widely separated civilizations from the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews to the Persian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian cultures all began to display sophisticated political and moral development from 800–200 BC, without any known contact. Jaspers regarded its rise (...) as a mystery. However, given ancient legal codes containing moral precepts long predating this period, the natural law hypothesis serves as the most plausible explanation of this ‘mystery’ of mankind’s dawning moral awareness. (shrink)

This article compares the epistemologies, writing styles, subject matters, methodologies, sources, and interests of ancient and modem historians of theCatholic Church. Ancient historians reviewed include Eusebius, Theodoret, Socrates, Sozomen, and the Venerable Bede. Modem Church histories critiqued include those of Dwyer and Bokenkotter. The credulity of ancient histories and the skepticism of modem histories on matters supernatural, miraculous and metaphysical is contrasted. Modem church histories are found to be less open to a wide range of sources and more chained to (...) materialist or naturalist assumptions, and thus less rich and edifying than their ancient precursors, who retained a lively sense of divine providence. (shrink)