May 17 in Christian History

May 17, 2010 01:17 PM EDT

352 - Liberius was elected 36th pope of the Early Church. During this time the dispute between Arius and Athanasius was at its height, and after vacillating earlier, Liberius vindicated himself as a champion of Nicene orthodoxy.


1291 - Scottish medieval Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus, 25, was ordained. He believed in "divine will" rather than "divine intellect," and founded a scholastic system called Scotism. In the Catholic Church he is known as "the Subtle Doctor."


1844 - Birth of Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar who, in his 1878 "History of Israel," first advanced the JEDP Hypothesis, claiming that the Pentateuch (i.e., the first five O.T. books) was a compilation of four earlier, literary sources.


1881 - The Revised Version (EV or ERV) of the New Testament was first published in England. The Old Testament was completed in 1885. In 1905 the American Standard Version (ASV) - based on the textual foundation of the ERV - was published in the U.S.


1947 - The Conservative Baptist Association of America (CBAA) was formally established at Atlantic City, NJ, as a breakaway movement from within the American Baptist Convention.


© 1987-2010, William D. Blake. Used by permission of the author, from

Almanac of the Christian Church