Református Szemle 113.6 (2020)

Der Para-Traktat der Mischna erklärt unter dem Titel die „Die rote Kuh“ die Bestimmun­gen bezüglich 4 Mose 19. Nach einer kurzen Einleitung folgt die Übersetzung von drei Kapi­teln mit kurzen Sacherklärungen. Dies ist die erste ungarische Übersetzung des Textes.

The congregations of the Reformed Church District of Királyhágómellék and Transylvania replaced the older hymnbooks twenty years ago. The replacement of 1921 hymnbook, previously used in the Partium region, and of the 1923 hymnbook used in Transylvania, opened a new chapter in the church singing practice. When comparing the origin and style layer of the songs in the two hymnbooks, the difference is striking, especially with respect to the 19th century melodies and the amount of 18–19th century ad notam songs in the 1921 hymnbook. From a structural point of view, the Hungarian Reformed Hymnbook focuses mostly on the hymns of the Reformation era and the German choral melodies, quantitatively closely followed by the Anglo-Saxon and Romantic hymns. The other valuable medieval, baroque and 20th century hymns are present in a merely symbolic proportion. During a hymnbook revision, it is not enough to drop rarely used or undervalued hymns. Rather, hymns with weakened influence need to be replaced. This is how we should approach our new hymnbook published nearly a quarter of a century ago. Its substantially new material should be regarded as a “profit” that needs to be discovered repeatedly and adopted in our worship services.

In this paper I present an in-depth analysis of the writings of László Ravasz from the period 1903–1906. During this period, he graduated from the Protestant Theological Institute, the State University at Kolozsvár/Cluj, and spent a year of PhD research in Berlin. He started publishing in the journal Erdélyi Protestáns Lap mostly in the domain of religious studies. He still adheres to the liberal wing of theology, but in this period, he slowly starts to shift towards the so-called value theology, a much modern way of the long-standing liberalism.

In this study, we briefly outline the possible sources of a disputation written by the Transylvanian polyhistor Sámuel Kaposi and make reserved statements about the authorship and originality of this disputation. Our aim is to draw attention to this interesting text, which is perhaps the first Hungarian work dealing with spiritual desertion, a topic peculiar to English and Dutch Puritans.