CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



Testament is supposed to date from the time of 

 Solomon and Hiram ; or to have been done by 

 Asa, the priest ; or, again, that it belongs to the 

 time of the apostle Thaddaeus (Adaeus), and 

 Abgar, the king of Osroene, in the ist century. 

 To the same period is also supposed to belong 

 the translation of the New Testament which is 

 ascribed to Achaeus, a disciple of Thaddeus, the 

 first Edessian bishop and martyr. Recent inves- 

 tigation has not as yet come to any nearer result 

 than to place the latter vaguely in the 2d, and the 

 former in the 3d century, and to make Judaic 

 Christians the authors of both. Ephraem Syrus, 

 who wrote in the 4th century, certainly speaks of 

 the Peshito as ' our version,' and finds it already 

 necessary to explain some of its terms, which had 

 become obsolete. The version of the Old Testa- 

 ment was made direct from the Hebrew, and by 

 men imbued with the Palestinian mode of expla- 

 nation. It is extremely faithful, and astonishingly 

 free from any of those paraphrastic tendencies 

 which pervade more or less all the Targums or 

 Aramaic versions. Its renderings are mostly very 

 happy, and coincide in many places with those of 

 the Septuagint, a circumstance that has given rise 

 to the erroneous supposition that the latter itself 

 had been drawn upon. 



THE APOCRYPHA. 



This is perhaps the proper place to notice the 

 apocryphal literature of both Testaments. No one 

 can fail to be struck with the contrast which the 

 Old Testament Apocrypha presents in tone and 

 character to the canonical writings, Esther alone 

 excepted. The very best portions of it, such as 

 The Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach, are desti- 

 tute of that living authoritative power of religious 

 conviction which belongs to men who have stood, 

 as it were, face to face with God, and to whom the 

 things that are unseen and eternal are more real 

 than the things that are seen and temporal. The 

 term apocryphal originally meant secret or con- 

 cealed, and was rendered current by the Jews of 

 Alexandria. In the earliest churches, it was 

 applied with very different significations to a 

 variety of writings. Sometimes it was given to 

 those whose authorship and original form were 

 unknown ; sometimes to writings containing a 

 hidden meaning ; sometimes to those whose public 

 use was not thought advisable. In this last sig- 

 nification, it has been customary, since the time 

 of Jerome, to apply the term to a number of 

 writings which the Septuagint had circulated 

 amongst the Christians, and which were some- 

 times considered as an appendage to the Old 

 Testament, and sometimes as a portion of it 

 The Greek Church, at the Council of Laodicea 

 (360 A.D.), excluded them from the canon ; the 

 Latin Church, on the other hand, always highly 

 favoured them ; and, finally, the Council of Trent 

 (1545-63) placed them on an equality with the 

 rest of the Old Testament. The Church of Eng- 

 land uses them in part for edification, but not 

 for the 'establishment of doctrine.' All other 

 Protestant churches in England and America 

 reject their use in public worship. But it was 

 once customary to bind up the Apocrypha between 

 the authorised versions of the Old and New Tes- 

 taments, though this has now ceased, and, as a 

 consequence, this curious, interesting, and instruc- 



392 



tive part of Jewish literature is now known only to 

 scholars. The Old Testament Apocrypha consists 

 of fourteen books : i. First Esdras ; 2. Second 

 Esdras ; 3. Tobit ; 4. Judith ; 5. The parts of 

 Esther not found in Hebrew or Chaldee ; 6. The 

 Wisdom of Solomon ; 7. The Wisdom of Jesus, 

 Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus ; 8. Baruch ; 9. 

 The Song of the Three Holy Children ; 10. The 

 History of Susanna; II. The History of the 

 Destruction of Bel and the Dragon; 12. The 

 Prayer of Manasses, King of Judah ; 13. First 

 Maccabees ; 14. Second Maccabees. The precise 

 origin of all these writings cannot be ascertained. 

 Some of them were to all appearance originally 

 written in Hebrew especially Ecclesiasticus and 

 the First Book of the Maccabees ; and these 

 seem to be contemporary with some of the later 

 Psalms. Second Maccabees and Judith belong 

 also apparently to the time of the Maccabees ; 

 and Tobit and Baruch were also probably first 

 written in Hebrew or Chaldee, yet, like the rest of 

 the Apocrypha, which were certainly written in 

 Greek, all are now extant only in the Greek text. 

 None of them was received into the Jewish 

 canon ; and though they were all found in the 

 Septuagint used by the Christians, it is doubtful 

 if some of them were acknowledged even by the 

 Greek-speaking Jews. To the books ordinarily 

 called Apocrypha may fairly be added the Psalms 

 of Solomon, written a short time before Christ ; 

 and the Book of Enoch and the so-called Fourth 

 Book of Esdras, though not found in the Greek 

 Bible, seem partly at least to have been known to 

 the writers of the New Testament. Some of the 

 Apocrypha bear traces of a Palestinian, others of 

 an Egypto-Alexandrine, and others again of a 

 Chaldaico-Persian origin or influence. Most, if 

 not all, bear internal evidence of having been 

 composed in the ist and 2d centuries B.C. 



The Old Testament Apocrypha supplies us with 

 most interesting materials for insight into the 

 development of Jewish theology, of religious and 

 national faith, during the centuries immediately 

 before Christ 



It is in connection with the New Testament 

 Apocrypha that the latter word came to have ulti- 

 mately attached to it the signification of ' spurious' 

 or ' false.' The Apocrypha of the New Testament 

 may be arranged under three heads : i. The writ- 

 ings comprising the Apocryphal Gospels, which 

 consist of twenty-two separate documents, ten in 

 Greek and twelve in Latin. They concern them- 

 selves with the history of Joseph and of the Virgin 

 Mary before the birth of Christ, with the infancy 

 of Christ, and with the history of Pilate. The most 

 important of the set are the Protevangelium of 

 James, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Acts of 

 Pilate, which are perhaps the origines of all the 

 apocryphal traditions. That many of the stories 

 found in these were current in the 2d century is 

 abundantly proved, but we have no evidence that 

 any of the books known as Apocryphal Gospels 

 were then in existence, or are older than the 4th 



| century. 2. The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 

 consisting of thirteen documents originally written 

 in Greek, but found also in a Latin compilation 

 probably of the 6th century. They are distin- 

 guished from the Apocryphal Gospels by having 

 less of miracle and more of didactic discourse. 

 The more important of the collection are The 



\ Acts of Peter and Paul, The Acts of Barnabas, 



