228 



HES. WALTZ E MATNT'IE. OX ASTEOXOMICAL 



the tradition of the date when the promised Deliverer should come 

 was derived from the visit of the Mas? to the Infant Jesus in the 

 600th year after Zoroaster. He himself heartily agreed with both 



suggestions. 



Mrs. Maunder thanked the Meeting for the very kind reception 

 that had been given to her paper, and would especially thank the 

 Chairman for the illustrations which he had given, which threw 

 great light upon several points of interest. 



She was sorry that Mr. Rouse had seemed to connect the chrono- 

 logy of the Bundahi-5 with that of the Hebrew Scriptures. She had 

 hoped that she had made it quite clear that she held the chronology 

 of the Bundahi< in very light esteem; on the face of it, it was mythical 



In reading the four Apocryphal books, she had come to rather a 

 vivid idea of the personalities of their authors. Pseudo-Ezra was a 

 scholar and a gentleman, an intensely patriotic Jew with whom one 

 could be in great sympathy, even while we condemned the form in 

 which he gave expression to his patriotic feeling, namely by the manu- 

 facture of spurious prophecy. The author of Jubilees was an arith- 

 metical "crank" : we have many such at the present time : his idea 

 was to work all chronology into multiples of 7 ; he assumed that our 

 manners and our morals would be reformed if we could make the 

 year an exact number of weeks. The author of Slavonic Enoch was 

 simply an astrologer ; he followed a trade, and the pious patter 

 which he interpolates into his advertisements is exactly the kind of 

 thing which many astrologers do at the present time ; he was neither 

 moral, nor immoral, he was simply without morals. But the author 

 of Ethiopic Enoch stood on a different, on a lower, level from any of 

 these : he was an ungodly man. His book was manifestly a piece 

 of patchwork : he worked with the scissors and the pastepot. But he 

 was ill-advised to borrow the prophecy of the patriarch who walked 

 with God, for he was himself one of the ungodly men condemned in it. 



The Meeting adjourned at 6.15 p.m. 



Written Communications. 

 Professor F. C. Burkitt. M.A.. D.D., Xorrisian Professor of 

 Divinity. (1) Your argument about the land Airy ana Yaego is most 

 ingenious. But I do not know that it quite proves the historicity 

 of u Jamshyd," or that this knowledge of the Arctic day and night 

 came from tradition. Might it not equally well have come from what 



