James New

by Montague Rhodes James
London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (NY: Macmillan) 1920

[UPenn BS 1700.J3] [scanned by Michael Nicholson and revised by Robert A. Kraft, April 2003]
-latest update 09 June 2004 RAK [supplements to Eve, Og/Giants, Daniel], then 16 March 2005 [Norea]
See also the parallel project, for Early Christian materials and traditions

Correcting and updating April 2003, 05je, 24je, 11jl, 08oc
add information from Ginzberg's Legends and similar literature (in red?)
add Ahikar?, (ps-)Philo?, (ps-)Josephus? Nag Hammadi materials -- new material in green
leave saviour, flavour, etc.? change roman numerals to arabic; LXX to LXX/OG, AD to CE, etc.

add bibliog refs. (http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~nt/asp/pseudep.htm), esp.
Lorenzo DiTommaso, A Bibliography of Pseudepigrapha Research 1850-1999 (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, Supplementary Series 39; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 2001)
add Resch references
add Denis refs: Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs d'ancien testament (Brill 1970)
[part 1 = relatively full texts; part 2 = fragments; part 3 = historians and literary authors]
Stone/Bergren = Michael E. Stone and Theodore A. Bergren, Biblical Figures Outside the Bible (Harrisburg PA: Trinity Press International 1998) [essays by various authors, plus an excellent bibliography and index]
Florentino Garcia Martinez, Qumran and Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Brill 1992)
Baring-Gould [see MRJ ref below]

Even more recently, J. R. Porter has produced a very introductory volume titled The Lost Bible: Forgotten Scriptures Revealed (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=1739
in which excerpts from both "OT"-like and "NT"-like works are introduced and presented, along with some striking pictures. BS1700 .P66 2001 (van pelt and cajs)

THE object of this series of translations is primarily to fumish students with short, cheap, and handy text-books, which, it is hoped, will facilitate the study of the particular texts in class under competent teachers. But it is also hoped that the volumes will be acceptable to the general reader who may be interested in the subjects with which they deal. It has been thought advisable, as a general rule, to restrict the notes and comments to a small compass; more especially as, in most cases, excellent works of a more elaborate character are available. Indeed, it is much to be desired that these translations may have the effect of inducing readers to study the larger works.

Our principal aim, in a word, is to make some difficult texts, important for the study of Christian origins, more generally accessible in faithful and scholarly translations.

In most cases these texts are not available in a cheap and handy form. In one or two cases texts have been included of books which are available in the official Apocrypha; but in every such case reasons exist for putting forth these texts in a new translation, with an Introduction, in this series.

INTRODUCTORY

THE object of this book is to collect in a form convenient to English readers the remains of some of the apocryphal writings connected with the Old Testament which have not survivcd in their entirety. That there were many such books we know; and the student may find, scattered in dictionary articles, or collected in such works as the -- still unsurpassed -- Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti of John Albert Fabricius, their names and fragments. But there is not a handy English guide to this information, such as I now attempt to supply.

It is impossible in most cases to assign anything like a precise date to these writings; the most we can say is that they are pre- or post-Christian (and even that is not always clear), and that they must have been in existence before the time of the writer who quotes them. That latter point at least is certain. But we shall not be far out if we regard the first century before and the first century after the Christian era (100 B.C.to -A.D. 100) as covering the period during which most of them were produced. Our uncertainty as to their chronological order forbids me to attempt any arrangement of them based upon date; and I have preferred the simpler plan of following the biblical order of the personages to whom they are attributed, or of whom they treat.

Before, however, we consider any of them individually, it will be well to form an idea of the sources from which we get any infomiation about them. [x]

The quotations from these books are for the most part to be found in the writings of the Greek Ante-Nicene Fathers. The so-called Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome, Barnabas, and Hermas, are important contributors; Justin Martyr and the other apologists give us little. Clement of Alexandria and Origen are incomparably the richest sources; Hippolytus has something. In the fourth century the yield is far smaller: Epiphanius, a determined borrower from earlier writers, is not to be despised; but for our present purpose such writers as Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, the Gregories, are barren and useless. The next stratum that is at all productive (and the last) is to be found in the Byzantine chronographers, George the Syncellus, George Cedrenus, Michael Glycas.

The Latins are throughout poorer. Tertullian and Cyprian will be referred to; but Jerome hatcs apocryphal literature, and says so, while Augustine, a valuable source of knowledge about some New Testament Apocrypha, never, it so happens, quotes spurious Old Testament literature at all. Yet, if Latin Fathers are poor, we shall see that Latin versions of some very queer books were current, and have left traces in manuscripts.

We can readily understand, or at least imagine, the state of mind which made the later Church writers chary of quoting the extra-canonical books. For one thing, the conception of canonicity had grown much clearer by the fourth century; the experience of the first three centuries had shown the necessity of defining doctrine, and consequently of stating clearly what books purporting to be sacred were really to be considered authoritative and could legitimately be used in public worship. Most of us have very little idea how many gospels, revelations, histories or "acts" of apostles, and books of prophecies were in circulation for which the claim was [xi] set up that they should be so used. It was the recognized method of pushing a particular set of doctrines to produce a writing under some venerable name, in which the special tenets were openly or covertly advocated. The fashion is on the wane now, yet we have heard of the Book of Mormon, of Notovich's Buddhist Life of Christ, and perhaps of an astounding work called the Archko Volume. But though the methods of to-day are of necessity different, it would not be very surprising even now if a coterie of spiritualists were to publish, and to gain some credence for, a Life of our Lord dictated "automatically" by the spirit of one who had known Him in the flesh; and this [first world] war has taught us that apocryphal prophecies are by no means out of date.

It was, of course, specially important that the books which professed to contain teachings of Christ or of Apostles should be sifted; but it was also necessary to banish from the churches those which had been fathered upon the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament. Many such had been made the vehicle of anti-Catholic, and even of anti-Christian, teaching. We shall encounter instances of these, though they are not so common as writings that are legendary, or apocalyptic.

This necessity for definition led to the drawing-up of lists of the sacred books, and then, naturally, of longer lists, in which apocryphal books were included and expressly reprobated. Such lists form our second main source of knowledge about the lost writings. There are three Greek lists, one Latin, and some in other languages, especially Armenian, which will have to be noticed.

The Greek lists are known as the Stichometry of Nicephorus, the list of the Sixty Books, and that in the Pseudo-Athanasian Synopsis of Holy Scripture. The Stichometry of Nicephorus is a catalogue appended to the chronography called of Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople (806-815), and it is called "Stichometry" because it appends to the title of each book a statement [xii] of the number of stichoi or lines which it contained. The line was the unit of payment for the professional scribe, and was commonly of the average length of a line of Homer, say sixteen syllables or thirty-four to thirty-six letters. It is thought that this particular catalogue must be appreciably older than the ninth century, perhaps as old as the fifth or sixth; but I do not think its date is very important to us. lt seems to have been added to the chronography about 850, at Jerusalem. The list in the Synopsis of Scripture, falsely attributed to Athanasius, is very similar to that of Nicephorus, but not, in the judgment of a good critic, Theodor Zahn, copied from it. In the single section which concerns us, the two are identical. The book in which it occurs is of uncertain date, not earlier than the sixth century.

The list of the Sixty Books is found appended in some MSS, but not in all, to the Questiones of Anastasius of Sinai. By the Sixty Books the Canonical Scriptures are meant. The names of these are followed by nine more, described as "outside the Sixty" (Wisdom, Sirach, 1-4 Macc., Esther, Judith, Tobit), and these by twenty-four more [including ten "NT apocrypha"] under the title "apocrypha." Probably this list also may be of the sixth or seventh century.

The three lists contain the following titles of Old Testament apocryphal books [to which has been added one of the Armenian lists from Mechithar of Airivank, who is also treated below]:

[xiii]
The Latin list of apocryphal books is contained in a document known as the Gelasian Decree, "concerning books to be received and not to be received." It pur-ports to have been issued by a Pope acting as the mouth-piece of a Council of bishops; in most MSS, the Pope is Gelasius I (496), but in some Damasus (384), and in some Hormisdas (523). The view expressed by its latest editor, E. von Dobschu%tz, is that it is not really a papal document at all, but a compilation made in France in the sixth century. That question is not settled. Whatever its origin, the Decree gives us several unusual names of apocryphal books, and omits many, like Enoch, which we should expect to find and which we know were current in Latin. Its contribution is as follows:-

The book, concerning the daughters of Adam, or Leptogenesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . Apocryphal.
The book which is called the Penitence of Adam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Apocryphal.
The book concerning the giant named Ogias,
who is stated by the heretics to have fought with a dragon after the Flood . . .Apocryphal.
The book which is called the Testament of Job . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Apocryphal.
The book which is called the Penitence of Jannes and Mambres . . . . . . . . . . . . .Apocryphal.
The writing which is called the Interdiction (or Contradiction) of Solomon . . . . . .Apocryphal.

The Armenian lists collected by Zahn in 1893 (Forschungen, 5.109) are three in number.

1. Samuel of Ani (cir. 1179) mentions, among books brought into Armenia about A.D. 591 by Nestorian missionaries, the Penitence of Adam, and the Testament; the latter may be that of Moses, but is more probably that of Adam.

2. Mechithar of Airivank (cir. 1290) has a list closely resembling the Greek ones [see the chart above]. One section of it is headed Secret Books of the Jews, and runs thus:--

This is essentially the list of the Sixty Books, substituting the Sibyl for Lamech, omitting the Testament of Moses and replacing the last four items by the Seventh Vision of Daniel.

3. A second list in the same writer's chronicle, under the year 1085, mingles some apocryphal titles with the Canon of the Old Testament, viz.:-

This list consists entirely of books which still exist. The Prayers of Aseneth/Asenath seems to take the place of the Prayer of Joseph in the former list. [See Denis 1.4 on the Prayer of Aseneth.]

The above lists include nearly all the names which will concern us. Some notice, however, will have to be taken of other writings attributed to some of those whose names occur in the lists, e. g. Moses, and of books fathered upon, or relating to, Eve, Seth, Noah, Ham, Melchizedek, Hezekiah, as well as the ancient Persian king Hystaspes; and a collection of the passages which early writers have quoted without naming their source.

THE LOST APOCRYPHA OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

WE hear of quite a considerable number of books attributed to, or relating to, Adam: an Apocalypse, a Penitence, a Testament, a Life, are the foremost. As to the first three of these titles, there is uncertainty as to whether they represent one, two, or three books. Perhaps it will be possible to form an opinion when the evidence has been set out.

In the Epistle of Barnabas, ii.10, we read: "But to us he speaks thus: `The sacrifice of God is a contrite heart; a savour of sweetness to the Lord is a heart glorifying Him that hath formed it."' Upon this the Constantinople MS has this marginal note: "Psalm 50 and in the Apocalypse of Adam." The first clause is, of course, familiar, occurrng in Ps. 50 (51); the second is not from the Bible. Yet two early Fathers, namely, Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, quote it in this form; Clement twice -- always in connexion with the passage Isa. i.11, which, be it noted, Bamabas has also quoted just before. We need not doubt the statement that the words occurred in the Apocalypse of Adam. They have to do with repentance, and plainly repent-ance was a favourite topic in conriexion with Adam. The Gelasian Decree and an Armenian list, we have seen, [2] mention a Penitence of Adam. in the Gnostic book called the Pistis Sophia, by the way, the word penitence has a technical meaning; it is applied to the hymns sung by the being Pistis Sophia on her progress through the spiritual world; each hymn is called "a penitence."

Further, we have another passage which connects together the ideas of repentance and of a revelation made to Adam. George Cedrenus, a Byzantine chronicler, says (ed. Migne, 1.41): "Adam, in the 600th year, having repented, learned by revelation concerning the Watchers and the Flood and concerning repentance and the divine incarnation, and concerning the prayers that are sent up to God by all creatures at every hour of the day and night, by the hand of Uriel, the angel that is over repentance. In the first hour of the day the first prayer is accomplished in heaven, in the second hour is the prayer of angels, in the third the prayer of winged things, in the fourth the prayer of cattle, in the fifth the prayer of wild beasts, in the sixth the assembly (or review) of angels and the discerning (or inspection) of all creation, in the seventh the entering in of angels to God and their going out, in the eighth the praise and sacrifices of angels, in the ninth the prayer and worship of men, in the tenth the visitations of waters and the prayers of things in heaven and on earth, in the eleventh the thanksgiving and rejoicing of all things, in the twelfth the entreatings of men unto well-pleasing." He goes on: "And in the 950th year Adam died, on the very day of his transgression, and returned unto the earth from whence he was taken, leaving thirty-three sons and twenty-three daughters."

This horary of the day, and also that of the night, we possess in various other forms. One is in Greek, and has survived under the name, not of Adam, but of Apollonius (of Tyana), the famous thaumaturge of the first century. The latest editor of it, Abbe/ F. Nau (in Patrologia Syriaca, 1.2, Appendix, 1907), is of the opinion that it may really be attributed to Apollonius or his circle, and that it was transferred from his book to that of Adam; but his case is a weak one: the text is full of [3] Christian touches, and the evidence that it was originally under Adam's name is earlier in date than any that can be produced for Apollonius.

The horary seems also to have been known in the Latin Church. Nicetas of Remesiana, writing in the fourth century on the Merit of Psalmody, has this sentence: "We ought not rashly to receive the book that is entitled the Inquisition of Abraham, wherein it is feigned that the very animals, springs, and elements sang, inasmuch as that book is of no credit and rests on no authority." I conjecture (and others agree) that Inquisition of Abraham (Inquisitio Abrae) is a corruption of Dispusitio (i. e. Testament) Adae.

We have it also in Syriac, where it is said to be from the Testament of Adam. There are two Syriac versions, edited and translated by Kmosko, in the volume of the Patrologia Syriaca referred to above. One of these has this introductory note: "When he was sick unto death, he called Seth his son, and said to him: My son, He that formed me out of the dust showed me and granted me to put names upon the beasts of the earth and the fowls of heaven, and showed me the hours of the day and night, how they stand."

And more than once Adam speaks in the first person, e. g. at the fourth hour of the night: "The Trisagion of the Seraphim: thus I used to hear, my son, before I sinned, the sound of their wings in Paradise, and after I had transgressed the commandment I heard it not."

There is thus a prima facie case for thinking that the Apocalypse, Penitence, and Testament of Adam, if not identical, at least contained a good deal of common matter.

The Syriac MSS of the horary, or some of them, append to it other passages which purport to come from the Testament. One of these is a prophecy of the coming of Christ, addressed to Seth. Of this we have two texts, the second very much amplified. After the prophecy is another prediction that a flood will come because of the sin of Cain, and that the world will last 6000 years after that. Then follows the statement: [4] "I, Seth, wrote this testament: Adam died and was buried on the east of Paradise, over against the first city that was built, named Henoch. He was buried by the angels, and the sun and moon were darkened seven days. Seth sealed the Testament and laid it up in the Cave of Treasures with the gold, frankincense, and myrrh which Adam brought out of Paradise, and which the Magi are to offer to the Son of God in Bethlehem of Judah."

This, of course, is throughout Christian, and the mention of the Cave of Treasures links it up with a whole series of Eastern books, such as the Book of Adam and Eve (tr. S.C. Malan), the Cave of Treasures (ed. Bezold), the Book of the Rolls (Gibson, Studia Sinailtca, 8).

The last fragment has really no claim to be connected with Adam at all. It is an account of the nine orders of angels in which there is mention of David, Zechariah, and Judas Maccabaeus.

If the horary and the prophecy were parts of the same book, it was a Christian, or at least a fully Christianized text, and not a very early one. Yet I find it difficult not to suspect the existence of an early book behind it. The last words of Tertullian's book On Penitence seem to imply that he knew of some writing in which Adam's praises of God after his repentance were recorded. He says; "For, since I am a sinner of the deepest dye, and not born for any end except repentance, I cannot easily keep silence about it (i. e. repentance), and no more does Adam the beginner both of the race of men and of sin against the Lord when by confession he has been restored unto his Paradise." No more may be meant than that Adam, now that he is redeemed and restored, sings praise to God; but the other view has usually been taken, and if it is correct it means that there was in the second century a book that contained hymns uttered by Adam after his fall and repentance. The phrase quoted from the Epistle of Barnabas might well be a fragment of such a writing.

Certain it is that legend was busy with accounts of [5] the penitence of Adam: of the attempt made by him and Eve to do penance apart for forty days in the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates -- an attempt frustrated by Satan, who disguised himself as an angel and induced Eve to come out of the water on the pretence that God had forgiven and forgotten all. This story appears both in the Eastern Book (or Conflict) of Adam and Eve, and in the Latin Life of Adam. The common source of these widely divergent streams must lie far behind both.

The Life of Adam has been mentioned.\n/ [See now Gary A. Anderson, "Adam and Eve in the 'Life of Adam and Eve,'" item #1 in Stone/Bergren.] In some form it has made its way into most of the vernaculars of Europe, usually by means of the Latin version, which is common in MSS from the ninth to the fifteenth century. It and its elder sister, or parent, the Greek, may be read in English in Charles's Pseudepigrapha,, and I need not analyze either further than to say that the Greek and Latin both contain detailed accounts of the Fall, and of the Death and Burial of Adam, while the Latin also has, as noted above, something about his Penitence.

[Murdoch, Brian and J.A.Tasioulas. The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve edited from the Auchinleck Manuscript and from Trinity College, Oxford, MS 57. Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Pp. 200. ISBN: 0-85989-698-6. [Reviewed for TMR 03.04.11 (April 2003) by Graeme Dunphy (University of Regensburg): "This new text edition of two important Middle English Adambooks will be welcomed by English and general mediaeval scholarship alike. The Auchinleck Life of Adam is an early fourteenth-century poem comprising 780 lines in rhyming couplets, composed in the dialect of London or Middlesex and surviving only in the Auchinleck Manuscript (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS 19.2.1) which was committed to writing in the 1330s. The Canticum de Creatione (Oxford: Bodleian Library, olim Trinity College, MS 57) is slightly later; it helpfully gives its own date of composition as 1375. The 1200 lines of the Canticum are arranged in six-line strophes; the dialect appears to be Sussex. Both are paraphrases into English of the Latin Vita Adae, but apparently from different versions of the source. They therefore provide many interesting points of comparison."]

But these were not the only Lives of Adam that were current. A text of a different kind is quoted by George Syncellus in his Chronography, p. 5. He says: I have been necessitated (by the silence of the canonical Scriptures, he means) to give some explanation of this matter (i. e. the dates of Adam's life), such as other historians of Jewish antiquities and Christian history have recorded out of the Leptogenesis (i. e. the Book of Jubilees) and the so-called Life of Adam -- though they may not seem authoritative -- lest those interested in such questions should fall into extravagant opinions. In the so-called Life of Adam, then, is set forth both the number of the days of the naming of the beasts, and that of the creation of the woman and of the entrance of Adam himself into Paradise, and of the precept of God to him about the eating of the tree, and of the entry of Eve into Paradise with him, and the story of the Fall and what followed it, as is subjoined.

"On the 1st day of the week, which was the 3rd day [6] of the creation of Adam and the 8th of the 1st month Nisan, and the 1st of the month of April, and 6th of the Egyptian month Pharmouthi, Adam by a divine gift of grace named the wild beasts. On the 2nd day of the 2nd week he named the cattle; on the 3rd day of the 2nd week he named the fowls; on the 4th day of the 2nd week he named the creeping things; on the 5th day of the 2nd week he named those that swim. On the 6th day of the 2nd week, which was, according to the Romans, the 6th of April, and according to the Egyptians the 11th of Pharmouthi, God took a part of the rib of Adam and formed the woman.

"On the 46th day of the creation of the world, the 4th day of the 7th week, the 14th of Pachon, and 9th of May, the sun being in Taurus and the moon diametrically opposite in Scorpius, at the rising of the Pleiads, God brought Adam into Paradise on the 40th day from his creation.

"On the 50th day of the creation of the world, and 44th of that of Adam, being Sunday the 18th of Pachon and 13th of May, three days after his entry into Paradise, the sun being in Taurus and the moon in Capricorn, God commanded Adam to abstain from eating of the tree of knowledge.

"On the 93rd day of the creation, the 2nd day of the 46th week, at the summer solstice, the sun and moon being in Cancer, on the 25th of the month of June and 1st of Epiphi, Eve the helpmeet of Adam was brought by God into Paradise, on the 80th day of her creation, and Adam took her and named her Eve, which is interpreted Life. Therefore God ordained by Moses in Leviticus, on account of the days of the separation (of Eve from Adam) after her creation, out of Paradise, that the woman should be unclean 40 days after the birth of a male child, and 80 days after the birth of a female. For Adam was brought into Paradise on the 40th day of his creation, wherefore also they bring male children into the Temple on the 40th day according to the Law. But for a female child she is to be unclean 80 days, both because Eve entered into Paradise on the [7] 80th day, and also because of the impureness of the female compared with the male; for when she is unclean she does nor enter the Temple until 7 days after, according to the Law of God.

"This we have copied shortly out of the so-called L ife of Adam for the information of students."

Now, although George Syncellus expressly distinguishes the Leptogenesis (Book of Jubiiees) from the Life of Adam, and subsequently gives quotations avowedly made from it, the fact remains that practically all that he quotes from the Life of Adam occurs in Jubilees (3.1-11): The monthly reckonings and the astronomical details are not there, but all the facts are. It has been held that the Life was an amplified episode taken from Jubilees, or that it is merely another name for Jubilees. The former is to my mind the more likely explanation, for there is another bit of evidence in favour of the separate existence of such a writing. Anastasius of Sinai, writing at the end of the sixth century, says (on the Hexaemeron 7, p. 895): "The Hebrews assert, on the authority of a book not included in the Canon, which is called the Testament of the Protoplasts, that Adam entered Paradise on the 40th day, and that is the view also of a historian, the chronographer Pyrrho, and of manv commentators."

This Testament may very well have been the same as Syncellus's Life. I think we need not greatly regret that we do not possess this Life or Testament: we probably have most of the matter of it either in Jubilees or in the Greek and Latin texts I have described.

The Apocalypse-Testament would have been more interesting, with its hymns of the repentant Adam and the Messianic predictions which I do not doubt that it contained One more testimony to its existence must be put on record. Epiphanius (Heresy, 26), treating of the "Borborite "Gnostics, makes (in § 5) this quotation: "Reading in apocryphal writings that `I saw a tree bearing twelve fruits in the year, and he said to me, "This is the tree of life,"' the heretics interpret it in a way which need not be remembered." Later on [8] (in § 8) he says that they use "Apocalypses of Adam" as well as other spurious books. The plural is merely rhetorical. It has been assumed, plausibly enough, that the quotation about the tree -- which nearly coincides with Rev. 22.2 -- is from the Apocalypse of Adam: but this is no more than an assumption. The importance of the passage is that it gives fourth-century evidence of the currency of the Apocalypse.

Upon the whole I incline (in spite of the evidence of Samuel of Ani) to the opinion that there were two outstanding Adam-books of Jewish origin. One, the Apocalypse (Testament, Penitence), which is gone, except for a few quotations; the other the Life, which is represented in its main features by the Latin and Greek texts (Vita Adae et Evae, and "Apocalypse of Moses"). [See Denis 1.1 on the Adam cycle.]

The only book current under this name was a "Gospel," and Epiphanius is the only authority for its existence. In the same 26th Heresy (2, 3) he says: "Others do not scruple to speak of a Gospel of Eve, for they father their offspring upon her name, as supposedly the discoverer of the food of knowledge by revelation of the serpent that spake to her." "Their words," he goes on, "like those of a drunkard, are fit to move sometimes laughter, sometimes tears. They deal in foolish visions and testimonies in this Gospel of theirs." Thus: "I stood upon a high mountain, and I saw a tall man and another, a short man, and I heard as it were the voice of thunder, and drew near to hearken, and he spake to me and said: `I am thou and thou art I. And wheresoever thou art, there am I, and I am dispersed among all things, and whence thou wilt thou canst gather me, and in gathering me thou gatherest thyself.' "This is pantheistic stuff, of a kind, one would suppose, very easy to write, if a model were furnished. I give it a place here only for the sake of completeness: it is no more an Old Testament apocryph than it is a gospel. [9]

Seth was in like manner the ostensible author of many Gnostic books.\n/ [See now John D. Turner, "The Gnostic Seth," item #2 in Stone/Bergren.] But there is a passage both in Syncellus and Cedrenus which deserves to be quoted as possibly preserving a notice of a lost writing under his name, of less eccentric character. I quote Cedrenus (ed. Migne, col. 8): "Seth is recorded as the third son of Adam. He married his own sister, called Asouam, and begat Enos. Seth signifies resurrection. He was also called God, because of the shining of his face, which lasted all his life. Moses also had this grace, and so veiled himself when he spoke with the Jews, for forty years. Seth gave names to the seven planets, and comprehended the lore of the movements of the heavens. He also prepared two pillars, one of stone and one of brick, and wrote these things upon them." (The rest of this familiar story from Josephus is then given.) "He also devised the Hebrew letters. Now Seth was born in the 230th year of Adam, and was weaned when he was twelve years old, and in the 270th year of Adam Seth was caught away by an angel and instructed in what concerned the future transgression of his sons (that is to say, the Watchers, who were also called Sons of God), and concerning the Flood and the coming of the Saviour. And on the fortieth day after he had disappeared, he returned and told the protoplasts all that he had been taught by the angel. He was comely and well-formed, both he and those that were born of him, who were called Watchers and Sons of God because of the shining of the face of Seth. And they dwelt on the higher land of Eden near to Paradise, living the life of angels, until the 1000th year of the world."

Dr. Charles may be right in regarding this statement (about the revelations made to Seth) as an attempt to transfer to him the wisdom and the position which properly belonged to Enoch. Still, there is evidence, at any rate, of Messianic prophecies attributed to Seth, besides those which Adam revealed to him, and which [10] are recorded in the fragments of the Testament, and more shortly in the Life.

In particular, the Arian author of a commentary on St. Matthew, printed with the works of St. Chrysostom and known as the Opus Imperfectum, quotes a story about the Magi, "among whom (in their own country) was current a writing inscribed with the name of Seth, concerning the star which was to appear and the gifts that were to be offered to Christ." In the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into French by P. Peeters (19I4), the Magi are represented as bringing with them a Messianic prophecy by Adam which Seth had received and handed on to his posterity. These are, of course, Christian compositions, and not necessarily or probably of early date.

In some of the texts from Nag Hammadi, a female figure named Norea/Noreia (Orea) plays a significant role, in association with Seth (and Eve) as well as with Noah. Thanks to Virginia Wayland for the following summary:

In the Hypostasis of the Archons (translated by Bentley Layton) 91.31-92.18, Adam knew Eve and she bore Seth (see Gen 4.25), then Eve bore Norea. Eve says "He has begotten on [me a] virgin as an assistance [for] many generations of mankind." The text adds: "She [Norea] is the virgin whom the Forces did not defile."

In 92.14, Orea (=Norea?) comes to Noah wanting to board the ark, but he refuses, and she blows on the ark causing it to be consumed by fire. Noah rebuilds. (Compare 95.9ff, where Zoe, daughter of Pistis Sofia, breathes into the face of Yaldabaoth and her breath becomes a fiery angel who binds Yaldabaoth and casts him into Tartaros.)

In 92.19-93.2 the chief ruler tries to rape Norea, as he and his associates claim to have "known" Eve [see 89.17ff], but she resists and cries out to the Holy One, the God of the Entirety for rescue: "You are the rulers of darkness. You are accursed. You did not know my mother [the "spirit-endowed woman" of 89.11], but it was your female counterpart that you knew [i.e. the "carnal woman" of 90.2, 13]. For I am not your descendant, but I have come from the world above." The great angel Eleleth then comes in response to her call, saves her from "the grasp of the lawless," and teaches her about her "root." 93.3-97.20 is a revelatory dialogue between Eleleth and Norea in which Eleleth confirms that Norea and her offspring have come "from the primeval father, from above, out of the imperishable light" (96.18ff).

Norea is not in On the Origin of the World, but 102.10 says "But the feminine names are in the First Book of Noraia." The feminine names refer to the seven who appeared in Chaos as androgynous beings. A few lines later the text also refers to "the First Logos/Discourse of Noraia."

The short tractate (2 pages!) called the "Thought of Norea" does not say anything about her birth (or even necessarily that she is a historical person); there she appears more as a Sofia type figure.

G. Stroumsa discusses this in connection with the theme of intercourse between the sons of God and the daughters of men. He connects this story about Norea with traditions about Noah's wife (see further below).

[See now Steven D. Fraade, "Enosh and His Generation Revisited," item #3 in Stone/Bergren. 4Q369 is named "Prayer of Enosh" (see Gen 4.26b) by its editors, H. Attridge and J. Strugnell, in DJD 8, 353-356.]

[Add discussion (here?) of Enoch literature! On the Greek, see Denis 1.2. See also Philip S. Alexander, "From Son of Adam to Second God: Transformation of the Biblical Enoch," item #4 in Stone/Bergren] "Contribution of the Aramaid Enoch Fragments to our understanding of the Books of Enoch" pp 45-96 in Floentino Garcia Martinez, Qumran and Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Brill 1992)

Lamech is the next title in the lists of Apocryphal books which concerns us. There are two antediluvians of the name recorded in Genesis: in 4.25 ff. we have the descendant of Cain, the author of the Song; in 5.25 ff. the descendant of Seth and father of Noah. The former has been the subject of more legend than the latter. The enigmatical Song has had explanations invented for it, of which that which has attained the widest currency is as follows. Lamech was blind, and used to go out shooting with bow and arrow under the guidance of the young Tubal Cain. The function of Tubal was to tell the old man where the game was, and direct his shot. One day Tubal was aware of something moving in the thicket; he turned Lamech's aim upon it, and the creature fell dead. It proved to be their ancestor Cain -- covered with hair and with a horn growing out of his forehead -- for such was the mark set upon him by God. Lamech, on learning what he had done, smote his mighty hands together in consternation, and in so doing smote and slew Tubal Cain. Thus it was that he "killed a man to his wounding and a young man to his hurt."

This tale is current in a separate form in Slavonic. [11] No one has made a better conjecture than that the lost book of Lamech had this for its principal subject. Many are the Jewish writers and mediaeval Western commentators who tell the story, and through the medium of the latter it became one of the regular episodes to be illustrated in continuous Bible histories of the twelfth and later centuries. In England it may be seen on the west front of Wells Cathedral and in the bosses of the nave of Norwich Cathedral; abroad, on the west front of Bourges, of Auxerre, at Toledo, at Orvieto -- all these showing it in sculpture; while in MSS it is very frequently to be met, and in glass -- in "Creation" windows -- is by no means uncommon.

The literature attributed to Noah and his family is various.\n/ [See now Devorah Dimant, "Noah in Early Jewish Literature," item #5 in Stone/Bergren.] We hear of writings under his name and under those of his wife and of one of his sons.

The Book of Noah seems nowhere to be mentioned by any ancient writer; but pieces of it have been incorporated with the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. It must, therefore, be at least as old as the early part of the second century B.C.\n/ "4QMess Ar and the Book of Noah," pp 1-44 in Floentino Garcia Martinez, Qumran and Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Brill 1992).//

The portions of Enoch which Dr. Charles (Jubilees, p. lxxi) describes as Noachic are chapters 2-11.; 60.; 65-69.25; 106-107; and probably 39. 1. 2a; 41. 3-8; 43.- 44.; 54.7-55.2; 59, but this second set has been modified.

Of these chapters, 6-11 contain the story of the fall of the Watchers. The most tell-tale passage is 10.1, where the Most High sends an angel (Arsalaljur, Istrael, or Uriel) "to the son of Lamech, saying, `Go to Noah and tell him in my name,'" etc.

60. is a vision, abruptly introduced, concerned largely with the two monsters Leviathan and Behemoth.

65 begins: "In those days Noah saw how the earth bowed itself," etc. In 5 the first person appears, and we read of "my grandfather Enoch." 67.1, has, "The word of God came to me and spake, `Noah, thy [12] lot is come up before me,' "etc. It is mainly a prophecy of the Flood.

106, 107 may possibly be the beginning of the Book. They deal with the birth of Noah. But Enoch is the speaker.

The former gives Noah's commandments to his sons. At 7.26 he begins abruptly to speak in the first person: "And we were left, I and you, my sons."

The other (10.1-15) tells how the demons afflicted Noah's posterity, and how at his prayer all but a tenth part of them were bound in the pllace of condemnation, and how the angels taught Noah all the remedies for the diseases which tile demons had introduced, which he recorded in a book and gave it to Shem.\2/ Parts of this section exist in Hebrew in a Book of Noah, printed by Jellinek and by Charles, and analyzed by Ro%nsch in his Buch der Jubila%en.

\2/ There is in Syriac a book of prognostics under Shem's name recently edited by Dr. Mingana (Rylands Library Bulletin).

It will be seen that the book was of miscellaneous character; partly legendary and haggadic, partly apocalyptic: not unlike the Book of Enoch, in fact. As to its original compass, we have no indication whatsoever, and the absence of references to it in literature seems to show that it went out of sight and use at an early date. Possibly the speeches of Noah in the Sibylline Oracles (Book 1) may be derived from it, but not probably; there is little that is distinctive in them.

Epiphanius (Heresy, 26) has a good deal to say about a Book of Noria, the wife of Noah, which was used by the Borborite Gnostics. He abuses them for calling her Noria instead of Bath Enos (which in Jubilees, 4.28 is the name of Noah's mother), and relates (presumably on the authority of the Book) that, as they say, "she [13] often tried to be with Noe in the ark" (when it was being built, I understand), "and was not permitted, for the Archon who created the world wished to destroy her with all the rest in the flood; and she, they say, seated herself on the ark and set fire to it, not once or twice, but often, even a first, second, and third time. Hence the making of Noe's ark dragged on for many years, because it was so often burnt by her. For, say they, Noe was obedient to the Archon, but Noria revealed (proclaimed) the Upper Powers and Barbelo, who is of the Powers, and opposed to the Archon, like the other Powers, and taught that the elements that had been stolen from the Mother above by the Archon who made this world and the other gods, angels, and demons who were with him, should be collected from the Power that resides in bodies."

See also above on Seth's sister in the Nag Hammadi Hypostasis of the Archons 91.31-92.18: Adam knew Eve and she bore Seth, then Eve bears Norea. Eve says "He has begotten on [me a] virgin as an assistance [for] many generations of mankind." The text adds: "She [Norea] is the virgin whom the Forces did not defile." Then in 92.14, Orea (=Norea?) comes to Noah wanting to board the ark, but he refuses, and she blows on the ark causing it to be consumed by fire. Noah has to rebuild. In 92.19-93.2 the chief ruler [lawless archon] tries to rape Norea, but she cries out to the Holy One, the God of the Entirety for rescue. 93.3-97.20 is a revelation dialogue between Eleleth and Norea.

Norea is not in On the Origin of the World, but 102.10 reports that "the feminine names are in the First Book of Noraia." The feminine names refer to the seven who appeared in Chaos as androgynous beings. A few lines later the text also refers to "the First Logos/Discourse of Noraia." The short separate tractate (2 pages!) called the "Thought of Norea" does not say anything about her birth or activities, or about the feminine names; there she appears as a Sofia type figure.

The matter about Barbelo and the Archon is, of course, Gnostic from the beginning; but it is curious to notice that in later legend Noah's wife is often referred to as trying to thwart him. A story is current in two widely separate tongues, Slavonic and English, which shows this.

Noah was enjoined to tell no man that he was making the ark; and, miraculously, his tools made no noise when he worked at it. The devil, anxious to prevent the building, went in human form to Noah's wife and asked her where her husband spent his time so secretly. She could not tell. He effectually roused her jealousy and suspicion,and gave her certain grains. "These," he said, "if put in Noah's drink, will force him to tell you all about it." This happened: Noah gave away the secret, and next day, when he went out to work, the first blow of his axe resounded through all the countryside. An angel came to him and rebuked him for his want of caution. The ark had to be finished with wattlework.

Such is the tale as told and pictured in a beautiful fourteenth-century English MS, Queen Mary's Prayerbook (Brit. Mus. Royal 2. B. 7). It is to be found also in a Newcastle mystery play, and in Slavonic [14] countries, whose legends are collected in Da%hnhardt's Natursagen.

The form given there (1.258) is worth setting down, to demonstrate the identity of the two stories. It occurs "in a late Russian re/daction of the Revelations of (Pseudo-) Methodius, with which (on this point) the popular traditions of Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Wotjaks, and Irtysch-Ostjaks, agree in essence."

Before the Lord sent the deluge, He commanded Noah to build an ark secretlv, and not to tell even his wife what he was making. While Noah was at work in a wood on a mountain, the devil came to him and asked what he was doing, but Noah would not tell him. Then the devil went to Noah's wife, and advised her to give her husband an intoxicating drink, and draw the secret from him. When Noah had taken it, his wife began to question him, and he told her all. Next day, when he went back to work, he found the ark all broken into little pieces. The devil had destroyed it. Noah wept night and day and lamented his sin. After that an angel brought him a message of forgiveness and told him to make the ark over again.

The trait of the noiselessness of the axe before Noah betrayed the secret also occurs in the Hungarian story, (l.c. 269).

In some mystery-plays comic relief is obtained by making Noah's wife a shrew and a scold, who will not be induced to enter the ark until the last possible moment.

This incident, in a more complete form, occurs in the Russian legend just quoted. The devil asked Noah's wife how he could get into the ark which was now ready. She could not think of a plan. But he told her that she must refuse to enter the ark until the water had come up, and must wait until Noah uttered the devil's name. She obeyed, and however much Noah called, she would not come, until at last he said, "Come in, you devil." The devil immediately darted into the ark. The sequel to this is portrayed in Queen Mary’s Prayer-book. Noah, on seeing the dove return, says, Benedicite. The devil, [15] unable to bear the sacred word, bursts out through the hull of the ark, but the hole he makes is stopped by the snake, who thrusts his tail into it. Many forms of this story are collected by Dia%hnhardt.

All this is far enough removed from the Book of Noria, yet the legend I have told has this much in common therewith, that it represents Noah's wife as opposed to the making of the ark under the influence of a spiritual being. Epiphanius is, as usual, confusing in his account of the transaction, but we see at least that Noria is kept away from the ark, we know not on what excuse, and we guess that she succeeds in hiding herself in it and burning it.

I conjecture that the Gnostic writer may have taken a simple folk-tale and made it a peg whereon to hang his own very uninviting bag of doctrines.

A Prophecy of Ham is mentioned in an obscure and unlhappily defective passage of Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 6.6 fin.). He is quoting the heretic Isidore, son of Basilides, and Isidore is speaking of the borrowings of Greek philosophers from Jewish Scriptures. He says: "For indeed I think that those who claim to philosophize, if they could find what is the meaning of the winged oak-tree and the embroidered mantle upon it, and all that sacred allegory that Pherecydes devised, drawing his material from the prophecy of Ham (the sentence is imperfect).

This is quite cryptic as it stands, and no great amount of light is forthcoming. In the same book (2.9) Clement quotes Pherecydes as saying, "Zeus makes a mantle great and fair, and on it broiders Earth and Ocean and the house of Ocean," where the words for mantle and broider are those used by Isidore. And a papyrus (Grenfell and Hunt, Greek Papyri, Series 2, no. 11) has given us a little more of the same passage of Pherecydes; but it does not explain the winged oak tree. [16]

The best opinion that is current so far about the prophecy of Ham is that of Eisler (Weltenmantel, etc., 1910), who connects it with the literature that went under the name of Hermes Trismegistus. The writers of that school and the alchemists who came after them (we have a good many Greek alchemical writings) professed to see a connexion between the name of Ham (Cham) and their science of Chemeia: and Chem figured as an interlocutor in some of the written dialogues, and is mentioned under the name of "the prophet Chymes," or "Chemes." The symbolism employed in such circles is likely to have been strange and obscure: it probably conveyed in esoteric fashion their views on cosmogony.

The best opinion that is current so far about the prophecy of Ham is that of Eisler (Weltenmantel, etc., 1910), who connects it with the literature that went under the name of Hermes Trismegistus. The writers of that school and the alchemists who came after them (we have a good many Greek alchemical writings) professed to see a connexion between the name of Ham (Cham) and their science of Chemeia: and Chum figured as an interlocutor in some of the written dialogues, and is mentioned under the name of "the prophet Chymes," or "Chemes." The symbolism employed in such circles is likely to have been strange and obscure it probably conveyed in esoteric fashion their views on cosmogony.

Of Abraham a word must be said.\n/ [See now George W. E. Nickelsburg, "Abraham the Convert: A Jewish Tradition and its Use by the Apostle Paul," item #6 in Stone/Bergren.] The lists give us the name of Abraham simply, and Nicephorus attaches to it the number of 300 lines; the MSS also read 1300 and 3300, but 300 is best supported. The Apostolic Constitutions mention apocryphal writings under the names of the three patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob); Epiphanius says that the Sethians used an Apocalypse of Abraham which was "full of all manner of wickedness," and Origen gives something like a quotation from an Abrahamic book, in these terms (on Luke, Hom. 35). "We read-at least if any one likes to accept a writing of the kind-of the angels of righteousness and of iniquity disputing over the salvation or perdition of Abraham, each band wishing to claim him for its own company." He then refers to a passage in the Shepherd of Hermas. We have these Homilies on Luke only in a Latin version, and I have little doubt that the original of this passage was fuller-apocryphal quotations being apt to be slurred over, if not wholly expunged, by orthodox fourth-century translators; I also suspect that the point of the quotation has been [17] spoilt, and that it was not Abraham's soul, but another, about whom the angels disputed.

Passing from these three references to extant literature, we find two Abraham books, one called an Apocalypse, the other a Testament, of Abraham. The Apocalypse exists only in Slavonic: it is accessible in a translation recently issued by the S.P.C.K., and is of considerable antiquity and great interest. The Testament exists in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Slavonic Roumanian and was edited by me in 1892.\3/ All the texts of it have been more or less tampered with. The plurality of versions and revisions is in favour of the book's antiquity, and it does contain an episode which might be identified with that of Origen s quotation. The Apocalypse does not. We have seen, moreoever, that books of the Three Patriarchs are mentioned in the fourth century: and the Testaments of Isaac and Jacob, especially that of Isaac, have undoubtedly quite ancient elements. With them this, of Abraham, is found in Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic.

\3/ A translation of the Coptic of the Testaments of the Three Patriarchs is promised by Mr. Gaselee for the present series. [See also Denis 1.3 on the Testament of Abraham in Greek.]

So I think the Testament represents an early book, and am sure that the Apocalypse is early. Which of them is the text meant in the lists I will not undertake to say. They do not differ in length so much that we can decide from the stichometry.

Connected with Abraham is Melchizedek.\n/ [See now Birger A. Pearson, "Melchizedek in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism," item #7 in Stone/Bergren.] This mysterious figure interested many early thinkers, as it did the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and a sect who identified him with the Holy Spirit was either christened or christened itself Melchizedekian. Legend, both Jewish and Christian, was busy with him, identifying him sometimes with Shem, sometimes with a son of Shem, and sometimes finding other pedigrees for him. Though we do not hear from other writers of books specially concerned with him, we have two [18] stories of Melchizedek which almost rank, as independent apocrypha. One is in Greek, printed with the works of St. Athanasius, and setting forth that Melchizedek was the son of King Melchi and Queen Salem, and how he was converted to a belief in the true God, and at his prayer his whole kindred was swallowed up in the earth at the moment when his heathen father was about to sacrifice his other son Melchi to idols; how Melchizedek then lived as a solitary on Mount Tabor until Abraham, divinely guided, found him.

The other is a long episode attached in some MSS to the Slavonic Secrets of Enoch. It will be found, in English, in Dr. Charles's edition, pp. 85-93. It is of great interest. It tells first of the succession of Mathuselam to the priesthood vacated by Enoch, then of his death and the accession of Nir, son of Lamech, and next of the miraculous birth of Melchizedek from Sopanima wife of Nir. Melchizedek, like the mysterious Child of Rev 12, is caught away to Paradise forty days after his birth, and thus saved from the Flood. Nir dies, and the priesthood remains vacant. A short account of Noah and the Flood ends the whole. Little attention has hitherto been paid to this story. Both it and the Greek one described above are, in their present form, Christian.

A Testament of Jacob, as has been said, exists in Coptic and other Eastern languages. Besides this (which seems to be an abridged form of a longer original), something called a Testament of Jacob is found in a Greek MS at Paris (Coislin, 296); but it is merely an extract from the 49th chapter of Genesis. Further, a sixteenth-century writer, Sixths Senensis, in his Bibliotheca Sancta, has an entry (p. 70) worth transcribing. "There is current in print a Testament of the patriarch Jacob which Gelasius in the 29th Distinction (of the Decretum of Gratian) reckons among the books of apocryphal character." He here refers to the Gelasian [19] Decree, where many copies read wrongly Testamentum Jacobi for Test. Jobi. What this printed Testament of Jacob, current in Italy in the sixteenth century, may have been, I have not been able to determine with certainty. There is just the chance that, as the Vision of Isaiah was printed in Latin more than once and wholly forgotten, so some really apocryphal work may have had a brief life; but it is far more likely that some réchauffé of the Blessings of Jacob, circulated with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, is meant. Such a thing is, in fact, prefixed to some of the old translations of these Testaments, e. g. the English one printed by Richard Day.

There is, besides, a proper apocryph of Jacob in the shape of the Ladder of Jacob, extant only in Slavonic, and translated by Bonwetsch in the Gottingen Nachrichten for 1900, in two recensions. I shall reproduce this in English in the Appendix to this volume.

The Twelve Patriarchs have their well-known Testaments, of which Dr. Charles has given us an indispensable edition [see now Denis 1.5, and deJonge]. It seems as if behind the present Testaments there lay, in some cases, earlier documents of which we have glimpses. For instance, the story of the wars of Jacob is found in Jubilees and in Jashar, as Dr. Charles sets forth. Then, again, we have a double narrative in the Testament of Joseph. In that of Levi a different phenomenon occurs.\n/ [See now Marinus de Jonge and Johannes Tromp, "Jacob's Son Levi in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and Related Literature," itsm #8 in Stone/Bergren.] A tenth-century MS at Mount Athos (e. of Dr. Charles) makes two long insertions in the text: (a third, in the Testament of Asher, is said to be wholly Christian, and is not printed by Dr. Charles). These two passages, the first of which is not as yet translated, merit notice here.

(i) Test. Levi 2 -- "And as I kept sheep in Abelmaoul, a spirit of understanding from the Lord came upon me, and I beheld how all men had corrupted their ways and how sin was builded upon a wall (so far the ordinary text: now the Athos MS continues) [20] "Then did I wash my garments and cleansed there in pure water, and I washed myself wholly in living water. And I made all my ways straight. Then lifted I up mine eyes and my face to heaven and opened my mouth and spake, and spread out the fingers of my hands and my hands unto truth before the holy (plural). And I prayed and said: Lord, thou knowest all hearts, and all the thoughts of men's minds thou alone perceivest [and now my children with me],\4/ and give me all ways of truth. Put far from me, O Lord, the unjust spirit and the spirit of evil thoughts, and fornication and pride turn thou away from me. Let there be shown me, O Alaster, the holy spirit, and give me counsel and wisdom and knowledge and strength to do such things as please thee arid to find grace in thy sight and to praise thy words. Be with me O Lord, and let not any Satan prevail against me to make me err from thy way. And have mercy on me and bring me to thee to be thy servant and worship thee rightly: let a wall of thy peace he round about me, and a shelter of thy might cover rue from all evil . . . (a corrupt word (paradws): wherefore also blot out lawlessness from under heaven, put an end to lawlessness from off the face of the earth. Purify my heart, O Master, from all (un)cleanness and I will lift up (my hands) to thee; and turn not away thy face from the son of thy servant Jacob. Thou, Lord, didst bless Abraham my father and Sarah my mother, and saidst that thou wouldest give them a righteous seed, blessed for ever. Hearken also to the voice of thy servant Levi, that I may be near thee, and make me a partaker in thy words, to do true judgment for ever, even me and my sons, unto everlasting generations, and remove not the son of thy servant from before thee (from thy face) all the days of eternity. And I kept silence, though I yet prayed."

\4/ Intrusive, or corrupt: query "And now, O Lord, bless me and my children with me," etc.

This is a corrupt and incoherent text, a cento of rather ordinary supplications without a leading thought. The vocabulary of it agrees well enough with that of [21] the Testaments, so that it need not, and I think should not, be regarded as a late compilation; indeed, such a supposition is pretty well put out of court by the fact that the second long insertion is undoubtedly antique. The idea readily occurs to one that there may have been Testaments of Levi, and perhaps of one or two other leading patriarchs, a good deal longer than the present ones, composed before the rest of the Testaments, and that the notion of completing the set of twelve entailed, among other things, the compression of existing texts.

The second insertion, part of which is also found in Aramaic, is translated in Appendix 2 of Dr. Charles's Testaments (1908, p. 228). The greater portion is put in-quite incoherently-after Levi 18. 2. The Aramaic pieces begin at an earlier point than the Greek and carry the story on some way beyond it. A large part of the text has to do with ritual observances, and has much in common with Jubilees 21. It has injunctions. given by Isaac on the authority of Abraham and the Book of Noah (probably a mythical one) to Jacob and Levi, on the ordination of the latter to be priest. After that we have details of the birth of Levi's children, and the text (Aramaic) ends in a paraenetic poem addressed by Levi to his sons. Throughout he speaks in the first person. Dr. Charles regards this fragment as an original source both of the Testaments and of Jubilees, in which case it would have to be as old as the third century B.C.

And now we come to the consideration of a very interesting lost book, the Prayer of Joseph.\n/ [On Joseph more generally, see Harm W. Hollander, "The Portrayal of Joseph in Hellenistic Jewish and Early Christian Literature," item #9 in Stone/Bergren.] The lists have told us that it contained 1100 lines-as many as are assigned to Wisdom; and we have certain fragments of it preserved by Origen, which must be transcribed and expounded in detail. [See now Denis 2.15]

He is speaking of John the Baptist, and, says he: "It will not be out of place to add a notion of our own about him. When we read the prophecy of him, `Behold, I send my angel before thy face,' etc., we reflected if by chance one of the holy angels being upon service were not sent down as a forerunner of our Saviour. It would not, indeed, be surprising if, when the firstborn of all creation became incarnate, for love of man, some should have become emulators and imitators of Christ, and embraced the opportunity of ministering to His kindness to men by means of a like body . . . . Now if any one accepts among the apocrypha current among the Hebrews, what is entitled the Prayer of Joseph, he will derive from it exactly this teaching, expressed in plain terms: that those who from the beginning possessed some special excellence beyond men, and were greatly superior to all other souls, have descended from the estate of angels into human nature. Jacob, at any rate, says: `For I Jacob that speak unto you, I am also Israel, an angel of God and a ruling spirit, and Abraham and Isaac were pre-created (proektisqhsan - a word only found here) before any work. And I Jacob, that am called by men Jacob, yet my name is Israel, that am called by God Israel, a man seeing God, for I am the first begotten of every living; thing that is quickened by God." And he continues: "And I, when I was corning from Mesopotamia of Syria, Uriel the angel of God came forth and said that I had come down (came) to earth and tabernacled among men, and that I was called by name Jacob. He envied me and fought with me, and wrestled with me, saying that his name should have precedence of my name and of the angel that is before all (or that his name and the name of the angel that is before all should have precedence of my name). (All is singular, and should perhaps be rendered `before every (angel).') And I told him his name, and in what order\5/ he is among the sons of God, saying: `Art not thou Uriel, the eighth from me, and I am Israel, an [23] archangel of the power of the Lord, and a captain of captains of thousands among the sons of God? Am I not Israel, the first minister before the face of God?'And I called upon my God by the inextinguishable name." "It is likely" (Origen goes on) "that if these words were really spoken by Jacob, and therefore recorded, that the incident `He supplanted his brother in the womb' (Hos. 12.3) happened intelligently (consciously, sunetws)." He then speaks a little about Jacob and Esau, hinting at their possible pre-existence, and concludes: "But we have made a considerable digression in taking up the matter of Jacob and calling in as evidence a writing not lightly to be despised, to make something more credible of the theory about John, which maintains that he, according to Isaiah's word, being an angel, took a body in order to bear witness to the Light." This passage is summarized by Jerome on Haggai.

The second fragment is in the Philocalia, cap. 23.15, taken from the Commentary on Genesis 3. It is partly to be found in Eusebius' Praep. Evang. 6.2, and Procopius on Genesis quotes from it too. The topic is astrology.

" For, as we showed before that the fact that God knows what every man will do is no obstacle to freewill, so neither do the signs which God has appointed for the giving of information impede freewill: but, like a book containing future events in prophecy, the whole heaven-the book of God, as it is-may contain the future. Wherefore in the Prayer of Joseph this word of Jacob may be thus understood: `For I have read in the tablets of heaven all that shall befall you and your sons.'

(19) "But if Jacob says he has read in the tablets of heaven what is to befall his sons, and upon this point some one objects to us that the opposite of what we have said is shown by the Scripture (for we were saying that man has no apprehension of the signs, whereas Jacob says he has read in the tablets of heaven), we shall say in defence that our wise men, aided by a spirit [24] excelling human nature, are taught secret things not humanly but divinely, as Paul, who says, `I heard unspeakable words,' etc . . . . And, besides, Jacob was greater than man, he who supplanted his brother, and who declares in that same book from which we quoted, `I read in the tablets of heaven:' that he was a captain of captains of thousands of the power (host) of the Lord, and had of old the name of Israel: which fact he recognizes while doing service in a body, being reminded of it by the archangel Uriel."

The next allusion is in the Annals of Michael Glycas, a Byzantine chronicler of the twelfth century. He has given a résumé of the story of Tobit, and when he comes to the name of the archangel Raphael, he says, "And this name Raphael thou hast already learnt out of Tobit, but that of Uriel, as the great Psellus (Michael Psellus, 1081) says, neither the Old nor the New Testament makes known to us. But there is a Hebraic book, unknown to most men, entitled the Prayer of Joseph, where his father Jacob is introduced as talking with this angel [Raphael]; though now the book, like the other apocryphal writings, is rejected and set at nought by the Hebrews." The bracketed name of Raphael must be wrong. The reference to Psellus, much of whose writing remains inedited, has never been followed up. Very likely he depended upon Origen for his knowledge of the Prayer.

In the Ascension of Isaiah, 4.22, a number of prophetic writings are mentioned: the twelve minor prophets are enumerated, and then "the words of Joseph the just, and the words of Daniel." Here it is generally assumed that the Prayer of Joseph is meant. The passage has been thought to be an addition to the Ascension: at latest it would be of the third century, at earliest late in the first.

In the Revue Bénédictin Dom Morin has an article on the library of the Abbey of Gorze in the eleventh century. To it he appends a note upon a collection of Latin homilies attributed to a certain John, which he had seen in MSS, then extant at Reims and at Arras. [25] (Are they still in being?) "I noticed," he says, "a mention of the angel Uriel; on p. 62 are the words, Et pugnavit cum angelo Oriel (and he fought with the angel Uriel)." I do not see that this can refer to anyone but Jacob, and it is not independent of the Prayer of Joseph. It is quite likely, of course, to have been derived from Origen, who, when all is said, remains our sole source of knowledge of the contents of the book.

A very lengthy comment might be written upon these fragments. I will try to compress mine.

First, the title, Prayer of Joseph, is peculiar. No other separate book is so named, though a good many prayers occurring in Scriptural books are dignified with special titles, and some were current separately. Such are the Prayers of Moses (Ps. 90), of Habakkuk, of Solomon in Kings, and in Wisdom, of Jesus son of Sirach (Sirach 51), of Azarias in the furnace (Dan. 3 (LXX/OG)), of Esdras (4 Ezra 8), of Baruch (Apoc. Baruch), of Manasseh. But these are not whole books. The nearest parallel is the case of the Book or History of Asenath/Aseneth, which the Armenian list places in the stead of the Joseph book, and calls the Prayer (prayers) of Asenath. A Greek MS of it has a similar title, Confession and Prayer of Asenath [See Denis 1.4]. The fact that Asenath replaces Joseph suggests the possibility of an integral connexion between the books (so Mgr. Batiffol). I leave tried to establish one, but with little success. The most one can say is that in Asenath. a sort of divinity hangs about both Jacob and Joseph: that Levi "saw writings written in the heavens," that the angel who visits Asenath is "captain of the host of the Lord God, leader of all the army of the Most High." He has a name "written in heaven in the book of the Most High by the finger of God, before all. And the things written in that book are ineffable, such as men may not speak or hear." Joseph is described as the son of the Most High. The description of Jacob says that his arms were as those of an angel, his thighs and legs and feet like a giant's, and he like a man that fought (or might fight) with God, I think it quite probable that the [26] writer of this was acquainted with the Prayer of Joseph but I do not see (as I should like to see) evidence that the one book has drawn much from the other or is modelled upon it.

All that we can fairly gather from the title is that the book must have contained a prayer or prayers of considerable bulk uttered by Joseph (as Asenath contains a long prayer of Asenath). On what occasion it was offered, whether in the pit, or in prison, or on his deathbed, there is no certainty.

From the fragments we call gather one point of importance. Jacob says, "I that speak unto you, I have read what shall befall you and your sons." He is therefore addressing some or all of his descendants, and he (toes so in the terms used by the Patriarchs in the Testaments when they are on their deathbeds. Also, I think, the revelation of his angelic nature is one which would naturally be reserved until the end of his life. Further, in Gen. 48, where the blessing of Joseph's sons is related, there are coincidences of expression: "My God," and "When I was coming from Mesopotamia of Syria." Thus the book contained a dying speech of Jacob, of which we leave a portion. I am tempted to think that it was addressed to Joseph and his sons Ephraim and Manasseh The grounds are naturally slight: (a) We already have, in Genesis 49, the full address of Jacob to the twelve; (b) there are coincidences of language with the episode of Joseph's sons in Gen. 48.

The matter and doctrine of the fragments occupy us next. The pre-existence of Jacob as an angel, and of Abraham and Isaac is here taught in the crudest way. The terms, however, are confusing. If Jacob is first begotten of every living thing, is he senior to Abraham and Isaac? One must doubt whether the writer had thought this out. He is bent on emphasizing the dignity of Jacob, and finds himself forced to mention the two other Patriarchs.

On pre-existence of souls in general a good deal has been written: an essay by F. C. Porter in O. T. and [27] Semitic Studies in Memory of President Harper, is a notable contribution to the subject. His thesis is that the Jewish doctrine of the pre-existence of ordinary human souls does not imply a belief in a full personal existence of them. We, however, are concerned with the personal pre-existence of certain individuals. Rabbinic literature has a little light to throw on this. The Midrash Rabba, 1.§ 4, gives (as do other books) a list of things that were created before the world. The Torah and the Throne of Glory (Prov.. 8.22, Ps. 93.2): these were created already; four more came into God's mind to be created: the Patriarchs (Hos. 9. 10: I saw your fathers as the first-ripe in the fig-tree at her first time), Israel (Ps 74.2), the Sanctuary (Jer. 17.12), the name of Messiah (Ps. 72.17). Sometimes Repentance is added. We find the list also in Midrash Tanchuma and the Pirke R. Eliezer (where the phrase is "the spirits of the fathers"). It does not quite come up to our text in precision of statement. Older books can be cited. Enoch 48. 3, says of the Son of Man, "Before the sun and moon and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were made, his name was named before the Lord of Spirits." Moses (Assumption, 1.14) says of himself, "God foresaw (not created) me before the foundation of the world that I should be the mediator of his covenant."

Ideas about pre-existence were in the air, and it is even possible that the words of Christ in John 8.58, "Before Abraham was, I am," are to be regarded as showing a consciousness, and containing a contradiction, of such beliefs.

As to the phrase "first-begotten of every living thing," one O.T. text may be cited as a parallel, Exod. 4.22, "Israel is my firstborn son"; but far nearer is St. Paul's phrase in Col, 1.15, "the firstborn of every creature."

In the Shepherd of Hermas, Vision 3.2, 5, we read of the (seven) holy angels who were first created. Clement of Alexandria mentions them rather frequently, e. g. in Str. 6.143: "Seven are they that [28] have the greatest power, the first begotten rulers of the angels." We also find them in the Pirke R. Eliezer, 4: "The seven angels that were first created."

" That his name should have precedence over my name and over that of the angel before every . . ." Schu%rer would read, "and before every angel" (pro tou pantos aggelou for tou pro pantos aggelou) but I do not think the text can be mended so easily. It depends on one sole MS, and I fear it is defective. More important is it to notice another Pauline parallel: "He hath given him a name which is above every name," etc. No Jewish Scripture supplies a better.

Uriel is the wrestling angel. This, again, is peculiar. The uniform Rabbinic tradition says that it was Michael, Pseudo-philo (Bibl. Antiq., 18.6) that it was the angel who is over the praises, the Ladder of Jacob that it was the archangel Sarekl: in Pirke R. Eliezer the wrestling angel gives his own name Israel to Jacob. I do not trace the reason for choosing Uriel. He figures a good deal in Enoch: in 20.2 he is the angel over the world and over Tartarus, he guides Enoch to remote regions and shows him the movements of the heavenly bodies. He is one of the four great angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael being his compeers. To Adam he comes as the angel over repentance and tells him of the hours of day and night. To Esdras he shows visions. In the Apocalypse of Peter (and Sib. Orac. 2 ) he brings souls out of Hades to judgment. In the Testament of Solomon we read of a demon who was an offspring of Uriel, and Uriel is summoned to control him.

He appears in our fragment in a somewhat unfavourable light, seeming to take advantage of Jacob's (Israel's) confinement in a human body to gain a superiority over him, which he (no doubt) hopes to maintain when Jacob's earthly life is over.

Of the phrases "come down to earth" and "tabernacled among men," the second is paralleled by Baruch 3.38, Rev. 21.3, and especially Sirach 24.8-10 - the first has its closest illustration in Eph. 4.9-10. [29]

"Uriel the eighth from me." Another contradiction of tradition. Israel appears here as the first of a band of seven, all of whom were before Uriel. Uriel is elsewhere always one of the first seven, and usually of the first four. The place here claimed by Jacob-Israel is that assigned by almost universal consent to Michael.

" And I called on my God by the inextinguishable name." Does this begin a fresh sentence and mean that after thus addressing Uriel, Jacob called upon God? or is it to be connected with the last clause, meaning that, in the discharge of his functions in heaven, Israel invoked Him? In this latter case the greatness of the Name would be the important point, and the intention would be to show how exalted was Jacob's ministry. In spite of the fact that the verb is in the aorist and not in the imperfect, I incline to the latter interpretation. The expression "inextinguishable name" I have not as yet found elsewhere, though I believe it to exist.

These are the chief points in the first fragment. The second is: "I read in the tablets of heaven all that shall befall you and your sons."

The tablets of heaven figure in three books, Enoch (four times) jubilees (over twenty times), the Testaments of tire Twelve Patriarchs (thrice).

The Enoch passages are 81.1, 2 (the book of the deeds of all men, to the remotest generations), 93.2 (they contain the destinies of the righteous), 103.2 (the reward of the righteous), 106.19, 107.1 (generation after generation will transgress).

In Jubilees, 3.10, the laws of the purification of women are written in the heavenly tablets, and in sixteen other passages decrees or legal enactments are registered in them. In three cases events are recorded as they happen, and in two others, future matters. But to us the really important passage is 32.21ff. Jacob at Bethel (not on his flight in Gen. 28, but later in his life) "saw in a vision of the night, and behold an angel descended from heaven with seven tablets in his hands, and he gave them to Jacob, and he read them [30] and knew all that was written therein which would befall him and his sons throughout all the ages."

In the Testaments, Levi (5) speaks of the slaughter of Shechem as written on the tablets (as Jubilees 30.19, 20), Asher (2) says that the distinction between clean and unclean is declared there (also in the manner of Jubilees); and in 7.5, "I have read (or known) in the tablets of the heavens that ye will surely be disobedient," etc. In each of these cases Dr. Charles eliminates the phrase "tablets of the heavens" for reasons which seem to me unsound. In each case there is a distinct resemblance to the use of the phrase in Jubilees.

We cannot be wrong, I think, in connecting the phrase in the Prayer of Joseph with the passage in Jubilees 31, and in supposing that in the Prayer the same vision of Jacob at Bethel is referred to.

The leading idea of the principal fragment is that angels can become incarnate in human bodies, live on earth in the likeness of men, and be unconscious of their original state. Israel does so apparently in order that he may become the father of the chosen people. It is, I believe, a doctrine which is unique in Jewish teaching.

It has been held -- e.g. by J. T. Marshall (Hastings' Dict. Bible, 11. 778) -- that the Prayer was definitely anti-Christian: it claimed for the Patriarchs the sane sublime and supernatural characteristics as Christians claimed for Our Lord. Also, whereas in early Christian exegesis the wrestling angel is identified with the Logos, the pre-existent Christ (as by Justin and Origen), the status of that angel is here lowered in favour of Israel. These are substantial arguments. I would add that the fragments appear to show knowledge of Christian ideas and terminology. These are the points: (a) preexistence of the Patriarchs as opposed to "Before Abraham was, I am"; (b) incarnation; (c) firstborn of every living thing; (d) "his name should have precedence of mine."

Upon the whole I incline to think that the author of [31] the Prayer of Joseph knew something of Christian theology and indulged in some side-hits at it. Whether that was the main object of the book we cannot tell; but Origen treats it with such respect that I think its attack on Christianity cannot have been very overt.

In the Journal of Theological Studies 20 (1918) p. 20, Mr. Vacher Burch advocates the view that the Prayer was pro-Christian, and based on the primitive Testimonia against the Jews. "The chief theme of the fragments . . . is the surpassing of one angel-appearance of the Christ by another -- of Uriel by Israel." It is now known that Uriel was a Testimony hypostasis of this nature, for the Ethiopic Narrative of St. Clement (Budge, Contendings of the Apostles 2.479) contains this helpful passage: "And I (Peter) gave them commandments concerning circumcision according to the Law of Moses, and God (i. e. Christ) appeared unto me in the form of the Angel Uriel, and commanded me to do away the Old Law and to bring in the New." He refers also to the fact that Justin Martyr makes Jacob and Israel names of Christ. I cannot reproduce the whole of the passage here: the thesis is to me unconvincing at present. It is obscurely put by Mr. Burch, and needs restatement in an expanded form to make it plausible, or indeed intelligible. See further under Hezekiah.

The Penitence of Jannes and Mambres [see Denis 2.18, Pietersma] is mentioned in the Gelasian Decree. Origen (on Matthew 25) says: "Paul's statement, `As Jannes and Mambres withstood Moses' (2 Tim. 3.8) is not found in the `public' scriptures, but in a secret (apocryphal) book entitled the Book of Jannes and Mambres." The writer called Ambrosiaster, on 2 Timothy, says: "This example is from the Apocrypha. For Jannes and Mambres were brothers, magicians or poisoners, of the Egyptians, who thought they could resist by the art of their magic the mighty works of God which were being accomplished through [32] them. But when the might of Moses in his works proved greater, they were humbled, and confessed, with the pain of their wounds (cf. Philostorgius, below), that it was God that wrought in Moses."

These are the old allusions that imply the existence of a book of Jannes and Mambres. There is a good deal of scattered legend about them, chiefly Jewish. They are the two sons of Balaam (Num. 21.22): they educated Moses (Abulpharaj): they were drowned in the Red Sea, or slain with their father by Phinehas. St. Macarius visited their tomb, which was full of demons, from whom he obtained leave to enter and look round. He found a brazen vessel hanging by an iron chain in a well and much consumed by time, and also a number of dried-up pomegranates (Palladius, Hist. Lausiaca).

Another set of allusions is in heathen writers. Numenius, quoted by Eusebius, names them, and so does Artapanus. Pliny speaks confusedly (N. H. 30.2) of the magicians Moses, Jannes, Jotapa; and Apuleius (Apology, 90), enumerating famous wizards, names Jesus perhaps, and certainly Moses, and Jannes, Apollonius, Dardanus, Zoroaster, Hostanes.

The allusions to the two wizards which occur in Oriental chronicles have been collected by Iselin in Zeitschrift f. Wissenschaftl Theol., 1894, 321.

We now come to consider possible fragments of the book. Photius's excerpts from Philostorgius's Ecclesiastical History has one (9. 2, p. 166, ed. Bidez): "Moses chastised Jannes and Jambres with sores and sent the mother of one of them to death." This must have been introduced by Philostorgius as an illustration the ninth book of the History is concerned with the reign of Valens.

In the eleventh-century MS Cotton Tiberius B. V., appended to a tract On the Marvels of the East, is the following fragment in Latin and Anglo-Saxon, illustrated by a beautiful picture of Mambres doing an incantation, and hell open with souls in it.

" Mambres opened the magical books of his brother Jannes, and did necromancy and brought up from hell [33] the shade of his brother. The soul of Jannes answered him saying: I thy brother died not unjustly, but of a truth justly, and judgment will go against me, for I was wiser than all wise magicians, and I withstood the two brethren, Moses and Aaron, who did great signs and wonders: therefore died I and was brought down from among men into hell, where there is great burning, and the pit (lake) of perdition, whence there is no coming up. And now, my brother Mambres, take heed to thyself in thy lifetime to do good to thy sons and thy friends: for in hell there is nothing of good, but sadness and darkness: and when thou shalt have died and shalt be in hell among the dead, thy dwelling-place and thy abode (seat) will be twenty (probably two) cubits broad and four cubits long."

With the Penitence of Jannes and Mambres in the Gelasian Decree is classed the Penitence of Cyprian (the magician and martyr of Antioch, the parent of the Faust-legend). This we have, and it gives an account of his initiation into the devil's service. There are two mentions of our wizards in it: § 6. The prince of the devils praises Cyprian, and calls him a youth of good gifts, a new Jambres, apt for the ministry. § 17. Cyprian says of himself: "I do not believe there was ever a worse man than I was: I outdid the Jannes and Jambres of history. They in the midst of their lying wonders acknowledged the finger of God, but I was wholly set upon it that there was no God. If God did not pardon them who even partly recognized Him, how should He pardon me who ignored Him altogether? "In this view the Egyptian magicians, it seems, did not find forgiveness.

The Greek Acts of St. Katherine are printed in three texts by J. Viteau (Paris, 1897). The first says that Katherine had studied all the art of Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, Homer, Plato, Philistion, Eusebius, and the necromancies of Jannes and Jambres and the Sibyl. The second repeats, this, more than once, and also gives two quotations from Jannes and Mambres, the first of which defies translation, but adds: "They show, to [34] them that seek to behold, the faces (or persons) that have slept in the earth from the ages." The other is better: "But concerning the mountains (sic-? mules) Jannes and Jambres spake, signifying the sign of the manger of the Lord; and concerning the stone whereby the stone of the tomb (a verb is wanted), as also it was said by the prophet: The stone which the builders rejected," etc.

If this is a genuine quotation at all (and one from the Sibyl which precedes it is correct) it implies Messianic, even Christian, predictions in the book.

Philostorgius by speaking of the mother "of one of them" (qaterou) contradicts the tradition that the two men were brothers, if he is to be taken literally.

The Latin fragment remains the best. It would form a possible opening for the book, or it might come near the end of it: it would hardly be the closing note. Mambres must have made some reply, and even perhaps repented as a finale. But we must confess ourselves quite ignorant of the general character of the Penitence. It was older, we see, than Origen, anti it may have been Christian. Cyprian's Penitence is possibly modelled upon it to some extent.

By way of appendix a curious fragment may find a place here. In the Roman edition of the works of Ephraem Syrus (2, p. 405), iii in the midst of the Syriac Testament of Ephraem is suddenly interpolated the following piece of Syriac verse, which has no link of connexion with its context, and which I here translate from the Latin rendering

" In the time of Moses the magicians rose up against the son of Amram but the finger of God overcame them, as they themselves also confessed.

" The righteousness of God smote the wicked men with an evil sore, that even against their will they might proclaim the truth: for the Truth is wont to bear patiently until deceivers repent: but when they re puffed up and think themselves safe, then are they cast down into the pit.

" For when Moses was sent to bring the people out of [35] Egypt, at the bidding of Pharaoh's Lord he came to Pharaoh and told him the command of God. When Pharaoh heard it he was driven to rage and fury and turned to blasphemy; and when the matter was published throughout the city and was come to the ears of the nobles of those parts, some said: It is the command of God and must be obeyed at all costs.

" But the King, when he saw Moses, feared, and began to feel the punishment that hung over him.

" Is there any that does not fear at the sight of the Lord? or who would not tremble at beholding God? So Pharaoh feared Moses, because he was the god of Pharaoh.

" The whole multitude of the magicians of Egypt hasted together to see a new marvel, for in the face of Moses was the angel of fire and wind, surpassing the brightness of the sun and of lightning, so that whoever fixed his eyes on him took him for a god; but they who heard his voice -- for he was stammering and stuttered -- despised and contemned him as a man. And one affirmed that he was come down from heaven: another set him wholly at naught: for, said he, if there were any great thing in him, surely he would have healed himself.

" Now Moses, as you have heard, knew the tongue of that country well; bred up in the house of Pharaoh, he had drunk in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, as the Apostle witnesses to us of him. And though he were not aware of it himself, yet he had the Holy Spirit dwelling in him, from whom he had learned all that had happened from Adam even to his own days, and was not ignorant of what the magicians were plotting against him.

" So Pharaoh called together all the magicians and their disciples and spoke to them of Moses thus: It is now time that whatever power you have you should put forth for the common good. When war is upon us there is need of mighty men, and the skill of physicians appears then when diseases are rife. Throughout all the world the people will laugh at us with great disgrace [36] of our name if we are overcome by this stammering stutterer. Be therefore strong in conflict till we bear off victory: contend valiantly till we triumph. There is no man who knows not our name or extols you not as workers of wonders: we (ye?) have been wont to be Helpers even of Kings when war came upon them. If then they see us made a laughing-stock to a stammerer, much more shall we be despised by all other men. Up then, put on a manly spirit, and go forth to battle like heroes of renown, that we may gain an eternal name; and so all who hear of it may be smitten with fear and not dare to resist our people. And though I excel in royal dignity, yet I uphold the common cause with you. To all of us there will be like honour or like shame.

"The magicians, stirred by these words, as if made drunk with wine, promised seas and mountains to Pharaoh King of Egypt. The sun, said they, shall not again rise to lighten Egypt before the son of Amram has ceased to live. What time thou, O King, takest quiet slumber in thy bed, then shalt thou hear that Moses has been punished by a shameful death. And this, indeed, we account as nothing: it is child's play. Come then, enter thy chamber and climb up upon thy bed and sleep: for the death of Moses is at the doors, and he shall not, believe us, see another day.

" Thus the magicians left Pharaoh. And he, believing their words, could not sleep for his impatience, looking for the dawn of clay: nor, had he slept, could he rest without the coming of the same images to him in his slumber.

" But they, practising their arts, called up devils and sent them against Moses. The evil spirits rushed in hosts upon the holy man: but the power of God and the prayer of the righteous one drove them back as the storm scatters the fire and the wind the smoke. So did the demons fly from the face of Moses as the conquered flee in battle before the victors, and thieves turn their backs when they hear the voices of the watchmen approaching.

" As light dispels darkness, so did Moses drive away [37] the wicked ones. Headlong they returned to the magicians by whom they had been hired; and, said they: We lose our labour against this man, for he is stronger than we, and we cannot get near to the border of the place where he dwells.

" Meanwhile the day dawned, and Pharaoh anxiously expected that what the magicians had promised him, of the death of Moses, should have been fulfilled. But when the appointed time was past, and there came none to tell the tidings he desired, the King called the magicians and spake thus to them: Why, said he, hath the matter fallen out otherwise than as you promised? for you said, Moses shall not see another day after this.

" The magicians said to him: Have patience a little the man's death is indeed near, but we can do nothing in haste, O King, and this day allows it not, for to-day it is new moon: whey the moon begins to wane, then shall the life of Moses fail.

" This was the cause they pretended to him, until the appointed hour should come to Moses: but the King received their words gladly, being subject to the same errors as they.

" The magicians therefore set to work: they took somewhat of the hairs and garments of Moses, and made an image of him, and laid it up in a tomb, and set evil demons against it. Immediately the demons came, and the princes of them: Satan was ready with his hosts, all of them in divers forms, to destroy Moses.

" They ran against him in a troop. But when they lifted up their eyes to the holy prophet and saw him encompassed by a host of angels, like as it was once with Elisha, they could not bear the look of him, much less attack him, and all together they fled away in confusion with cries and howlings.

" This thing brought the magicians to perplexity. They turned therefore to other means to save their name and not be found guilty of deceit and lying before the King. Accordingly they tools a cup full of wine and by their enchantments compelled vipers and dragons to spue their venom into it; and when it was ready they [38] gave the cup to Moses, that he might drink it and burst asunder. Take, said they, this wine which the King of Egypt sends thee, and drink it, for to this pinnacle of honour he will have thee raised, as he hath long ago desired; and this wine itself is like the desire of the King, for it is old, and by reason of length of time is become muddy and dark.

" At this Moses smiled, and took the cup and signed it in the name of God and drank the wine without any hurt. But that they might know that their deceit was not hidden from him, he turned to them and said: Come, tell the King, who hath sent me to drink wine mingled with the poison of serpents, that none of these things do any hurt to the servants of God.

The elegancies of the poetic form are not so excessive as to disguise the story, and it is one which I do not find elsewhere. The drinking of the poison is like, or has been made like, the famous miracle of St. John the Evangelist: the "signing "of the cup may well be a touch of the poet's; it is the only one that is obviously Christian. I should not be at all surprised to find that we had here a paraphrase of part of the story of Jannes and Mambres. Note that the unsuccessful attacks of the demons are just such as occur in the Penitence of Cyprian which is linked with that of the Egyptian wizards. The (Latin) Acts of St. James the Great contain something similar, in the tale of Hermogenes and Philetus.

EIdad and Medad (Modat) [ see Denis 2.17] was a short book of 400 lines, longer than Ephesians (312), shorter than 2 Corinthians (590). Of it we have one certain fragment. Hermas, who in the Shepherd makes many unacknowledged borrowings, quotes a scripture by name once and once only. In Vision 2.5 he says: "The Lord is near unto them that turn to Him, as it is written in Eldad and Medad who prophesied to the people in the wilderness."

We cannot doubt that the matter of the book was the [39] prophetic utterances of Eldad and Medad. Legend has not been very busy with their names, but the Midrashim (Tanchuma) and Targums say something of them and of what they prophesied. They are made half-brothers of Moses, in two ways. (i) According to the author of the Hebrew Questions on Chronicles (4.17), attributed to Jerome, they had other names, Epher and Jalon. After the giving of the Law, he goes on, Moses commanded his father Amram to put away his wife Jochebed, because she, being Levi's daughter, was aunt to her husband. Amram did so, married again, and Eldad and Medad were his offspring. (2) A Midrash says that after Amram's death Jochebed married Elizaphan and bore Eldad and Medad to him. The gift of prophecy was bestowed on them (Sanhedrin, i) because when chosen among the seventy Elders they said they were unworthy of the honour, Tanchuma says they prophesied of things that were to happen as long as forty years after, whereas the other Elders only predicted things near at hand. Alone among the Elders their names are recorded; they kept their gift of prophecy and entered the Promised Land. They prophesied of the death of Moses and succession of Joshua (so also Pseudo-Philo); or, say others, of the quails; or of Gog and Magog.

We have seen that Hermas at Rome quotes Eldad and Medad In Clement of Rome's letter, and in the Homily that is called his second Epistle, a prophetical passage is quoted without a name, which Bishop Lightfoot guessed to be taken from this same book. The guess is an interesting one, and the passage shall be given here. There are considerable differences between the two quotations.

1 Clem. 23 (2 Clem 11): "Far be from you that scripture where it saith (for the prophetic word also saith): Miserable are the double-minded which doubt in their soul (heart), which say: (all) these things we heard in our fathers' days also, and lo! we have grown old and nothing of these things hath befallen us (but we expecting from day to day have seen none of these [40] things). O foolish ones, compare yourselves to a tree; take the vine; first it sheddeth the leaf, then a shoot cometh (then a leaf, then a flower: 2 Clem. omits the next words), and after that a sour berry, then a cluster fully ripe. (Here 1 Clem. ends; 2 Clem continues: So also my people hath had unquietnesses and afflictions: afterward it shall receive good things)."

The resemblance to 2 Peter 3.4, etc. (where is the promise of his coming?) is pointed out by Lightfoot.

The difficulty I find in acquiescing in Lightfoot's conjecture is that I do not quite see whom Eldad and Medad would be addressing. In the story as we have it in Numbers 11, their prophecy is uttered not very long after the giving of the Law, and just before the gift of the quails. The people have not been long in the wilderness -- not long enough, it seems to me, to make it appropriate that they should say "we have grown old in looking for the fulfilment of the promises." Such language would be more fitting in the mouth of Israel when in exile and hoping for the Return. And so I think that those are perhaps more likely to be right who suggest that the apocryphal Ezekiel is the source of this passage.

The book of Og the Giant who is said by the heretics to have fought with a dragon after the Flood. This is the most sensational entry in the Gelasian Decree. How we should like to have the book in which such stirring incidents were related!

What can we elicit from records, or reasonably conjecture, about it? It was circulated by heretics. What heretics? I guess the Manichaeans, for in a list of Manichaean books given by Timotheus, Presbyter of Constantinople (Fabricius, Cod. Apocr. N.T. 1, 139) is one called "The matter (or treatise) of the Giants" (h( tw=n giga/ntwn pragmatei/a), which may fairly be identified with the Book of Og [or more probably, with the "Book of the Giants" mentioned elsewhere]. Other Manichaean writings -- the Foundation and the Treasure of Life -- are condemned, be it noted in passing, in the Gelasian Decree.

But how should Og, who was conquered and slain by Moses [Num 21.33, 32.33, Deut 1.4, 3.1-13, 4.47, 29.7, 31.4; note that Deut 3.11 identifies him with the giants, and presents a legend about his unusual bedstead], have fought with a dragon after the Flood? It is the constant [frequent, at least -- see Ginzberg 3.346 = 6.117, 119] Rabbinic story that he was one of the antediluvian giants, and that he escaped the Flood by riding on the roof of Noah's ark, being fed by Noah [Ginzberg 1.160, n.35] and, further, that he was identical with Eliezer the servant of Abraham [Ginzberg 1.203 on "Ogi" and/or Eliezer, 3.344 on their identity]. Once one of his teeth fell out, and Abraham made an armchair out of it [Ginzberg 3.344, he made a "bed" from it]. This and many other stories demonstrating his great size [e.g. Ginzberg 3.343], may be found collected in Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judenthum [around 1700 (1711\2)] or Baring-Gould's Legends of Old Testament Characters [1871; and more fully in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews]. But there is nothing in them about a dragon.\n/

An unexpected source gives what may be a reminiscence of that incident. In the metrical Anglo-Saxon Dialogue of Salomon [or Solomon] and Saturn\n/ are the following question and answer

Only a reminiscence, clearly, if that: for Og, we see, survived the combat for many centuries [to the time of Moses!]. But quite possibly a reminiscence, for the hero is of the right sort of date, the friend of Nimrod, and early enough to be connected with the rise of the whole tribe of venomous beasts.

Dragons and floods are not unconnected in mythology. Sometimes the dragon, it is thought, is a torrent or flood personified; sometimes (as in Rev 12.15) he is the source of it. We may remember that it was after the Deucalion flood that the Python took up his abode at Delphi, where Apollo slew him. Some such myth as that lies, perhaps, at the bottom of the lost story of Og.

MOSES (APOCALYPSE, TESTAMENT, ASSUMPTION, JUBILEES)

To Moses two entries are devoted in the lists. We have the Testament, 1100 lines long, and the Assumption, 1400. Besides that, an Apocalypse of Moses is named; George the Syncellus says that Gal, 5.6; 6.15 ("in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything," etc.) is from the Apocalypse of Moses; a marginal scholium in several MSS of the Epistles agrees that it is "from an apocryphon of Moses." There must be some mistake. The only text in Galatians which could be plausibly assigned to such a source is 3.19: "It was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator," which might be an allusion to the Assumption (God foresaw me . . . to be the mediator of His covenant): no conceivable Jewish book could have contained the statement of Gal. 5. 6, and no Christian forger of early times ever did his work quite so badly. At some ancient date the marginal reference must have been attached to the wrong place, and our authorities have copied it in its dislocated state. (A passage which might more plausibly be referred to a book called the Apocalypse of Moses is 2 Cor. 11.14 (Satan is transformed into an angel of light), for this does happen in the Life of Adam: and the Greek recension of that is called the Apocalypse of Moses.)

Two Apocalypses of Moses we have: the name is an alternative title of the Book of Jubilees [Denis 2.19], according to George Cedrenus; and there is a Greek Apocalypse of Moses (ed. Tischendorf, etc.) which is really nothing but a Life of Adam, identical in great part with the Latin Vita Adae, et Evae. Besides this there is a (late?) Hebrew Apocalypse, of Moses' progress through the seven heavens. [43]

What of the Testament? There is one express quotation from it in a Greek catena on the Octateuch, giving the dimensions of the Tower of Babel, and this proves to be a quotation of Jubilees. Some therefore think the Te

Nicephorus (= Synopsis here)	No. of lines.\1/	\|	Sixty Books.	\|	Mechithar of Airivank (see further below, Secret Books of the Jews)
		\|	Adam.	\|	Adam
Enoch	4800	\|	Enoch.	\|	Enoch
		\|	Lamech.	\|
		\|		\|	Sibyl
Patriarchs	5100	\|	Patriarchs.	\|	Twelve Patriarchs
Prayer of Joseph	1100	\|	Prayer of Joseph.	\|	Prayers of Joseph
[see below]		\|	Eldad and Modad	\|
Testament of Moses	1100	\|	Testament of Moses	\|
Assumption of Moses	1400	\|	Assumption of Moses	\|	Ascension of Moses
Abraham	300	\|		\|
Eldad and Modad	400	\|	[see above]	\|	Eldad, Modad
		\|	Psalms of Solomon	\|	Psalms of Solomon
Of Elias the Prophet	316	\|	Apocalypse of Elias	\|	Mysteries of Elias
		\|	Vision of Esaias	\|
Of Sophonias the Prophet	600	\|	Apocalypse of Sophonias	\|
Of Zacharias the father of John	500	\|	Apocalypse of Zacharias	\|
		\|	Apocalypse of Esdras	\|
Pseudepigrapha of Baruch		\|		\|
Pseudepigrapha of Ambacum (Habakkuk)		\|		\|
Pseudepigrapha of Ezekiel		\|		\|
Pseudepigrapha of Daniel		\|		\|	Seventh Vision of Daniel

The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament: their Titles and Fragments Collected, Translated and Discussed (Updated Version) [Parabiblical Literature Associated with Jewish Scriptural (OT) Names] [["Other Scriptures & Alien Scriptures in Jewish/Chr Traditions"]]

INTRODUCTORY

THE LOST APOCRYPHA OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament: their Titles and Fragments
Collected, Translated and Discussed (Updated Version)
[Parabiblical Literature Associated with Jewish Scriptural (OT) Names]
[["Other Scriptures & Alien Scriptures in Jewish/Chr Traditions"]]