SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE

THE GREAT REJECTED BOOKS

OF THE BIBLICAL APOCRYPHA

INTRODUCTION

THE CHIEF WRITINGS WHICH HAVE SOUGHT AND BEEN DENIED ADMISSION TO THE BIBLE

THE

HE books included in the present volume are those which, loosely speaking, we call The Apocrypha." They have a strange and piercing interest of their own. They are very old; most of them are very noble of sentiment and high of purpose; yet for one reason or another they have been rightly rejected from the Holy Scriptures into which they sought admission. The origin of most of them is doubtful. Even the language in which they were originally written is uncertain. We can not group them definitely as Hebraic or even as Semitic. Some may have Greek sources, and thus spring from the thought of the great Aryan races, rather than from the teaching of the Semites. All of them have Aryan touches added to their earlier ideas, and difficult to disentangle. Hence our volume, while mainly founded on Hebraic literature, drifts far from it, and the books here given show more of the Western world, the European spirit, than any other early literature of the East.

The fact that these books have been denied a place in our Scriptures has gradually weighed down even the meaning

of the word "apocrypha." Originally it meant "secret teachings," then it was accepted as implying that the teachings were of doubtful authority, and to-day even our dictionaries define the word as meaning "false and deceitful.” Clearly, under a name which has so many meanings, many different kinds of books may be included, some wonderful, secret, and profound, others of doubtful worth, and some foolish or even deliberately treacherous. We must separate these classes in our minds.

To most readers of to-day the name

Apocrypha" will bring to mind, first of all, those books or parts of books still frequently printed in Protestant Bibles under that heading, grouped together at the close of the Old Testament. These are too well-known to be reprinted here. They are apocrypha" in the middle sense of the word, books of doubtful authority. Catholic churches still accept them as part of the hallowed Scriptures. All the Christian world did so until Luther's day; and the chief reason for their rejection by the Protestant churches is that no Hebrew originals of these books are known. They exist only in the Greek version of the Old Testament. That is to say, the early Christians, in accepting as their own the Bible of the Jews, may have been mistaken in including these unquestionably pre-Christian writings as part of the Hebraic canonical books. These apocrypha were part of the later Jewish "wisdom" literature, and as such were revered by the learned Jews of Egypt, who gave them to the world as part of their Greek version of the Jewish Bible. But we have no definite evidence that, before the destruction of Jerusalem (A.D. 70), the Jews who dwelt there had accepted these works as "holy" or "inspired."

An entirely different class of apocrypha are those of later date, or what might be called the Christian apocrypha. There were naturally many tales of Jesus, which spread from land to land. Some of these may have been based on actual incidents of his life, and a good Christian might well have fancied he was doing a service to his religion when he wrote down one of these tales and so saved it from loss or from

further additions. It was in this way, as readers of our second Arabic volume will recall, that Sunan, or traditions of Mohammed, were at first loosely preserved, and were then gathered into a fixed form some two hundred and fifty years after the Prophet's death. Yet these Sunan, after having been sifted by religious criticism, were accepted by the Mohammedans as part of their holy literature.

The Christian Church, on the contrary, set itself firmly against the acceptance of any such traditions. It possessed its four Gospels, narratives of the life of Jesus so closely in touch with hi-a, written so shortly after his death that no additional details seemed needed. Indeed, these Gospels and the letters and narratives of Christ's disciples cover the whole of the distinctively Christian teachings which was added to the Bible of the Hebrews. Of course this refusal of the Christian Church to accept any later "gospels" or lives of Christ did not mean that these tales were necessarily false. They were all simply classed as "apocrypha," or books of unknown origin.

Some of the "apocrypha" of this class bearing upon Christ are doubtless sincere; some are almost and perhaps wholly as old as the established Gospels. Some, by claiming the authorship of an apostle who could not possibly have written them, stamp themselves as being, to some extent, pretenses. Others are complete fabrications of a later date. Indeed, the period for the production of Christian apocrypha, in this last and lowest sense, has never reached an end. The nineteenth century saw several such invented works, books elaborately bolstered up by accounts of research and of the discovery of ancient documents. We have reached a development of science which makes it unlikely that educated men will be deceived by one of these modern fabrications; but such writings have repeatedly imposed upon the ignorant. There is still a third and equally interesting class of apocrypha. These are the books written, or claimed to have been written, before the time of Christ, as part of the Old Testament. These are sometimes mere addenda to the Bible story, historical narratives said to be by some Biblical per

sonage; more often they take the form of prophecy in which Noah or another is made to foresee all that afterward occurred, leading up finally to the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. Books which thus proclaim the Messiah may very possibly be of late Christian invention; but most of these Old Testament apocrypha are obviously of Jewish origin, even when their earlier Hebrew text has disappeared. Some of them are much older than the date of Christ, and among them there are very beautiful and very valuable religious works.

Indeed, in reading the apocrypha we must keep clearly in mind the initial fact that the issuance of a book under some ancient name is not in itself evidence of an attempt to deceive. In our own day, historical novels, poems, and even philosophies, are constantly being thus fathered upon some older authority. Usually the author prevents confusion by putting his own name on the title-page; but the books of two thousand years ago were very different from ours, and no such necessity would have occurred to an ancient Hebrew. We can well imagine a young religious enthusiast saying to the friendly rabbis, "See, I have written a book showing all the wickedness of all the ages and foretelling the punishments to come, and I have pictured it as the vision of Adam." And the rabbis would read the book and approve the doctrines, if these seemed sound, without ever thinking of including the work in their Scripture as a Book of Adam. In fact, for such writings we have a special name. We call them not "apocrypha," but "pseudepigrapha," which means epigrams or writings given out under a pseudonym or assumed name. Yet these works are still but a variety of the apocrypha class. Some generations after our enthusiast had composed his Book of Adam or another, some scholar would stumble on the forgotten fantasy and, according to his own disposition, either cry "fraud" or worship a new Scripture, and perhaps invent a legend to account for the holy book having been lost and found again.

Apocrypha, then, as we said at the beginning, may be of all gradations, from the splendor of genius and religious earnestness, down to shallow stupidities or crafty frauds. In