Hippolytus of Thebes, Chronicle (usually assigned to 10th cent., but perhaps of 7th cent.) : ' This is John, whom the Lord loved, the virgin and evangelist, who remained at Jerusalem, the mother of the churches, at his own house, to which the Apostles fled in fear of the Jews. There also was prepared the Passover. There also the first mystery was consecrated for the disciples. There also the Lord appeared to them after the resurrection. There also He showed the prints of the nails to Thomas. There the Apostles ordained as first bishop the son of Joseph, the brother of the Lord. . . . He [John] received the all-holy Mother of God (Qioroxo^) in his house until her assump- tion (u,i^pi T-?s a-vmrTciiriiij; airy,;).'
See also the plan, identifying the place of the Last Supper, of the descent of the Holy Ghost, and of the death of the Blessed Virgin, left by Bishop Arcnlf, who visited Jerusalem in a.d. 685, with Adamnan at lona, and reproduced in Adamnan, De locis Sanctis, of which reproduction there is a facsimile in vol. xxxviii. of the Vienna Corpus Script. Eccl. Lat. p. 244.
Literature. — Edersheim, Life and Times of .Jesus the Messiah , ii. 482-519 ; Le Camus in Vigouroux, Diet, de la Bible, ii. 399-403 ; Zahn, ' Die Dormitio Sanctae Virginis und das Hans des Johannes Jfarkus' in NKZ, vol. x. ; Mommert, Die Dormitio und das deiitsche Orundstiick atif dern traditionellen Zion : Sanda.\', Sacred Sites of the Gospels, pp. 77-88 ; J. Watson. The Upper Room (1895) ; J. Telford, The Storp of the Upper Room (1905) ; D. M. M'Intvre, The Upper Room Company (1906).
Darwell Stone. URIAH.— The Hittite (Mt 1«).
USURY.— See Ixterest.
UZZIAH. — A king of Jud8,h, named as a link in our Lord's genealogy (Mt 1*).
790
VAIN
VEIL
V
VAIN.— 1. ' In vain ' : Mk T'' (II Mt IS") fidTriv 8i cri^ovTai fxe dcSdaKOvres SiSatr/caXtas evraXfiara dvOpujiroiv. This is the only place in NT where the adverb IxaT-qv is found (orig. accus. from fidry), 'a folly'). The Vulg. has in vannm in Mk., sine causa (= 'without reason,' Cic. ) in Mt. Both senses are perhaps included : their worship was ' meaning- less ' and ' to no purpose ' (cf. Ja P® /xdraios Opy}(7Kda, with Mayor's {Com. on James, 71] apt quotation from Isocrates, ad Nicoclen 18 E, 1770O Ovfj-a TooTO KaWiarov elvai Kai Oepaweiai' fj-eyicTTrjp eav ws ^eXricrrov Kai dLKaidraTOv aavrdv irapixv^)- — Our Lord quotes here from Is 29'^, where LXX reads fxarriv 5k ffe^ovTai fie diddaKOvres evrdX/mara dvdpwiruv Kai dLdaaKoXias. The clause in the Heb. text may be literally rendered, ' And their fearing me is become ('npi) a statute of men wiiich they have learned.' How to account for fj.dTTjv in the Gr. text is a question still unsolved. Grotius (Opera, ed. Amsterdam, 1679, ii. 155) thought it evident that the LXX read inh] ( =p.dTT)v, cf. Is 49'*) and not 'nril in the Heb. text, so that the clause would then have meant, 'And their fearing me is vain — a statute of men which they have learned ! ' This brilliant emendation of the text is adopted by Turpie [OT in the Neio (1868), 196) and Nestle (Expos. Times, xi. 330). It is quite possible that our Lord ' read ^ihi in His Hebrew scroll of Isaiah,' and that this was the received reading at the time that the Gospels were written. Such a solution of the difficulty would indeed be completely satisfying, but we must remember that the proposed reading is merely a conjectural one, and that no external evidence in its favour has been found. Other suggested explanations of the ixdr-qv in the Gospels are, that our Lord used the LXX and quoted from it, or that in reporting His answer to the Phari- sees the writer or writers quoted memoriter from the LXX (it will be observed that the order of the last words is not the same in the LXX and in the Gospels). The latter explanation is the one gener- ally jjreferred by expositors, some of whom assign reasons still more unsatisfying for the presence of /ndrrjy. But seeing that it cannot be proved that our Lord did not use an Aramaic word correspond- ing to /jLdTTjv in quoting the passage from Isaiah, we feel it best to accept the fidrqv as stamped with His authority. — Our Lord by this citation authen- ticates and carries forward the teaching of the prophets of the OT as to the vanity of that worship which merely conformed to human tradi- tions, and by which it was thought possible to gain the favour of God without moral obedience (cf. W. R. Smith, OTJC 293-295 ; Driver, Is. 57 ; Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, i. 282).
2. ' To use vain repetitions ' : Mt 6'' irpocrevx^tJ.ivoi Se pLT] paTTo\oyri<X7)Te wcnrep 01 idviKoL. Mrs. A. S. Lewis (Expos. Times, xii. 60) approves of the der- ivation of ^(XTToXoyeo) from the Arabic b'tal, 'vain,' 'useless,' recently suggested by Blass. 'It is one of those hybrid compounds which come into exist- ence in countries Avhere two or more languages are spoken.' But it is more probable that the word is onomatopoetic (like parrapl^w, see Stephanus, Thesaurus, s.v.), and is derived from the sound made by the repetition of the same syllable in stammering or stuttering. Our Lord gives the interpretation of the word in the clause following, ' For they think that they shall be heard for their TTdXvXoyia' (cf. Meyer, Holtzmann, in loc). What He here condemns is the heathenish idea that a