4. The free exercise of the imagination within the domain of history led to the growth of a purely le- gendary literature. The full development of this was indeed reserved for a yet later period. The books of tin- Apocrypha occupy a middle place between those of tin- Old Testament in their simplicity and truthful- ness ami the wild extravagances of the Talmud. As it is, however, we find in them the germs of some of the fabulous traditions which were influencing the minds of the Jews at the time of our Lord's ministry, and have since in some instances incorporated them- selves more or less with the popular belief of Christen- dom, So in 2 Mace, i, ii, we meet with the state- ments that at the time of the captivity the priests had concealed the sacred tire, and that it was miraculously ! renewed — that Jeremiah had gone, accompanied by the tabernacle and the ark, "to the mountain where Moses climbed up to see the heritage of God," and j had there concealed them in a cave together with the altar of incense. The apparition of the prophet at the close of the same book (xv, 15), as giving to Judas j Maccabseus the sword with which, as a "gift from! God," he was to " wound the adversaries," shows how prominent a place was occupied by Jeremiah in the
traditions and hopes of the people, and prepares us to understand the rumors which followed on our Lord's teaching and working that " Jeremias or one of the prophets" had appeared again (Matt, xvi, 14). So again in 2 Esdr. xiii, 40-47, we find the legend of the entire disappearance of the Ten Tribes, which, in spite of direct and indirect testimony on the other side, has given occasion even in our own time to so many wild conjectures. In chap, xiv of the same book we rec- ognise (as has been pointed out already) the tendency to set a higher value on books of an esoteric knowl- edge than on those in the Hebrew canon ; but it de- serves notice that this is also another form of the tra- dition that Ezra dictated from a supernaturally-in- spired memory the sacred books which, according to that tradition, had been lost, and that both fables are exaggerations of the part actually taken by him and by " the men of the Great Synagogue" in the work of collecting and arranging them. So also the rhetorical narrative of the Exodus in Wisd. xvi-xix indicates the existence of a traditional, half-legendary history side by side with the canonical. It would seem, in- deed, as if the life of Moses had appeared with many different embellishments. The form in which that life appears in Josephus, the facts mentioned in St. Stephen's speech and not found in the Pentateuch, the allusions to Jannes and Jambres (2 Tim. iii, 8), to the disputes between Michael and the devil (Jude 9), to the " rock that followed" the Israelites (1 Cor. x, 4), all bear testimony to the wide-spread popularity of this semi-apocryphal history. See Enoch (Book of).
5. As the most marked characteristic of the collec- tion as a whole and of the period to which it belongs, there is the tendency to pass off supposititious books under the cover of illustrious names. The books of Esdras, the additions to Daniel, the letters of Baruch and Jeremiah, and the. Wisdom of Solomon, are ob- viously of this character. It. is difficult, perhaps, for us to measure in each instance the degree in which the writers of such books were guilty of actual frauds. In a book like the Wisdom of Solomon, for example, the form may have been adopted as a means of gain- ing attention by which no one was likely to be de- ceived, and, as such, it does not go beyond the limits of legitimate personation. The fiction in this case need not diminish our admiration and reverence for the book any more than it would destroy the authori- ty of Ecclesiastes were wc to come to the conclusion, from internal or other evidence, that it belonged to a later age than that of Solomon. The habit, however, of writing books under fictitious names is, as the later Jewish history shows, a very dangerous one. The practice becomes almost a trade. Each such work creates a new demand, to be met in its turn by a fresh supply, and thus the prevalence of an apocryphal lit- erature becomes a sure sign of want of truthfulness on one side, and want of discernment on the other.
6. The absence of honesty, and of the power to dis- tinguish truth from falsehood, shows itself in a yet more serious form in the insertion of formal documents purporting to be authentic, but in reality failing alto- gether to establish an}- claim to that title. This is obviously the case with the decree of Artaxerxes in Esth. xvi. The letters with which 2 Mace, opens from the Jews at Jerusalein betray their true charac- ter by their historical inaccuracy. AVe can hardly ac- cept as genuine the letter in which the king of the Lacedemonians (1 Mace, xii, 20, 21) writes to Onias that "the Laceda>monians and Jews are brethren, and that the}' are of the stock of Abraham." The letters in 2 Mace, ix and xi, on the other hand, might be au- thentic so far as their contents go, but the reckless- ness with which such documents are inserted as em- bellishments and make -weights throws doubt in a greater or less degree on all of them.